The "Make Money" Side
Of Developing A Perfume

If you love perfume and have a creative side, developing your own perfume from scratch can be highly enjoyable and emotionally rewarding.

For more on developing your own personal fragrances I recommend you read Sherill Pociecha's article Natural Perfumery. If you are talented and persistent you may eventually develop a fragrance that could be acceptable to your friends and others.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in the "make money" side of perfume making, I suggest you follow a very different approach. I call it "making perfume with a credit card, a telephone and a checkbook." It is a commercial approach to perfume making and it too requires a love of fine fragrances. But with this approach you really can make money.

Avoid Getting Personal

Let me first argue you out of developing your own fragrance from scratch, unless you just want to do it as an enjoyable craft project or educational experiment.

First of all, you would, most likely, be working with natural materials — the "classic" ingredients of all perfumes. As in days of old, they are rare, expensive and obtainable only in small quantities.

So the first strike against is that you would be working with expensive materials — materials that will, most likely, be more expensive than the price you can charge for your perfume. (It's a little like baking cakes for a bake sale — your ingredients cost more than what your cakes will sell for.)

A Perfume Makers' Club member used this bottle to present his personal perfume creation to his wife.

If you think you can save money by gathering natural materials from your garden or the woods, look into the number of pounds of, for example, rose petals, you would need to make a single ounce of the essential oil!

The second strike against you if you try to develop your own personal fragrance from scratch is that you are (not yet!) a perfumer. You are not skilled in art and knowledge that takes years to acquire and is usually gained by book study plus working under the guidance of a master perfumer.

Don't believe for a moment that designers and celebrities "create" their own fragrances. Far from it! They know that their name and fame can sell a fragrance that bears their name — and, hopefully, they have the good taste to recognize a fragrance that is "them" when it is presented to them by master perfumers. The charge for this service will run into tens of thousands of dollars.

You, the novice, cannot save money on the development work that goes into making a new fragrance simply by deciding to work with "found," natural materials and do the blending yourself. If you really don't believe me, just try it and see what you come up with.

If you are honest you will quickly admit that, even if you are lucky enough to create a pleasant fragrance, in use it simply doesn't have the persistence of almost any perfume available at a drug or department store. In other words, it will smell nice for a moment or two but not for an hour, six hours or a full day.

In order to make money with your own perfume you must be able to buy it for pennies and sell it for dollars. This is the "secret" of the perfume business. The only "big" cost you can afford is the cost of packaging and selling your perfume. In this respect your business will be no different from any major fragrance house such as Guerlain, Givenchy, Estee Lauder, Cacharel, L'Oreal, Shiseido or Revlon — or big name designer such as Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfigger or Ralph Lauren.

This is the "make money" secret of all successful perfume promotions.

The good news is that it is both possible and practical for you to do what they do — except for one very expensive step. But you can — and must — bypass that step in order to be financially successful.

The Step You Must Sidestep ...
And How To Sidestep It
So Well That Nobody Will Notice!

I have already suggested that the step you want to avoid in developing your own perfume is the step of creating the fragrance blend — something better left to master perfumers. But how then do you make "your" perfume your own?

The answer lies in a resource that is generally overlooked by the home hobbyist perfume maker — the fragrance houses that sell, in one form or another, fragrances that are similar (often very, very similar) to famous name perfumes.

These businesses have evolved because modern technology provides us with tools to analyze the makeup of any existing perfume and come very close to producing an exact replica.

If you watch crime shows on TV this should not surprise you. The technology is similar to what a state-of-the-art crime lab might use to analyze evidence. Consider your favorite fragrance to be the evidence. In short order the lab technician can tell you, with great accuracy, what chemistry was required to make it.

But Your Goal Is Not
To Bottle A "Knock Off"

Once chemistry unlocked the secrets of the world's finest and most expensive fragrances, marketers of "knock offs" were able to make the claim that their fragrances were substitutes for whatever famous brands you wanted. The sales pitch was that you could now get your favorite scent at a reduced price. Instead of paying $65 for an ounce of whatever, you could get it for $25 an ounce — tremendous savings!

But regardless of whether it was the original fragrance or the knock off, the oil — the fragrance itself — still cost good money. And the higher the quality of the original, the higher the cost to both the originator and to the marketer knocking it off.

So, in many (most?) cases, the knock offs cut corners and the quality of their product often fell short. This was the only way they could make a profit since their sales pitch was "buy mine and pay less."

This is your opening

Fragrance houses that sell to the knock off people can deliver a high quality product. It all depends on what you are willing to pay. If you insist on buying perfume for $25 a gallon you cannot expect to get the same quality you would be getting by paying $115.

But remember, a gallon of perfume will fill about 125 1-ounce bottles. Even if you were selling this perfume at a wholesale price of $12 per bottle, the first ten bottles you sold would pay for your first gallon of perfume — leaving you 115 bottles to pay for your packaging and promotion.

In short, you can go for a quality product and still have plenty of room to make a profit!

Selecting Your Fragrance

No fragrance designer would think of starting on a new perfume without exploring fine perfumes already on the market. The most difficult — but fun — part of developing your own perfume is in going out and finding lots of perfumes — sniffing as many as you can at your local department store — perhaps making a trip to the nearest big city where you can sniff perfumes not available to you locally. You must explore perfume and understand what is on the market.

When you have sniffed a great many perfumes, you are ready to start narrowing the field down to those that you find most acceptable as a possible product you could sell. And, while you might like some really fine older fragrances, keep in mind the reality that the knock off houses are likely to offer only "smell a likes" of recently popular brands.

Don't expect to find an affordable knock off of a fine French perfume that was sold only to wealthy people. You'll have to settle for a "mass appeal" fragrance — yet there are important steps you can take to improve on what is offered and make it truly your own.

At this point you must begin to spend money — several hundred dollars — to buy samples of perfumes you like. This is what I call the "credit card" phase of perfume development. Here you simply go out and buy your "samples" at retail.

Then, having bought them, it is important that you start to use them — daily — to see how they respond to your body chemistry (everyone's skin chemistry is a bit different) and how they persist after you have applied them (is the fragrance gone in an hour or will it last all day or evening?)

You must do your own in-depth evaluation of the fragrances you have chosen. This will help you understand what you must do to develop your own successful product — one you can offer with pride.

Putting The Fragrance Together

Once you have done your research and have found a popular fragrance that you like, you are ready to approach fragrance houses for samples of their offerings. Of course at this point you will act like a professional as you want to be taken seriously. After explaining to one or more fragrance houses what you would like to achieve in your fragrance (i.e., what famous brand you favor), they will send you a series of samples of the fragrances they have available. You will also receive their prices quoted either by the gallon of finished perfume or by the pound of the fragrance that will create the finished perfume.

Usually you will receive about half a dozen samples and, quite likely, you will find all of them most then just acceptable. But you will find yourself, over the next week or so, being drawn to one or two more than to the others. These will not necessarily be the most expensive but it is likely that they will not be the cheapest either.

Now you are coming down to the biggest decision — which of the samples you want to bottle and make your own.

Note that I have indicated that the samples you receive are imitations of famous brands. But also note that you will be receiving about half a dozen samples. They are not all the same. And none (you can be sure) will be an exact replica of your famous brand favorite. Once you have made your selection and hung your own name and label on the fragrance, your customers will never suspect that your fragrance was originally developed as a knock off of a famous brand.

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