Unlocking the Secrets of Niche Perfumes: A Conversation with Huib Maat

Welcome to the bring your product idea to life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started. Hello.

So today on the podcast I am delighted to be speaking with Huib Maat. Huib is in house perfumer and the co founder at Pairfum London. So this is a niche perfume house based in London.

Huib is a perfumer, which is a very rare job. He tells me there are less perfumers than astronauts. Did you know that? I certainly didn't.

It's a really unique job and as you can imagine, it makes it a very unique episode.

We speak a lot about scent and fragrance and perfume and how has some great advice for how to buy perfume, particularly if you're buying online and as well as how to sell a product that's really hard to sell online because as you can imagine and as you know, if you, if you sell anything scented, selling scented products online is really difficult.

And he has some great advice for that as well as just generally some insights into how he markets his products, which are very niche and unusual, as you will find out. And all in all, this is a really fascinating episode and I cannot wait to introduce you to Halloween. So hi, how. Thank you so much for being here.

Vicky, fantastic to meet you. Thank you very much for the invitation. Absolutely love it. And I have to be honest, this is my very first ever podcast. So if I get things wrong, you.

Know, forgive me, it will, it will be great. You will be great, I promise. This is a great first podcast for you to do. So let's, let's start off with an easy question.

Can you please give an introduction to yourself, your business and what you sell?

Sure. I'm Huib. I'm the in house perfumer at Pairfum London. And we're one of the few English perfumery houses.

I mean if you, you know, if people ask, do you know French perfumery houses? People will mention lots of them. If you ask them, mention English perfumery houses, you know, the list will be much shorter.

If you then look at who are the new ones, you would find us where one of the, what I would describe as the new kids on the block. So I'm Haup. My background is Dutch. I was brought up in Holland, funny enough, I lived there only three years and I'm now in England.

It must be 30 years. So the big question is, am I Dutch or am I English? I also spent some time in Germany and then when I started, I.

Well, you know, you go to university and then when you come out of university, you kind of start to apply for jobs. And I found this advert for a company called Firmenich.

And for some people that are familiar with the perfume industry, it's basically an industry where you have quite big suppliers on one side, companies, the main three are Givaudan, Fhrmnich and iff. I mean, they are billion dollar companies.

And they would make the perfumes for companies like Chanel, you know, Dior, as the Lauder, but also Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Colgate. And they typically have two sides, one which we would describe as the fragrance part and the other one which is the flavor part.

And you might think, well, why? But let's take a citrus oil.

You know, when you eat citrus or you take a drink with citrus, it's the same citrus oil that you find in a fragrance when it has a citrus smell. So the raw material is identical. And it's these big companies that have, let's say plantations where they produce these materials.

They've also got big factories where they produce raw materials. And so they have a strong, strong history in the raw material side.

And at the same time, they basically create either flavors that go into anything, drinks, food and perfumes that go from fine fragrances to, you know, shampoos, toiletries, household products. And I saw this advertiser advert for Fermi. He gosh, this sounds really interesting. I've never heard of that.

And it's one of those things, you know, if your parents ask you, what are you going to become? You say, well, I'm going to be this or that. If you tell them I'm going to be in the perfume world, you know, most people say, well, what is this?

What is a perfume? What do they do? Where do you even find these adverts?

You know, there's a funny statistic that there are less perfumers than there are NASA astronauts. And you think, you know that. I haven't met that many NASA astronauts.

I love that statistic, actually. That's great.

Yeah, yeah.

And so did you always want to be a perfumer or did you. Is this something that Happy accident?

I would say I would call it a happy accident. And yet there is some.

I would say there's probably a little bit of a pattern to it in the sense that my father worked for a food company, a drinks company. So at a young age, he brought us new products that he had developed home. And as kids, we would drink and taste and we would enjoy it.

And funny enough, when you think that what you eat and what you taste is so close, you know, you only taste things your sweet, sour, etc. And all the rest, you smell. So even though I mightn't have known it, to a certain extent, he already introduced us to the world of smell.

