Where in the past the fragrance industry was terrified of launching more than a single fragrance at a time for fear they would cannibalize one another, the new strategy — at least at the artisanal end of the market — is to introduce a collection of anything up to 10 scents at once. The switch is, naturally, being driven by those ever-demanding Millennials, who are no longer satisfied with a single, signature fragrance but instead want a family of scents that they can personalize to make their own, or mix and match depending on their mood, the particular day of the week or even the time of day.
— Women's Wear Daily pins the blame for fragrance collections — launching 3 or 5 or 10 fragrances at once — on Millenials, noting also that "the modern revival of fragrance groupings became more widespread with the launch of the Tom Ford brand" (the Private Blend collection debuted in 2007). The article is premium content, but if you have a subscription you can read more at Fragrance Companies Hope Collections Will Satisfy Demanding Consumers.
Any Texture subscribers out there? WWD is part of their lineup so you can read the article without going through the online paywall.
Three problems with the multiple launch:
1) Most of them aren’t any good (Sturgeon’s law).
2) Most of them smell very much the same.
3) Most everyone is doing it so the market is flooded.
If this were an explosion of creativity I wouldn’t mind at all, but it’s an explosion of cash-grabbery instead. I would love to have a parade of novel, well-made, interesting scents to browse among, instead of what we have now.
Applause!
WWD seems to be saying that there is more creativity, not less, in the multiple-fragrance launches, and that they allow brands to focus on story telling instead of cash grabbing, but I’d agree — that’s not how most of them seem to work out in practice.
Also not sure why the focus on millenials. Very hard for me to believe that it was millenials buying up the Private Blend fragrances in 2007.
Millenials and Gen Xers are blamed for everything and anything that seems gauche or weird; we are the target demo for consumerism, but instead of actually talking and listening to people, marketers and their writers seem to willingly misinterpret things.
As Pyramus said, it’s cash grabbery disguised as creativity, even amongst indie brands. What most millenials (and some Gen Xers ) do is buy minis/rollerballs of scents they cannot otherwise afford and collect them instead. You can buy 5 rollerballs of fragrance for $50-100. That means you get 5 fragrances for the cost of one bottle of scent. If you are on a budget for grooming this is the way to go. But just like everything else younger people do, this has been misinterpreted as Millenials wanting a perfume for every mood in the day.
It is interesting that the article also talks about the success of rollerballs at Sephora, which I see as totally unrelated to things like Tom Ford Private Blend or the recent Ralph Lauren collection. Those don’t come in rollerballs anyway.
Meantime, mags like Atlantic talk about how Millenials are the generation that is less interested in consumer goods in general.
So it’s just the usual vague theories with nothing backing it up. They don’t know exactly who is buying what, just whether it gets sold…. or not.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. I think the misinterpretation to fit the editorial agenda runs rampant in media today.
I think you are hitting the nail on the head. With the caveat that I can’t access the whole article but am extrapolating from the quote above, it seems the article’s author is confusing economic necessity/innovation/ adaptability with being profligate. Switch in “job” for “perfume” and you find the same false logic:
Where in the past young people were terrified of trying out more than a single career for fear they would cannibalize one another, their new strategy is to try up to 10 jobs at once. The switch is, naturally, being driven by those ever-demanding Millennials, who are no longer satisfied with a single job, but instead want several jobs to make it on their own, or mix and match depending on their mood, the particular day of the week or even the time of day.
4) Very few of them will be reissued after the original outing.
SO RIGHT. I think that most, maybe all, commercial fragrances before the mid-nineties were brought to market with the hope that they’d endure, until we entered the Age of Flankers. Nowadays, houses know for a fact that most of what they launch cannot find its market: a quote in the WWD article said that in a launch of five scents they assume that two of them will be hits, which means they expect that three of them (and I guess they don’t know which three) are disposable. Nowadays they aren’t creating art: they’re throwing a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.
There’s not much talk about millenials here up north. What are they? Some sort of vermine on trust funds?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials
“Vermin on trust funds.” LOL. You win the internet for today! 🙂
Oh sure, blame me for the ~$180 Les Esclusifs that came out when I was 17, or any of the lesser (or greater, no shaming) brands that followed. My friends are hesitant to even buy $100 bottles of perfume for themselves, though that’s purely anecdotal. I always thought the truth was closer to major brands wanting too steal the focus from niche fragrances by launching nearly separate lines. Hmmm.
I think that’s way closer to the truth — the money started moving towards luxury niche, so every mainstream brand wants a piece of that pie. My guess is that that particular pot of money is not coming mostly from young people.
