Before Bel Rebel became a perfume brand, we were running a multi-brand perfume boutique. It was a great adventure that helped us learning a lot about the industry, and all its funny rules and odd customs.

Stock my brand!!!

There are many, many perfume brands. The industry was worth $31.4 billion in 2018, and is growing constantly. Even in a city like London, full of big perfume retailers (like Selfridges or Harrods) with a handful of independent shops, if you own or manage a perfume retail location, you will be flooded with samples of new creations and new perfume lines on a daily basis. Also, since you function as a shop, it means that your doors are constantly open. The brand ambassadors – either founders themselves or their agents – feel free to knock on your door anytime. How much easier would it be if those brand ambassadors let you know before they were coming and actually set up a meeting time with you. Having a different structure, department stores can avoid this situation. In a boutique, you’re often lured into a conversation with your customer, only to find out half an hour later that they are actually perfumers and they have this amazing set of their fragrances with them, totally accidentally.

Sometimes we are just not suitable. Sometimes we are not looking to expand the portfolio of available brands. Anyhow, a “no” should be respected regardless of its reason. Perfume boutique managers do not owe you their time and attention. Having this experience, we imagine our relationship with retailers significantly different – we need to be a match!

Communications strategies and attempts

In a multi-brand perfume boutique, you are expected to sell products from many different brands to your customers. Fine, you definitely have some sort of audience, whether it is thanks to your location or thanks to your online presence. Your role is to have more customers, to sell more products, which will be a success for both you and the brands you are selling. It’s a system we know from many other retail stores, which requires an effort of both sides.

Niche perfume brands – or artisan – are often very small. That comes with budget constraints, and most of them do not have a lot to spend on marketing. But there is a lot one can do with limited budget nowadays.

So what usually happens? As a boutique, you can count on an occasional pop in to your boutique by a perfumer, an event highly anticipated by some of your perfume-obsessed customers, who look forward to learning about the inspirations behind perfumes. Many of your less regular, or less fragrance-obsessed customers, would not really care. Marketing and PR strategies should not be solely based on these ‘meet and greets’.

A lack of support from brands and their distributors can inspire more creativity on the part of the shop owners. Look at all of the creative and innovative Instagram posts by perfumeries around the world. Hardly any of them rely on pack shots from brands or any marketing materials produced by them. If they do, the content becomes extremely generic. Most pictures taken of perfumes follow a specific style, being little more than a creative pack-shot.

The Old Fashioned Model

There are many ways one can sell perfume: through big department stores, smaller independent boutiques, online and through the brand’s own brick and mortar stores. Often, especially when trying to gain popularity in foreign countries, the easiest solution seems to be reaching out to a distributor. They will take care of everything and you won’t have to worry.

From our experience, the relationship between stores and distributors is not always great. Their role is difficult to define—is it just distributing or does it also include promotion? It seems like they tend to prioritise big retailers over smaller boutiques. Of course, behind a department store there is always more money, but perhaps having a great relationship with a smaller retailer can result in a better connection with a loyal, returning customer. We’re sure one can have both.

Who do you preach to?

Both fashion and beauty brands have experienced ridiculous growth thanks to influencer marketing. Something that perfume brands have also spotted. I would just say that preaching to the converted does not make a lot of sense – yes, let’s embrace the perfume bloggers, it’s wonderful they exist and promote our industry. Some of their audience might be also very interested in buying another fragrance – or a sample, or a decanter of it. It would be great to see some initiatives going out of the box, there is still very little of them. Perhaps trying to speak to a bit different audience in order to reach to people who may not know your brand? In the tight-knit circles of perfume fans, perfume collectors tend to know about majority of the brands, even when they are pretty new. Amongst them, word travels really fast. The trick is to reach new customers who haven’t heard about your brand before.

Why?

The problem with perfume industry seems to be its permanent confusion about where it actually belongs. There is artistry in it, which brings the idea that since it’s an art it will promote itself without unnecessary marketing actions. Even fine art does not really work like this anymore. It’s okay to promote things, to reach out actively to a new audience instead of waiting for customers to come by themselves.