I really can't claim that I have a background which you read so often that people say, oh, well, my mother did this in perfumery, or my parents did this in perfumery. In my case, this wasn't at all. Actually, I. It was really the food, particularly the drinks area where I came through. And then I just saw the advert.

And when I started speaking to them, I must admit I was just fascinated by it. You know, as a teenager, I would have used perfumes just like everybody else.

You grow up and at some point you start with the deodorant and then you get a bit older and you see the first girlfriend, you think, oh, I must wear perfume, you know, and that's kind of how I got into perfume. So there was nothing systematic there. It really was fairly random, to be honest.

Okay, so tell us, what does being a perfumer involve? What is the job? In a nutshell, I would say the.

It really is. I would say it's twofold. One is you have to create perfumes.

And essentially, to create perfumes is a bit either like a chef in the kitchen or a musician in a concert or, you know. Yeah, conductor that basically creates music with top notes and bass notes.

Or the chef that says, oh, I need to combine, you know, some meat with some spices. You can get it badly wrong. And it's. It's one of those things, you know, as a society, we always think, oh, I have to get it right.

But as perfumers, I would say we create more rubbish than we create stars.

And it's a continuous learning curve, and you need to kind of rephrase it and say, oh, I like this part in my failure, so I must improve that other part that I didn't like. So it's a continuous process of iteration where you essentially blend ingredients for a harmonious fragrance.

And in its most basic form, we speak about an effective triangle where we say, we've got a top note, a heart and a base note. And essentially, this is a construct that perfumers created to distinguish between the different types of raw materials.

So going back to citrus, that will be a very light note. We would associate that with a top note because it has a high volatility.

On the other hand, if you take something like vanilla, that would have a very low volatility, so it would stay a long, long time. So this would be a base note. Then you would have flowers like a rose, which we describe are the heart of a fragrance.

This would be a medium volatility. So when you speak about these volatilities in a perfume, the citrus note, or the top note tends to disappear within minutes.

Then as it's when you're smelling effectively, all of these are there at the same time. It's just that the top note dominates. And as it disappears, the heart note, let's say the rose in this case, suddenly becomes more prominent.

And then as it dissipates, the base note comes more to the fore. Doesn't mean that none of them are there anymore. It's just that they're different in terms of their dominance.

You know, the top note is dominant at the beginning and the base note is dominant towards the end. So my job really is to create perfumes roughly with this construction in mind.

And, you know, when it comes to perfume, nobody's interested in yesterday's perfume. Meaning if I could recreate something that was done by somebody else, people wouldn't be interested.

So the real challenge is to find something that is different, that's novel, but that people like.

And that's essentially where, you know, Pairfum London comes from in the sense that when we started the company, I thought, well, where do I actually draw my inspiration from? And it is through living in London. So it's, you know, you might say, why London? Why, et cetera? It's very simple.

Because when you live in this fantastic city and you walk down the street, you smell all kinds of things, and that essentially inspires the perfumes.

And it can become, you know, you can be standing under the shower doing something and say, oh, gosh, you know, that was a lovely smell that I got there yesterday. I must do something with that. And either you do something with it or, you know, you kind of park it for a future date.

But that's essentially where the inspirations come from. And then the beauty is. And that's part of the reason why I created Pairfum.

The big corporations nowadays, when it comes to perfumery, these are multibillion dollar enterprises. And like every enterprise, you have to make sure that you sell, that you're profitable, and that your product basically hits the mark.

What that does involve is that you basically test products, you go to Consumers, and you ask them, do you like this perfume? Whenever you ask a broad audience, it always comes down to the common denominator.

And that leaves a fantastic opportunity at the extremes for people like me, which are, you know, small, independent perfumers that can basically find and create those perfumes that are unusual that the average person might not like. But there will be some people that say, absolutely love this perfume. You know, when vanilla first came out as a.

As a fragrance, generally in perfume, and they did tests with perfume, one of the things that they found was that the average person didn't like vanilla. They said, oh, no, this is a flop. Absolute flop. And there was a really smart market researcher that said, hold on a minute.