Yup. Some young people are indeed buying $100+ bottles of scent, but most just can’t.
I can’t but do. 😉
Millennials have money??
Right?
“family of scents that they can personalize to make their own, or mix and match depending on their mood, the particular day of the week or even the time of day.”
This describes me, and I’m not a Millennial!
What Uday said.Lol.And:Imagine this;in 30 years’ time the dregs in department stores might be considered classics…
And apparently some consider me a Millenial too!!!Lol!!!(according to my birthyear…)
Apparently, I am as well. Though I prefer to only adhere to certain studies that plant me firmly outside the millennial age range. Hehe. 😉
It sounds like the industry is still sorting out what comes after the days when consumers wanted a signature scent. Owning a singular luxury item doesn’t make sense to younger generations who are accustomed to having inexpensive, disposable, consumer goods within their reach. We want options and expect to own multiple items in every category. Hence, one imagines, the popularity of rollerballs. (If only all the perfume houses would catch on: we don’t want huge, expensive bottles – we want small, affordable ones. And lots of them.)
I live in an apartment from the 1940s – probably the last era when Americans lived spartan lifestyles – and it was built for the way people lived then. You had one bar of soap, one lipstick; 2 pairs of shoes; one nice dress for special occasions; few kitchen appliances beyond a fridge and stove; no electronics save a television and radio; etc.
We now live in McMansions and even new apartments are built with walk-in closets and pantries. We have a lot of stuff (we don’t buy things – we “haul”) and don’t expect it to last forever. So I suppose the perfume industry is just reflecting that.
I guess the question is, though, are the changes due to the consumer demands of an age demographic, or are they driven by what is in the market? My Gap t-shirts last about 9 months before I start to notice holes or fraying… so are they made cheaply because consumers want more, cheaper t-shirts, or are consumers buying more t-shirts because they become shapeless and get holes quickly?
It’s a combo of consumerism as a lifestyle, greater acknowledgement of diversity of tastes, combined with economic insecurity and the need to make a profit.
With GAP, the jeans I wore in college (barely, BARELY) still fit with no holes and frays; GAP jeans I wear now bust out and fray, making it necessary to buy jeans every year. College was 16 years ago.
And with perfumes, it’s truly is a cash grab masquerading as creativity. I agree with kpaint on the need for ever more rollerballs; (imagine the sheer killing Chanel would make with rollerballs of classic #5 and #19) but this reflects a greater truth: the cost of living has gone up even those of us not living in McMansions, there is greater acceptance and celebration of different modes of beauty and as a result teh same stuff will not sell. So as Robin said above, you have all these scent series being released, and speculation at this point on who is buying, instead of, you know, engaging with actual real live humans and asking questions.
If I had to guess I’d say it was about economies of scale. If you’re doing a simultaneous release of ten scents with identical bottles and similar boxes and labels, it doesn’t cost you ten times as much as if you launched a single scent: it doesn’t even cost as much as launching them one at a time over a decade, and in that case the advertising budget is hugely reduced, too. Plus you get to stun the consumer with a blitzkrieg assault by taking over a large chunk of the department-store counter with your display unit, rather than having just one bottle in a sea of others. In every way except aesthetically and artistically, it makes a lot of sense to do a mass launch.
Ahh – very good points.
I wonder if the target market (I’m not a millenial) gets overwhelmed by mega-launches. I recently got a sample of one of the Derek Lam 10 Crosby scents and found myself wondering: if the designer were to smell any scent at random, would he be able to recognize one as his own?
People don’t shop to replace worn-out clothes, though. Most people have tons of clothes because (in the US) they’re a cheap commodity. Using GAP as an example again, I used to have piles of their jeans (3-4 years ago) because they cost about $30 on sale. This is about what they cost when I was in high school/college in the late 80s/early 90s – $30. So people didn’t have “collections” of jeans – you had 2 or 3 pair.
Same thing with electronic devices. I remember buying a PC around 2000 for $1,000 and thinking I was getting a helluva deal. Now for the same money you can get a phone, tablet and laptop, so plenty of people have all 3. We have lots of stuff because it’s cheap (and because we Americans live in a consumer-driven culture and economy and have convinced ourselves we need lots of stuff.)
Because Lord knows that only Millennials like to switch up and experiment with fragrances. Nobody else does that ever! Good grief.
Can we stop talking about millennials already? Because quite frankly I’m bored of the topic. And I’m apparently a millennial (depending on the study), though I definitely don’t feel like one. :-/