Could you develop a business producing and selling automobile air fresheners?

    Personally I hate them and would never want one in my car. But when someone is a heavy smoker they can clear the air a bit. But that's not the important point here. The "virtue" of automobile air fresheners is that they are a fragranced product that doesn't have a problem in going through the mail. They aren't "liquid"; they aren't "hazardous material." You can ship them to anyone, anywhere ... and they are light.

    To make a business with perfume you have to make sales. This is why so many independent fragrance companies offer soap and candles to supplement their revenue from perfumes and colognes. If you want to embrace perfume as a business it pays to explore a wide range of opportunities for getting your product "out there" profitably. Look at what producing automobile air fresheners involves.

Shape, Printing, Fragrance

    Air fresheners amount to no more than a die cut SHAPE with PRINTING and infused with FRAGRANCE. Just as there are many shops that will produce custom printed t-shirts for you, there are a number of shops that will produce custom air fresheners for you. Here is a list of a few of them.

    As with any new venture, you study it by examining what others are doing. Here, you might start by ordering small quantity of custom air fresheners. Then you can see what it's like to sell them but you can also begin to explore the possibilities of making them yourself.

    Your first step might be working with an artist to develop the graphics and shape of the air fresheners. Remember here that unknowns have come out of nowhere to make their millions selling t-shirts thanks to their unique artwork for which, of course, they register copyrights.

    While selling air fresheners produced by an existing supplier you can experiment with the elements on a small scale. Working backward, the packaging is simple shrink wrap. The paper to be infused? You'll have to do your research but by having your samples from "the other guy" you can ask around to local printers and commercial printers tend to be quite knowledgeable about papers, how they hold ink and how they will behave when infused with the scent.

    About the scents themselves, you'll have to get technical due to the special demands of this media. You'll be scenting a printed product so the scenting must coexist with the printers inks used. You will also be required to produce a fragrance that maintains its aroma over a long period of time, essentially unchanged. And you'll have to develop a fragrance that can withstand the changing conditions within an automobile. Direct sunshine can be a problem but your air fresheners will also be expected to work flawlessly in a cold automobile. Your hope lies in providing a great enough "cool factor" that can obscure some of your initial shortcomings. Then when you start making sales, you can clean up these problems.

Marketing

    A good start is to research, locally, the shops that sell automobile air fresheners. Make lists Do some of them look like they might try a new air freshener from a new vendor? You also want to research shops that don't currently sell air fresheners (because they are considered "yucky") but might take on yours if it has the right look and the right fragrance.

    And there is the business of providing custom auto air fresheners for businesses (car washes perhaps?) If your product is good, an "imprinted" air freshener could be an interesting substitute for imprinted pens.

    These are just ideas. What can you do with them? Give me your feedback here.