Here's a group at that far end that absolutely love this stuff. They love vanilla. And that's how essentially, the first kind of vanilla perfume came to the market.

Because these marketing departments suddenly realized we don't need to go for the big common denominator in the middle. We can also go for these, let's say, little extremes. And as long as they're big enough, we can tailor or target this market.

And we kind of do this on a more extreme basis. You know, that our perfumes are a bit more radical, a bit more dangerous, a bit more adventurous.

And there isn't somebody behind me that says, oh, no, no. You need to make sure that, you know, half the country, half the population of this world like this fragrance.

If we find that 1% of the world's population love our perfume, that's enormous. You know, that's an enormous audience. And that's essentially what inspired the creation of Parfum London in terms of the.

The place where I live, you know, what's around me, the opportunity in the market, which is essentially that big companies either no longer can be adventurous or they buy the smaller competitors.

And as soon as these smaller niche perfume houses come into the main fold of the big corporation, they suddenly apply the same logic to their perfumes. And the, you know, the character, the adventure disappears from those fragrances. That's why I saw the opportunity.

Okay, thank you. So I guess being smaller means that you're not having to sort of mass produce as much. Is that what allows you to create maybe more niche fragrances?

Because you're not having to make, however, you know, thousands and thousands of bottles? That's interesting. And coming back to being a perfumer, this is a very basic question.

We will come into more about Pairfum London and fragrance, but how do you train to become a perfumer?

And as maybe as Part of that, do you have to have a very superior sense of smell or is that something that can be developed because it's such an unusual, unusual job? As we said? I would love to know how one becomes one.

Well, I would say in the, in the past, the past was probably a bit more haphazard and more accidental. I would say in today's environment, anybody that aspires to be a perfumer has to be a chemist and ideally a PhD chemist.

You then apply essentially with one of those perfume houses that I mentioned, and there you receive an on the go training. And the training literally starts off with you smelling raw perfume, raw materials.

So that's on the one hand, the raw material, on the other hand, you smell all what we would describe as the classics or the iconic fragrances of this industry, such as Chanel Number five.

And when I say smelling, it sounds, you know, it doesn't sound that advanced, but it's, it literally is a question of training your mind more than your nose to actually smell ingredients.

As you smell the ingredients, you then suddenly learn that when you're smelling a finished product, let's say a Chanel Number five, how these ingredients behave in a finished fragrance. And it's. I remember when I started, I said to my colleagues at the time, I said, all right, I'm here now a week, I've started my first smelling.

When do I get started on working for clients? And they said, hold on a second, just back up for a minute before we let you anywhere near a customer to create a perfume for them.

It's going to take you two, three years. I thought, what? I can smell these ingredients, what's the big deal?

And it's essentially smelling these ingredients through different phases, such as what I described. What do they like when you smell them fresh? What are they like when you smell them on skin? What do you smell?

What do they like when you have them in different environments?

So you smell each ingredient many, many, many times until your mind basically remembers them and remembers all the different facets of each ingredient. And it's the same with the finished perfumes.

So you take a Chanel 5 and you smell it in the morning, in the evening, when you're feeling down, when you're feeling, well know, in a hot climate, in a cold climate, when it's fresh, on a paper smelling strip, on your wife, on another friend. So there's an awful lot of smelling in there.

And at the same time, you know, the background of being a chemist, this is at least for the modern perfumery, gives you an insight into essentially how these ingredients are starting to combine. I would say when I started, my background is, you know, I have a master's in business and economics, so there's no chemistry there whatsoever.

So myself and a lot of other very successful perfumers literally learned it through trial and error. We trained the noses and we suddenly discovered that, you know, we seem to do this very well.

And it's, I think working for Fermilich, I was there a good 10 years, at some point gave me the confidence to say, no, I feel confident that I can start myself. And, you know, then you get into a whole different ballgame of this suddenly is your own business and you have to start as any other business.

And there are a lot of, you know, business aspects that you suddenly have to learn and do. And it's. It's quite different, actually. But, you know, you also have the. There's certainly the freedom which. Which comes with it.

