The collection
The demise of the Perfume House
Like a lot of industries over the past twenty years, great changes have been seen
in the creation, manufacture and distribution of perfumes. Many old, prestigious
fragrance houses have merged and come under common ownership while new designer
(not to mention ‘celebrity’) brands just keep arriving every year.
Creativity, once the inspiration of in-house ‘noses’ has now largely been
contracted out to the commercial fragrance divisions of large petrochemical
manufacturers, whilst all of the trappings of modern media have been rallied to convince the beguiled
consumer that what is being sold to them remains the finest.
There are many problems with any business model that tries to drive down input costs
by reducing quality, but such difficulties are especially pronounced when applied
to the creative world of perfume. Complex smelling but wildly expensive natural
ingredients, once the appeal of the finest scents, are either diluted or totally
rejected in favour of the cheapest synthetic alternatives.
Great classics have become ‘re-orchestrated for modern woman’ (that is, cheapened
by the accountants who demand reductions in the original formula’s complexity and
quality) while new scents cannot now be created without the ‘focus group’ (the
gathering of thirty women together to find the scents that appeal to the majority
of them, a process that inevitably ends up creating the same scent over and over
again and one reason why all modern scents smell the same). It’s little surprise
that the price of raw materials within the average high-street scent is now as low
as 26 pence per bottle.
The marketing of these scents, now the biggest single cost within a perfume, has
become equally skewed. The launch and promotion of a major new scent can cost anything
up to £3 million as magazine coverage is used to saturation. With up to six fragrance
launches a week, backed by this huge level of marketing support and manufactured demand,
it is inevitable that department store buyers look no further than these established
brands to fill their shelves. Commercially, there’s no other game in town. In fact,
in stark contrast to the great perfumes of the past, many new scents now have built-in
product cycles of a mere eighteen months. Such is the business model that they are
following, that these perfume houses are now creating such ‘great scents’ that they
themselves believe will have become outlived in under two years.
Of course, it wouldn’t matter whether we’re talking about food, consumer goods or
perfume. It’s all the inevitable way of the modern world. Homogenised. Mass-produced.
Mass-marketed. And sadly, mass-consumed without a further thought to any alternatives.
Follow your nose!
There are however alternatives. Despite all the odds, there are still small, independent
fragrance houses pursuing a very different path. These are the artisan houses, the
creators of so-called ‘niche perfumes’. It is to these houses that this website (and
our Sidmouth shop) is devoted. As an independant shop run by independant minds, we only put on
our shelves and before you, our customers, fragrances that we consider to be of the highest
artistic quality. Unbeholden to the perfume industry 'machine', this allows us to follow
our hearts and seek out the truly great scents of our times.
Some of these small houses have been trading for hundreds of years (see our article on historic scents). Others may be the
output of young, new, freshly-qualified and highly talented perfumers. Very often,
these small houses undertake little or no marketing, letting their wonderful creations
reveal true beauty and quality that even the best of marketing hype can not match. Relative
to the mainstream they are of course expensive but for once one is paying for
what’s in the bottle rather than what’s in the (much hyped) name.
These small houses however share something very unique. It is the belief in themselves as perfumers;
a return to previous values when, before focus groups were even heard of, a house
perfumer created a scent because it was quite simply ‘art’ rather than ‘commerce’. That
is, they created the most beautiful creation they could imagine, sometimes (still) with
total disregard to cost. The pursuit of such visions however, does not come without risk:
these creations will not appeal to all (and that, after all, is precisely the point !)
What to one person is a flash of pure olefactory
genius can be, to another, off-kilter, unpleasant or down right cranky. But here is
the truth about these scents, something lost by the mainstream houses: in a world of
uniformity (and even conformity) they allow each and every one of us to return to what we
are - individual.