Do You Have Enough Money
To Sell Your Own Perfume?
(Part IV of a five part series)
In a 1953 interview with Time Magazine, Pierre Wertheimer, captain of the Chanel and Bourjois fragrance and cosmetics enterprises, stated that he had no intentions of launching a new perfume because it takes years of work and $100,000 in promotion to establish a brand. All major perfumers, said Wertheimer, rely on one famous brand for 75% to 80% of their business. At the time, Wertheimer had TWO famous brands: "No. 5" (Chanel) and "Soir de Paris" (Bourjois).
Today, like all other perfumeries, Chanel struggles to establish new "famous brands". The costs of doing this have risen and the competition is more intense. So how do you ever hope to have enough money to establish your own "famous brand" of perfume? How much money will it take? How much money do you have?
This is a question you must ask yourself and answer very honestly. How much money do you have to promote your own perfume? The answer to this question is your starting point for developing a successful marketing plan.
To market your perfume successfully, you must build your marketing plan around the resources you have — not what you would like to have and not what others are spending. If you don't have $10 million to spend on marketing your fragrance, why bother with a plan that will require $10 million?
So let's say you only have $10 to market your perfume. Yes, TEN DOLLARS. Does this mean you CANNOT sell it successfully? No. It means that, for your ten dollars, you need to find a plan that will bring back your ten dollars with another ten dollars in profit. Now you have $20 to promote your perfume!
Slow? Yes. But practical, very practical.
To be in the BUSINESS of selling perfume — your own perfume — you have to make money with it. You have to look at your marketing program for the profit it will return. If you go over your head, you lose everything. So to be successful, you market your perfume in "baby steps" until your brand is known and the profits from your baby steps allow you to start taking larger steps that will yield larger profits.
Where, with your "$10", do you start?
For most people, the starting point is getting people to smell your perfume. Usually this means giving out some sort of samples. Small glass vials are a standard. There was a time when even the largest perfume companies used them, though now they've mostly gone to micro encapsulation technology.
The REASON you want to spend SOME of your marketing money to distribute samples is simply to get vital feedback. Do people think your perfume stinks? If so, you might want to end your campaign and save your money. Do people LIKE your fragrance? This is a hopeful sign. Now USE this positive feedback to SELL your fragrance to others — on a small scale, if you are working on a small budget, but this positive feedback offers you a "hook" that can help you sell your perfume to others.
What happens if you DO NOT have enough money to advertise? The fact is, if you are at the beginning and money is tight to non-existent, ADVERTISING may NOT be what you need. Taking your perfume on the road PERSONALLY, displaying it and selling it to friends, relatives, co-workers and even well-selected strangers may be exactly what you need to get the cash register ringing.
Your experience in selling face to face — to real people who pay real money to buy your perfume — may be exactly what you need to prepare yourself for selling on a larger scale. And, with this experience as well as the cash you have earned, you will be ready to take the next step in developing your business.
So how much money do you REALLY need to start selling perfume? The answer is, "very little" — IF you are willing to shoot for goals that can be reached with the resources you have available.
Homemade perfumes generally lack commercial value, regardless of how wonderful they may be, because their creators fail to record how their perfumes were made. To profit from a perfume, to sell it, to sell the rights to it, or have somebody sell it for you, you must be able to make more of it. To make more you need the formula, the record of how the perfume was made: what materials were used and how much of each material was used. While the formula is nothing more than a recipe, a simple piece of paper, it is the key to unlocking your perfume's commercial potential. With the formula in your hand you have the ability to make a few dozen bottles more or, like the celebrities, tens of thousands of bottles. How to create an international production formula for your homemade perfume is a guide to getting you started on the right foot, correctly documenting everything you do as you are doing it, and then using these notes with some basic mathematics to write a simple, accurate, universal formula for your perfume. Writing formulas for your perfumes can change the way you think about them. With your formulas in hand your creations are no longer "here today, gone tomorrow." Now, thanks to your library of formulas, your perfumes become immortal!