So it's a wonderful combination, actually.

Yeah. Thank you. I can. I can see that because I guess working for a bigger perfume house, as you said, your mass producing perfume, maybe to.

For a certain brand, whereas it sounds like you have the freedom now to create what you like.

You're absolutely right. I still, you know, obviously, as a. As a business, you have to be able to sell your product. So there's no point creating a perfume that nobody likes.

But it's the difference between having to find so many people that like it and finding a niche that love a perfume is enormous. So we can take much more risks.

I think that's probably one of the big differences as well, is that we are much more prepared to take a risk because we can start on a much smaller scale with a really small run, sizes. And to a certain extent, you know, people will tell us whether they like it or they don't.

We, we do a lot of trade fairs, for example, where we meet our customers, which are retailers, but also consumers, and you hear very quickly if people like it or they don't like it. You know, I may love a particular fragrance, but if nobody really is enamored with it, then, you know, that tells you something.

So there's a lot of testing go into the process of creating fragrance. Are you asking lots of people to smell. To smell the fragrance, give you feedback on it? How does. How does that side of it work?

You explained how a fragrance is put together, but what happens? Yeah, so you, you have some ideas. You do the chemistry part, if that's the way of saying it. But what happens then?

How do you work out okay, this is a perfume that will work on the human body. This is a perfume people like. This is the perfum perfume that will last the day. How does that work?

So the. So for me, in your question, there are two parts. One is the. I would describe it as the technical performance of a fragrance. So does it last?

Is it strong enough? Will it survive, you know, two years in somebody's home?

Those things you can test literally through testing it on paper, testing it on people doing what we call accelerated aging tests. So these are standard tests that we conduct.

The other part, whether people like it or they don't, I think there's a little bit of gut instinct where I just say, oh, yeah, I can see that people would enjoy this. But then there's simply a part where I have to dress.

I go around friends and families, I send it to a few customers, ask them what they think of it, and I get the first feedback.

Where this can work quite well is because if we have a customer that already buys from us and I send them something to try, they to a certain extent, also have customers, and they also know what their customers like.

And the feedback that you get, Norm, is really good, actually, really good, because it's this expression of every perfume house has its own, let's call it stable smell.

And the best example of that is what we would call the Guerlain, with its famous Guerlinade, which is, you know, people know Guerlain, but the older Guerlain fragrances always had a signature scent in it. And that was called the Guerlinade. And it was a certain stripped down, we call it a core or a base that would be put into a fragrance.

And this was their signature fragrance. Now today, Guerlain is obviously much bigger, so they no longer have this signature scent as such.

But, excuse me, there's still some form of a what I would call signature smell, that is, or signature, let's call it, not a signature smell, but a certain style of fragrance or signature that tends to run through our perfumes.

And you'll notice that, for example, if you go and you travel, let's say you travel to the Arabic region or to France or to Italy, you suddenly notice that the fragrances in Italy have a certain style, or in France have a certain style, or in the Middle East. And that kind of signature is what I mean when you say each perfume house has its own style as such, that people can recognize.

And it's the same, I suppose, with food.

If you go to, you know, a certain restaurant, you expect a Certain style of food, like, let's say Chinese or Indian, they have their certain signature styles as such.

And coming back to your testing, I think it's literally of a question of creating these perfumes to the point where you can present them to your customers and then go for feedback. Typically that means, oh, we like this, but I don't really like that.

Or it's wonderful, but it might not be very strong, or I don't really like it, but I could see that maybe during the summer people would love it. So then, you know, this is very simple feedback.

But I then interpret that feedback and essentially evolve the fragrance to what I think a point where I would say, yeah, I think now it's ready to launch. And then literally we start and we produce, we bring it to the market, we present it to our customers. And I think in our case we.

We start well, we always produce limited ROMs. And we've found we've been very lucky in that respect and very grateful, actually, for that.

That we've never really ended up with a fragrance that nobody likes and that we can't sell. It's. Yes, we have some fragrances that are very successful and others that are not, you know, so that, I think is quite normal.

