Selling Your Own Perfume:
The Quest For Buyers

To have a perfume business you must have buyers — retail, wholesale, walk-in, Internet, it doesn't matter. But you must have buyers. You must make sales. Sales are the key to business success. No sales, no business. Good, profitable sales make a good, no matter how odd that business may appear to others.

Profitable businesses come in all different shapes and varieties. You only need one business "model", "strategy", or "idea" to sell your perfume successfully but it must be a strategy that is practical for you. Different strategies work for different people. Even among the giants of perfume marketing great efforts are taken to find profitable niches. The difference between the niches of the giants and the niches for you or me is that they need very big niches. We can do quite nicely selling perfume in niches far too small to appeal to multi-million dollar companies.

If you don't believe that even multi-million dollar corporations struggle to find profitable niches, make the rounds of a number of venues where big corporations make their perfume sales.

If you go to a department store at a shopping mall, you'll typically find brands such as Estee Lauder plus Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and a few designers. — the same brands whose clothing is sold in the store. But it is likely that you won't find Elizabeth Taylor, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or Celine Dion. Depending on what store it is, you might or might not find Chanel or Elizabeth Arden. Unless you're in a particular department store, you won't find Donald Trump (the fragrance) or Flower Bomb (by Viktor & Rolf).

Now go to WalMart. Here you are likely find Halston, Elizabeth Taylor, Paris Hilton, Elizabeth Arden, Hugo Boss, Britney Spears — and a host of brands you've never heard of unless you are a regularly buy your perfume at WalMart.

You won't find Chanel at WalMart (or at least Chanel hopes you won't find it there!) You won't find Viktor & Rolf, or Donald Trump, or Hummer.

Now go to a drug store that's part of a chain. Here you may or may not find Hummer and Elizabeth Taylor but it's almost certain that you'll find lots of products from Coty.

Now try your local supermarket. In some areas they too offer perfume (I'm thinking of one particular one in Texas as I write this.) If you do find perfume at your supermarket you may find a brand name fragrance that has been given new, promotional packaging by a third party, probably under license from the brand owner. Read all of the text on the package. Buy it and look at the inside packaging. See if you learn a few lessons.

Among the largest sellers of perfume there is a great deal of maneuvering and jockeying for position. Riviera Concepts, the small Canadian perfume business that launched Hummer (under license from General Motors), has now sold its brands to Elizabeth Arden, which already markets the Britney Spears fragrance line.

At the top of the food chain the market is fluid, relationships and alignments are in flux, the giants are struggling to find the best niches (huge niches!) for their brands. They really don't care very much what goes on with companies making less than $100 million in annual sales. But would you turn you back on a business that could gross $500,000 annually and, perhaps, net $350,000?

So where and how, as an individual entrepreneur, can you sell your perfume profitably? The answer is you can sell it profitably in dozens of ways and in dozens of places.

The book "61 Basic Strategies For Selling Your Own Perfume!" suggests seven different strategic categories none of which require more than a few hundred dollars in capital to get started — assuming that you have (or can make) the perfume you'll need to fill orders.

Among the categories highlighted are certain techniques of direct-to-the-consumer selling, getting your fragrance into smaller, local or regional stores, developing perfume profitably for local or regional promotions (this can be more profitable than you might imagine!) and doing "private label" promotions for local businesses that have multiple outlets.

What you start to discover when reading a book like "61 Basic Strategies For Selling Your Own Perfume!" — or any other book based on authentic experience of individuals marketing their own perfume — is that far from there being too few opportunities, the real task is in selecting the right opportunity — matching up your skills and resources with the perfume marketing opportunity that is the most right for you, the opportunity that is likely to make you the most money.

And why, you may ask, perfume? The answer is simple. Even with very limited means you can create a commercially marketable perfume which can be sold for ten times or more what you paid to make it or have it made for you (which will probably be from about $1.50 to $3.85 per bottle.)

It's not a business for everyone but it is a business that offers a dynamic opportunity to those who are willing to take the trouble first to understand what perfume is all about and then to select out of many business strategies for selling perfume the one that makes a light go off in your head and you say "this opportunity was custom made for me!"

© 2006 M.K. Lester