While much is written about perfume – the beautiful fragrances... the beautiful bottles – little is available on the "mechanics" of perfume production – the steps that take place on the "factory floor" where a beautiful vision is turned into a finished product, a "ready to sell" perfume. Now you can experience all of these steps, hands on, by making just one quart of your own perfume. If you follow each chapter and do what you are instructed to do, you will end up with from 8 to 64 bottles of your own perfume, depending on the capacity of the bottles you select. Along this "insiders journey," each step is profusely illustrated with professional color photographs and you'll learn — • Exactly what alcohol you'll need and where to get it • Why you'll want (just a little!) water in your perfume • What type bottles you'll need and why you cannot use others • Why you will use a spray and not a cap • How to fill and seal your bottles • How to label your bottles with the correct information so they will be legal for sale • How to select a name for your perfume that will allow you to acquire powerful trademark rights free. If you are a developer of scents you are encouraged to use one of your own for this project. If you are not a scent creator yourself you'll learn how to get a fragrance oil that is exactly right for this project. Online sources are given for all required supplies and materials. Nothing can hold you back from starting your project immediately!
Perfume is famous for the markup it can achieve, even for a middle market fragrance. While "everybody knows" that perfume costs next to nothing to make (not completely true) the making of it is often considered an esoteric secret. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" details how a 3-person company with no experience created their own fragrance in response to a marketing opportunity that was too good to pass up. The book explains exactly what was done to create a fragrance for that opportunity but it is far more than a history of the author's project. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" lays out every step in the process of creating your own perfume, either as a do-it-yourself project – and without the benefit of automated equipment some compromises and workarounds are required – or full bore professional production under your supervision. Either way you will be producing a quality fragrance at a remarkably low cost. Do you have a marketing opportunity that would be wildly profitable if only you could obtain your fragrance at a ridiculously low cost? "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" is the guide you need to do it.
A really great name, a special name that is just right for a particular perfume or perfume marketer (or entrepreneur with money to invest!) can be worth a ton of money. But few individuals with great ideas ever manage to cash in on those brilliant ideas. Instead they wait while others "discover" their idea, acquire legal rights to it and make all the money while they are left out in the cold without a penny having been earned for what was once THEIR idea.
If you are struggling to name your perfume and are looking for a name that will have real value, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" will help you weed out low value names and point you to names that have better marketing value plus the potential to become valuable assets in themselves.
If you have a great name you want to protect but no fragrance, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" will guide you through the simple steps you must take to acquire a legal right to that name before someone else grabs it! Best of all, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" shows you how to gain strong legal protection for your name without a lawyer and without spending more than pocket change.
Never had an idea for a product name? Never thought much about perfume? "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" may stimulate your interest in a whole new game that, when played well, can make you lots of money without your having to leave the comfort of your home office.
You can build a perfume business of your own using this business plan as a guide. By following its detailed strategy you learn to identify motivated groups of potential perfume buyers. Members of these groups are near the tipping point of desire for a new perfume. You don't know these people and they don't know you but you know a marketer they trust, one who does not currently sell perfume and might never think of selling perfume were it not for your approach. Here is where you step in with a professional plan, promotion, and perfume to take advantage of this ripe opportunity for mutual profit. Before your first promotion has peaked, you will already be developing a relationship with your next marketing partner. Following this plan, you will gain more and more profit with each new marketing partnership.
Now when you make your own perfume you can make it fully "commercial" meaning you will be creating a product ready for regular, continuous sales to friends, relatives, and the public! If the fragrance you've made has already won praise, why not share it with others? Some might pay you for it and want it for their web stores or retail boutiques! Creating your own perfume from dropper bottles: Methods, mechanics, and mathematics guides you through steps that can turn your hobby project into a perfume business. Discover how close you are now and how little more you must do to take what you made with essential oils and dropper bottles into a business of your own! For an introduction to this book, watch this video.
When you name a perfume you create a valuable asset – the name itself. To sell your perfume you want the most effective name possible. But a good name can have value beyond the edge it gives your sales. In naming your fragrance you are creating a trademark and a trademark can have value independent of the product. The value of that trademark can vary. Much depends on how well, in naming your perfume, you follow the trademark "rules." How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume first helps you develop a name that will be effective in selling your perfume. It then prods you to make use of certain techniques that can turn a good name into a great trademark, strong and valuable. If you have questions about how to protect a name, How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume will answer many such as:
- Can you protect your name yourself or do you need a lawyer?
- Can you register a trademark without a lawyer?
- What does it cost to register a trademark?
- How do I enforce the rights I have established?
How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume covers both state, federal, and international protection.
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Philip Goutell
Lightyears, Inc.