And it's funny, actually, when you look at an industry statistic that says that I think it's probably about 80% of all new perfume launches that come to the market don't really survive the first few years. It shows you how much trial and error the industry does in general. And, yeah, I suppose we're fortunate that we don't produce these large quantities.

So therefore we're never sitting on these quantities that we can't sell anymore. We're flexible and small as a company that we can adjust and move on to the next one.

Yeah, thank you. And I know you've spoken about niche perfume. So is that what niche perfume really means?

That you're making small batches small and also maybe, as you said, a bit not looking to appeal to everyone?

Or is there anything else that makes niche perfume differ from celebrity fragrances, for example, which we're all very familiar with from the television advertising?

Well, you're quite right. Let me. Let's maybe start slightly differently.

If you look at our market and most markets, you would say there's a premium segment or prestige segment, which let's say would be a Chanel Dior, etc, There's. Let's call it a discount segment.

In our industry, we call it Mastige, typically, because even when you walk into a discounter and you pick up a perfume and it's maybe a few pounds or ten pounds, it still tend to be lovely bottles with nice caps, you know, beautiful boxes with a cellophane. So it doesn't have the style of a typical discount product. So we kind of call it Mastige.

And then you have from top to bottom, what we would call the celebrity fragrances. So let's say for example, top Tom Ford at the higher end and then Ariana Grande at the middle end.

And then, you know, when you go into the discount area, you find lots and lots of celebrity fragrances and then you've got niche. Niche tends to be in the premium area. And you're quite right. The first thing is niche has unusual fragrances.

If we didn't have unusual fragrances, there wouldn't be a reason for us to exist as niche perfume realities.

The second one is most niche perfumery houses should have an in house perfumer, somebody like myself that actually creates the perfume, creates the product.

There's an awful lot of brands around, a bit like celebrity fragrances that say, I woke up in the morning and I had a story about perfume, so I launched it.

It's a bit shallow, I think, you know, it's a bit like with these celebrity brands where nobody really knows what they're doing and they just stick a label on because they can sell it. The third part, which you already pointed out, is that the run sizes tend to be much, much smaller.

You know, we don't produce perfumes in the millions. The fourth part is that typically the face of a niche perfume is the creator, whereas the face of a Chanel or Dior tends to be a celebrity.

Another feature that kind of links to that is the marketing in the sense that you wouldn't see a niche perfume advertised on TV or in magazines like Vogue, etc. Again, these adverts would feature celebrities, etc. Niche perfume houses typically aren't advertised.

If you see them, you might see them through social media, you might come across them when you meet them in a store or something like that. So the marketing is scaled down and many ways and is much more word of mouth. I would say those are the main features of a niche perfume house.

You then have others, which, let's say, for example, would set us apart, is, you know, what typically inspires the fragrance. If you have the mass market companies, they maybe pick up a trend or something like that, but they don't necessarily have a specific inspiration.

In our case, it's London. If you go to France or Italy or the us you would find other houses that have their own background and environment as the inspiration.

Another area that we would have is that we say our fragrances are natural. And people might say, well, does that make a big difference? Many ways it does, because it's.

If you take, for example, wine, wine ages the same way as we have it with our fragrances. If you have fragrance like a fragrance from other brands, they don't necessarily have to age. So that's a big difference.

Next thing that we are very strong in as well is we call it clean fragrances.

So if you pick up one of our perfume bottles and you look at the ingredient list, for example, you won't find water, you won't find solvents, colors, surfactants, stabilizers, etc. So the construction of the product, it's much simpler, much cleaner, much healthier for the skin as such. And then the last part, which we do not.

Yeah, some of the niche perfume, your houses do it as well, which is this barrel aging. We literally allow the perfume to age between four and eight weeks before we bottle it.

And it's for the reasons that we use natural ingredients that we do these. And this is what I would describe as what sets niche perfume apart from. Yeah, from the other three.

That's pretty interesting.

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's quite a big industry nowadays, niche. And it's. It's not just in perfumery.

