What It Takes To Make Money With Perfume:
Creativity, Labeling & Packaging
OR
Perfume: Where's The Money?

A successful perfume promotion requires excellence in three areas: The Fragrance (or "juice" as it is known in the trade), The Label and Packaging — the bottle, box, wrapper or any nice tricks that go with it, and The Way It Is Sold.

Weakness in any one of these areas diminishes your ability to make money.

Before looking at Labeling and Packaging — the topic of this article — let us first touch briefly on Fragrance and Salesmanship.

Fragrance And Salesmanship

Developing a fragrance is the work of experts. When Ralph Lauren, Elizabeth Taylor or, more recently, Donald Trump decide to market a fragrance, they go to the experts — perfumers — who, under their supervision and with their approval, develop the "juice" for their product.

I have discussed at length how an individual or small corporation can get around the need for expensive professional help in both Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup! and Developing A Profitable New Perfume On A Budget Of Less Than $200.

Selling a fragrance requires various skills and strategies. The ones that are most appropriate and most likely to bring large profits will depend on the resources of the individual (such as yourself!) or the corporation (large, small or very small!) that is undertaking the promotion.

This is discussed at length in the "marketing" pages of the Bio-Byte Perfume Makers' Club.

This leaves us with labeling and packaging, which includes selecting a bottle, creating a label and presenting the finished product in a favorable light on a retailer's shelf, a mail order catalog, tv commercial or web page. This is the job that requires great creativity.

Do You Have Creative Ability?

I would like to distinguish between what it is to be artistic and what it is to be creative, in the context of developing packaging for a new fragrance. "Artistic," in my mind, is open ended — no limits; no restraints. A bit like "brainstorming," that now near defunct management concept.

"Creative," in the context of package design, requires an artistic or aesthetic sensitivity but it tempers that sensitivity with and ability to understand and solve essential technical problems. The design of a bottle and label are not open ended projects. They are projects undertaken within constraints (I prefer to call them "constraints" rather than "limitations") which include

1. Affordable cost of bottle, label and presentation. These must fall within your budget. If you expect to make money, you can't put a perfume that is to sell for $25 into a package that is costing you you $35.

2. Budget, if any, for outside creative services such as label design. As a small producer you might design a label yourself, or have an artist work up a design for a few hundred dollars. But unless you are a large, well capitalized marketer, you are not going to commission a package designer on the level of Pierre Dinand or Karim Rashid.

3. The product label must comply with government regulations. (FDA Handbook for Cosmetic Labeling can be found on the FDA website or via a Perfume Maker's Club link.) In addition to whatever artistic design is used, the required government text must be a part of your label. Fragrance marketers sometimes solve this problem by pasting two labels on the bottle, one on the front and another on the back or even the bottom.

4. Bottle size and shape. Since you are selling perfume, not soda pop, you will be working with a small (1/2 ounce to about 4 ounce size) bottle. This means that your label, too, will be small. You will be lucky to have as much as two square inches of space for your graphics. This is a good reason for choosing a short name for your fragrance! Shape is also an important consideration. You can only affix your label to a flat or cylindrical shape. If you don't believe me, try sticking a (flat) pressure sensitive label on a (round) golf ball.

Giving Your Perfume Value Using Creativity Rather Than Capital

As an individual or small corporation working to develop and market a perfume, your biggest challenge — your creative challenge — will be in the packaging for, and selling of, your perfume. Actually, the two go together. Your packaging will be based on your selling concept. Your selling will be based on your packaging concept. And let's assume you are working without any money.

In Developing A Profitable New Perfume On A Budget Of Less Than $200 I demonstrated that you — yes you! — really can develop a perfume without any money or, to be exact, on a budget of less than $200 which, for a fragrance industry professional, might barely cover a luncheon for one.

The demonstration I gave in Developing A Profitable New Perfume On A Budget Of Less Than $200 included producing, bottling and labeling a new fragrance, i84 Cologne for Men, and I made my first sale of i84 Cologne for Men before I had finished writing the book. In other words, I took it from zero to cash flow in less than three months.

Assuming that you have selected an acceptable fragrance for your market, the value of the perfume you create is going to depend largely on how you package and sell it. Without any significant money to work with, the value of your perfume product will depend entirely on your creativity.

This is a business in which your creativity — as I have defined it above — is either going to make you money or ... not.

This Is What Will Make Your Fragrance Special

Although your sales presentation will conceal the fact, both your fragrance and your bottle will be pretty much "off the shelf" — items available to anyone who knows where to look for them.

But your presentation — your label and the way your bottle appears on a retailer's shelf or in your advertising — is what can give your three dollars worth of materials a value of thirty dollars or more to the consumer.

You only have two square inches of label area to work with but what you do with those two square inches can be the difference between your struggling to make a few sales and watching your fragrance fly off the retailer's shelf. And the more your product flies off the shelf, the more stores will want to carry it. Read about Francois Coty for more on this.

But the label isn't your only selling tool. While your bottle is likely to be very standard, the way you present your bottle can make a huge difference as to whether it attracts interest and stands out on the shelf or goes unnoticed.

While getting a fancy bottle may be impossible within your budget — as it always have been for me — there is nothing to stop you from dressing up your bottle with a few cents worth of ribbon, a bow, a tag or ... it's up to your imagination!

Finding a box for your product might be close to impossible within your budget ... but what about those attractive bags or sacks that independent jewelers use to dress up gift orders?

In short, by applying your creativity to the elements that you can make special, with a little imagination and a few cents worth of materials, you can give your product many dollars more in sales. And that's what marketing fragrance is all about!