How many ingredients does it take to make a "real" perfume?

When Shakespeare wrote sonnets did he stop too soon? Would a few extra lines have made them better?

Today there are well over 2,000 ingredients available for perfume creation and the list continues to grow. Chemists develop new odors by rearranging molecules. Biologists plunk unfamiliar plants from remote jungles and plains. These allow the perfumer to create scents that are not easily knocked off by the competition. Cosmetic chemists use these ingredients to create wonderful face creams that could never before have existed. How many ingredients do you need to make a great new perfume? And do you really need new or rare ingredients to wow people? Does greatness depend on the use of exotic, never used before ingredients – or does it depend on the skill and artistry of the perfumer? Consider a sonnet.

A sonnet is a poem exactly 14 lines in length. It has a rhyming pattern which can be one of a number of possibilities. But it is always 14 lines in length. No fudging to allow 13 or 15 lines. No free verse. Just 14 lines with a fixed rhyming pattern and yet amazing poems are written within this arbitrary 14 line structure.

Consider your own work with perfume. Is your aim to be the great innovator who will be the first to discover and use some new exotic ingredient? Or are you the artist who can pull amazing rabbits out of a limited inventory hat?

It's always exciting to work with new scents that you've never used before, if only to see what you can do with them. But it may be a greater challenge to look at your current inventory of scent materials and ask yourself what you can do with them, without adding anything you've never used before. However limited your supply of aroma materials may be -- perhaps only a dozen or so scents -- this handful of materials can offer infinite possibilities in your selection of what you put in and what to leave out, how to balance the strength of "A" against the strength of "B" to give a pleasing effect, how to decorate a theme without killing its focus. A lot can be done with a little and, being forced to create within a fixed template is the same test the sonnet writer is up against. Constrained by fixed limitations, all will all depend on your skill and your imagination -- not the number of ingredients you use and certainly not the use of special new ingredients. You'll be working with just your imagination and your skill with the materials you have at hand.

Try this approach and see what miracles you are led to create!

Would a blind person select your perfume?

Perfume marketers go to great lengths with their packaging, to make their fragrances enticing. Sophisticated buyers admit that sometimes they buy a perfume for its packaging rather than its scent. I've done this myself -- more than once. But suppose you were selling to a blind person who couldn't see your packaging? Suppose this person had only their nose to go on. Now all that would matter would be the perfume itself. Would your perfume measure up?

Generally the idea for a new perfume comes well before the scent. It would be rare today for someone to wake up in the morning with a very specific scent in mind, rush to their desk, write down the formula, produce and bottle it and then give it to the advertising people saying "go sell this." More commonly a marketing platform would be developed, then graphics commissioned for that platform and only then would the project be handed out to several perfumers to see who could come up with what. The marketer knows that a great scent will greatly enhance sales but it will be the packaging, advertising, and promotion that will get the sales rolling. Never will it be about the scent itself though that will be the pretense. In reality the scent is an afterthought.

But what happens when a blind person smells this new perfume? It is said that blind people have no greater sense of smell than the average person with sight. But, lacking sight and being free of distractions from packaging and promotion, the blind person is likely to be more aware of the scent itself. How might your fragrance be rated?

Amateur perfume makers typically start by making a fragrance and then asking the question, "how can I sell it?" If you're out to make money this isn't the smartest approach. But, if you are more interested in the aroma than the packaging, this approach can help you hone your skills and your ability to produce fragrances that could, some day, gain serious recognition -- and approval -- from both blind people and many others. After all, isn't it scent that, thousands of years ago, created the perfume industry?

Why bother with perfume? (Hint: you can't get away from it!)