You would find it in wine, you know, whiskeys, fashion, skin care, food, everywhere, to be honest. And it's to a certain extent, it's an evolution of, I would say, society.

And on the other hand, as well, people, as they, let's say, go through life, you know, when you're a teenager, your first ambition might be to say, oh, I want a big famous fragrance to wear.

Then when you're maybe 30 and you've got your job and you're working and you have your first income, you suddenly discover, you know, all my friends have the same clothes, the same perfumes, the same this, the same, that you start to sit back and say, I want something a little bit more unusual. So people start to look for niche products. So there's an element of affluence. So you need to be, you know, in your own job, earning money. A teenager.

I doubt many teenagers spend money on niche perfume. The second thing is it's an evolution of taste.

You know, somebody in wine or in whiskey or cheeses or fashion would suddenly say, oh, well, I'd like something a little bit more special. And that's essentially where niche in general as a, as a category or as a trend. And niche.

Perfume in particular has its strength and comes to the fore and people look for our products. You know, nowadays with the Internet, it's fantastic. We get inquiries from all over the world. We sell our products in all over the world pretty much.

And I think the Internet for small enterprises is really a fantastic opportunity. When it comes to perfume, it's obviously an enormous challenge because you can't smell the perfume online.

In many cases, you know, the definition of niches that you don't know are brand and then even worse, you're buying it from a foreign country. So, you know, as a, as a small enterprise, we've got these three challenges when it comes to selling our perfumes.

It's, you know, the other style of fragrance buying online you would find is that somebody says, I know my wife wants Chanel number five and I'm using Chanel number five. And it's obviously a compliment, it's not a, not a criticism.

But you'd say, well, I know my wife likes Chanel number five, so I'm going to have a look and see online whether I can get it cheaper. So that's one way people tend to buy perfume online.

The other one, which is very big and it's a trend, is that people look for copycats or dupes or fakes online and it's, you know, it's a big temptation. The main challenge is that these, sometimes these dupes and fakes are good. When they're good, there might be up to 90% similar.

One big question I would always have is, are they safe to wear though? You know, we hear lots of stories where people put these dupes on their skin and suddenly they've got irritation and rashes, etc.

So you really need to be able to trust whoever produces them. The third one is, is this product actually stable when it sits at home? Will it last or will it go off in a very, very short time?

But this is typically what people do when they buy online.

They either buy what they know cheaper, they buy, you know, duper, copycat, or in the third instance, which is niche, they're kind of going on the Internet to hunt and search for something that's a bit more difficult to find.

That's really interesting and I've, yeah, I've got a few follow up questions, if that's okay. I mean, I'm going to come back to buying perfume online in a moment if that's okay, because I do have some questions around that.

But what I would like to know if it's okay is because you're not mass market, because you don't have celebrities endorsed in your perfumes, which you see a lot of the big fragrance houses doing. What are you doing and what are some of the ways you're. I don't have advertising is the right way. But how are people finding you?

Other than going on Google maybe and looking for these niche perfumes, how else are people finding you?

Well, in general, there will be two routes. One is we obviously have customers that buy from us, and when I say customers, I mean retailers. So we would have shops that buy from us.

So when somebody walks into a store, they're presented our product. We also are, it's quite surprising. We are in, you know, boutique florists, we're in very nice gift shops, design led boutiques.

But this is the other part that's surprising. A lot of high end boutique hotels like niche products in their hotel rooms.

So we would also get a lot of awareness through people seeing our products literally in these, what I would describe, very nice and beautiful retail environments. So that's one part. The other part quite clearly is online and it's, it's social media.

So you know, we would have people that say, oh, you know, an influencer or somebody that has a fabulous profile on one of the social media platforms might say, I would be interested in presenting this to my followers. I might be interested in doing a quiz or you know, a giveaway or something like that. So that's, that's one way.

The other one is, particularly when it comes to perfume, there are a lot of bloggers around that actually write about perfume and they would do a product review much more lengthy than somebody would do on Instagram, but they would do a review.

