The new perfume: thoughts and preparations for a small, limited launch

    I've been documenting the sometimes boring details of developing a new perfume, how starting with aroma materials in dropper bottles, the drops are weighed out into grams, grams are converted into percents and those percents give me my production formula. I've made a small production batch from this formula and if you want to see what I've done, go to this web page. I won't bore you here.

    Now that I've produced the finished fragrance I'll wait a month before I bottle it. But while the fragrance is aging -- blending the components into a harmonious whole -- I'll be busy with other activities this launch will require.

    I've started writing an ad for my new perfume. I've got the main picture already and I want to superimpose a bottle of my new perfume on that picture. But before I can do that I have to select a bottle and "produce" that bottle with fragrance and label. Sometimes I'll dummy up a bottle for photography if the fragrance isn't ready yet. In this case I won't do that because I want the color of the fragrance to be right, not just something I've imagined. So I'll hold off on the bottle photo until my fragrance is fully blended and shows its true color.

    I've mentioned before that my market is the people who visit my online shop, PGLightyears.com. That is a small market, too small to expect much in the way of sales and profits. As to why I'm not planning a more aggressive launch, let's talk a bit.

    An aggressive launch -- which you would want -- requires both a sales push and logistical backup. Your sales push would involve setting up distribution. This could involve getting retail stores to carry your fragrance and then working your tail off to send them buyers. Distribution alone won't work. And it is the marketer's -- not the retailer's -- job to generate desire for the fragrance and sales. The retailer just offers an opportunity for people to obtain your fragrance. They aren't going to sell it for you. All this involves phone calls, travel, personal meetings, networking and anything else that you can think of to make it happen.

    How about online? Other people's websites and social media? It's the same problem but even more complicated. You have to entice the site owners to offer your perfume and then send them good traffic. What about the shipping? That will come back to you. You can't expect social media people to stock and ship your fragrance. If they take orders those orders will go to you for fulfillment and, based on my experience, there can be delays in forwarding those orders to you (after all, they already have payment in full and may not be so eager to pass on your share to you) so, by the time you get these orders, your customers may be a bit grumpy and less favorably inclined toward your fragrance than they were initially.

    Working with other websites and social media people, you also have the problem of refunds. If you have to refund an order for any reason, will you be able to claw back the refund amount from the person who took the order and pocketed their profit?

    Logistics is a big pain. When I had a warehouse with a crew to process and ship orders, the more orders we got, the happier I was. (At the time, these were not orders for perfume.) But as I scaled back my involvement, shipping became a chore for a reduced staff. For a while it worked but supervising people takes a lot of focus. Now I don't want the headaches of managing a staff while trying to develop new fragrances and writing about them. But what about you?

    If you are going to sell perfume you have to be prepared to ship it yourself or arrange with some service to ship it for you. And "shipping" isn't just shipping. It's also customer service, having a plan to take care of lost orders or returns or just dissatisfied customers. Even when your operation is running smoothly this can be a far more expensive and time consuming task than you might imagine, even when almost all of your customers are honest and generally pleased with what they get from you.

    I hope this helps explain why I am not aggressively pushing sales of my fragrances. I want to create but I don't want the responsibilities of building an organization again. But YOU have to push if you want to sell your fragrance. It won't sell itself. So you have to do all those things that I once did. Ultimately you'll find it's a rewarding experience, even if, at times, it can be stressful.

Weighing your drops can get messy

    I've been writing about a new perfume I'm developing. I've posted some pictures of the tools I'm using here. In describing the project I explained how I was working with dropper bottles and I claimed that by weighing out the drops in grams I could translate my formula into percentages. I mentioned that, like it or not, I would always weigh out a second bottle to confirm the weights from the first bottle. In this case I weighed out three bottles and have compared the numbers. I've posted the numbers here.

    When you look at the numbers in my Exhibit A, you'll see that none of the weights are an exact match from bottle to bottle. For the aroma materials used in a smaller amount, the weights are close. For the aroma materials used in larger amounts, there is more deviation. For example, the three weights for "Tonk" are 5.950, 5.405, and 5.606. So what weight do I go with? Here's where it gets messy.

    What I want is simple. I want to write out my formula in percentages. Once I have this I can easily scale up for any amount of production -- kilos, gallons, drums, or whatever. I can also send my formula out to a fragrance house and have them put it together for me, in any amount I require. But right now I'm looking at some messy numbers. The weights from A, B, and C don't quite match. Here's how I handle this.

    To start, I've taken an average of each of these weights and see if these numbers give me something practical to work with. As it is, the averages look workable. Remember, these measurements are in grams so the difference between 5.950 (the heaviest "A" weight) and 5.6 (the average for three tries) is just 0.35 gram (35 hundredths of a gram!)

    In Exhibit B, I've calculated percentages for each of my seven aroma materials. Ideally, when added, the percentages should total 100. Everything, together, really amounts to 100 percent, even if my numbers do not. But in the real world, as in my example, the sum will always be slightly off but I can work with my "99 percent" numbers. Although the sum of the percentages for A, B, and C (0.9952, 0.9996, 0.9995) are each closer to 100 than the sum of my averages, I'll go with the sum of the averages -- 0.9913. We're looking at a very small discrepancy.

    One point now may shock you. After all this weighing and jiggling numbers, when I get ready to go into production, I'll use the contents of all three bottles, A, B, and C. In fact, I'll just mix them together.

    This fragrance will be 7-1/2 percent oil to 92-1/2 percent alcohol and water (a light fragrance) so the three bottles together should give me enough oil to produce about 18 or 20 bottles of finished fragrance. If sales take off, I'll send the formula to my friends in Bangkok and have them make more for me, perhaps a kilo. This would allow me to produce a bit over 12 kilos of finished fragrance.