If you have a half-way sensitive nose you smell smells everywhere and some stand out as beautiful and others as stinky. Odor can move you and that's the story of perfume. It's not how it's made; it's not the cost or the markup. It's the moment you smell something and react. Your reaction wasn't intentional. It was something forced on you by the smell. My dog has an "accident." I don't see the dog; I don't see the "accident." But that odor immediately tells me what has happened. It communicates. When I'm in a supermarket and suddenly smell a fine fragrance, I can't tell where the scent has come from. I see no women in my aisle. Yet I know a woman has passed through and left a scent and I'm left wondering: Who is she? What does she look like? How might she look at me? Likely these questions will remain unanswered but that scent has left a memory. Scent instantly transforms an environment. In the supermarket aisle, among all sorts of food smells -- fish, meat, fruits and vegetables, coffee of various flavors and grinds, the oh, so light aroma of a fine fragrance can stand out. Odor is a powerful tool for communication. You can't see it coming. You can't see it at all. But suddenly you're enveloped in it. You can't say what direction it came from. You can't say where the person who was wearing it has gone. But it's there and it has your attention and you can't run from it. It's there -- and, if its a smell that can get a reaction out of you, it's going to do that whether you like it or not. With a visual image you can turn away if for whatever reason you don't like it. But a smell is just "upon you." Making perfume is (mostly) about making good smells, smells that will give pleasure when detected. But it involves a lot more than mixing aroma materials together until they smell nice. "Nice" can be boring and a great many of the materials used to make perfume smell "nice" by themselves -- which can make you wonder why, in the creation of a perfume, the "nice" smells are mixed with materials that may not smell so nice! (And that, really, is part of how fine fragrances are made.) If you want to be involved with/in perfume, you want to recognize what it does. It can identify a woman more quickly than a tattoo. It can make an instant statement about elegance -- or seduction. It can leave a trail behind after a woman has left the room. It can get attention leaving no ability to push back. But, as a maker of perfume, how do you control the message it communicates? Herein lies much of the art of perfumery. The best in the business can tailor their message -- their fragrance == so that it coordinates with a marketing theme and supports, through its aroma, the pictures in the magazines and the images on TV. The best creators of perfume are the ones who can direct your fantasies in the direction they have chosen. It's not easy and few can succeed at it regularly. A perfume can be an art form or it can be a mess. But once the scent is out there it will communicate, for better or for worse!

Advertising results can guide marketing strategy -- if you're willing to read them honestly

    Only by advertising can you get "advertising results" -- and only by having "advertising results" can you guide your project to success.

    I've been doing some advertising. It involved a financial commitment. You might think this is a questionable time to spend money on advertising -- national events are grabbing people's focus -- but the results I'm getting NOW are showing me where I must tune up my presentation to get better results -- and there's no reason why I can't get better results.

    I'm spending money to advertise two related books -- Creating your own perfume from dropper bottles: Methods, mechanics, and mathematics and Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!. Most of my advertising dollars are going to Google, to advertise the books which are sold on Amazon. Let me explain how my test campaign has evolved.

    I ran some advertising on Amazon. Advertising directly on Amazon had two drawbacks. First, because I have an Amazon Associates account, I can get a commission on sales. The commission doesn't just cover sales of the product I've advertised, it also covers others purchases from traffic I've sent to Amazon. But with Amazon's advertising program I can't use my Associates I.D., so I can't get these small but welcome commissions.

    The second drawback is that Amazon Advertising gives me only two choices: I can advertise a SPECIFIC title of my own or I can advertise ALL of my titles. This second option means my advertising money is split between multiple products -- some of which don't sell well -- instead of being focused on titles that do sell well, titles I want to promote.

    So on Amazon I have to select the title I want to promote. Then there's another problem. I'm severely limited in the length of my ad. I'm not allowed to write enough to explain the book. And finally, there's censorship that limits what you can say. Don't suggest your product will help people make money or that an investment is required to carry out the program. Can anyone make perfume without putting some money into it? Amazon wants you to advertise but to keep your advertising bland. Bland doesn't sell.

    So I've turned my focus to Google, Google Ads (once called Google AdWords). Here I am still very much in the "learning" phase but I'll share some of what I've learned. (If you want to know even more about Google Advertising, check out these books.)

    First of all you have to have a goal. In my case it has been to sell specific books. But I offer the books both as instant pdf downloads from my own website and as soft cover books from Amazon. The ads I've run have been for traffic, visitors to a landing page, but I had to make a decision. Should my landing page promote the download from my own site or should it promote the sale of the book on Amazon? This is a choice that must, and in time will, be tested to see which approach is more profitable. At present I'm going with Amazon as the royalty on a soft cover sale is greater than my current price for a pdf download.

    So the setup is this. I run small ads to drive traffic to the landing page at my website which gives a sales pitch and link to the page on Amazon that offers my book. And I do some tracking.

    Google shows me how many "impressions" they've given each of my ads -- how many times my ads have appeared somewhere out there -- and how many clicks each ad has received. I am charged only for clicks. In placing my ads with Google I can specify how much money I want to spend daily. Here you can start with just a few dollars -- $2, $5 or whatever. You'll want to let an ad run for at least 30 days before you kill it, even if you are only getting a handful of clicks. A small number of clicks means small expense.

    Aside from the statistics I get from Google, I get statistics from my own website. These show the volume and sources of traffic. Now, with my ads running, they show a leap in the amount of traffic coming from Google. This is good.

    From my own web stats I also get counts of traffic going from my landing pages to my Amazon book pages. This tells me how effective the sales presentations on my landing pages are.

    Finally, from the traffic going to my book pages at Amazon, I can judge how effective the sales presentations at my website and my descriptions of the books at Amazon are. I am now in a position where i can identify the weak links in the chain and try to strengthen them.

    At this point let's forget my personal marketing concerns and look at yours. My first point for you is that you can read all day about advertising but if you really want to learn about advertising you have to put up some money and do it. This requires two things. First, you have to be ready to spend money, say just a few hundred dollars knowing it could be lost. Next, you must have a product to advertise, a finished product that can be delivered immediately... perhaps a PERFUME.

    Here I'm going to quit for today. My next message will discuss how you might use what I've talked about above to sell... PERFUME.




 

Launching a new perfume in an uncertain world

    I had been writing about a new fragrance I was developing and then stopped while the fragrance was aging for the required 30 days. Now the aging days are over and I've launched the fragrance, it's called $timeout. The name is derived from a computer command that halts an ongoing routine for... some amount of time. When that time is up, either the old routine is restarted or $timeout switches you to a new routine. "$timeout" seemed like an appropriate name considering our current Corona virus situation.

The bottle

    I had planned to bottle $timeout with a press-on spray pump. Until now I had always used screw-on pumps. Crimp-on pumps are the industry standard as they are cheap and can be mounted by an automatic machine on an assembly line. But crimp-on pumps require some sort of machine, either manual or automatic. I have neither.

    I was introduced to press-on spray pumps at a packaging trade show and told they could be attached to a bottle by hand... or at least it might be possible to attach them without a machine. I should have become suspicious when I couldn't find any of these press-on pumps from a U.S. source. But, when I saw press-on pumps and matching bottles advertised on the Plush Folly (U.K.) website, I watched their video and bought a small supply. Now I was going to use them for $timeout. It didn't work out.

    It turns out that a good deal of force is required to mount a press-on spray pump to a glass bottle. The video shows a hammer being used with a warning that getting it right could be tricky. Pump and bottle must be perfectly aligned when the force is applied. Trying to do it by hand can damage the pump and even break some glass. After breaking two bottles and damaging three pumps I gave it up in favor of the bottles with screw-on pumps that I had on hand. This is the bottle shown in the picture.

How would you rate my new fragrance?

    Launching a new fragrance on the internet without a celebrity endorsement or a ton of social media promotion is a risky path to success. But I want to give you an opportunity to experience $timeout under the most favorable conditions and so I am making a special offer here.

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.