And then the third one, which I would say is becoming much more popular now, are these kind of, let's call them, video reviews that you would find on TikTok, YouTube, etc. Somebody says, oh, I received this product, they open it up, they show it and then kind of talk about how they experience the perfume.

And in my case, I would say today is the first time that we're trying a podcast to see what a podcast does for us in terms of publicity. So you're quite right. We have to kind of think differently. We have to find ways where the major companies haven't yet done that much.

And podcast, for example, is in the, is one area where I'm not sure, have you interviewed Chanel yet on your podcast or somebody like it? So it's, I thought at Least this is a new area, for example, to try out. So we quite clearly have to think of other ways how we can promote one other.

And that's the third one that we get, which is a very, very strong one in the niche industry, which is literally word of mouth that people have tried our products, and they then say to a friend, oh, I've enjoyed this product. I really like it. You should try it as well. We actually have one product I wanted to show that today, which we. It's a.

It's a gift product called the Perfume Experience Box, and it's a fragrance library. And I'll just open it up. Inside it, you can see these 12 little bottles. Can you see that?

Yeah, I can see that.

And what we found is that it's a fantastic gift. Because perfume is so difficult to gift. Unless you know what somebody wants, you're bound to get it wrong.

So Instead of giving one perfume, you give 12.

The effect of that, and it's, in a way, it's a marketing promotion, is that when somebody received this as a gift, they open it up with their friends, it's on the table, and they start to smell, and everybody, like a magnet, is drawn to it. So in all fairness, it doesn't just promote our product to whoever has received it as a gift, but also all the people that join in.

So it's one way for us as well, indirectly, to promote our product to a wider audience through word of mouth. So the third rule, word of mouth for us is very, very strong. Very important, actually.

Thank you. Thank you so much for all of that.

And I, by the way, I completely think going on podcast is a good idea, because as we spoke about before we started recording, what's really nice is that for your perfume house, we have a person, yourself, with a personality and a story and a background that we can talk to and find out more. And I think that's always more appealing, is to know the story behind a brand and know a bit about the person.

It gives a stronger connection, I think, rather than a big faceless corporation that you don't know as much about, maybe. I think it maybe gives people more confidence to try out something new. Maybe going to shop somewhere differently.

If they feel they know a little bit about the company, they know a little bit about the people. I think that just gives you a bit of confidence to maybe, okay, maybe I'll try shopping there this time.

Yes, I find that as well, actually. If you, you know, you've got the feeling that this person is real. So the risk is a Bit less.

And particularly in my case, you know, if something goes wrong, and let's be honest, things go wrong in life, at least you know, there is a guy, I can bring him up, I can email him or something like that and he will respond to me. So I totally agree with you.

I think there's another part which I have found in the past is that I much more enjoy buying from a person than from a nameless entity.

You know, I don't know about you, if you go and it's very modern nowadays that you've got these self checkouts and you go into a supermarket and you go through the self checkout and it's possible that you've gone through the entire store without muttering a word or interacting with any person. And I personally don't really enjoy that that much actually. I actually do make an effort to go to the normal a cashier.

And it's not necessarily that I, that I crave the conversation as such, but it's, it's just much more personable. I see that in business as well.

And I think that's where things like videos or zoom calls or podcasts are fantastic because they allow the person to come to the fore and you've got the feeling that you're buying. You know, that was one of the things that I kind of wanted to bring back as well.

With perfumery, I thought perfume has gone so mass market and that's not a criticism, it's fantastic because it's available to everybody.

But in the past, perfume used to be something very personal where you went to a perfumer and you had a one to one consultation and you discovered some different fragrances and you then kind of honed in on a fragrance that says, oh yeah, this is what I'm going to buy today. When you run through the duty free, you know you're smelling left and right as you chase through it.

In the end your nose is confusing, you think, oh, I don't know what to do.

So you just buy something, you know, the same in the department store, you walk in and there's this fabulous perfume clouds and then you've got the assistants showing you perfume. And I'm not so sure that that's the best way to buy perfume.

I think something whereby you slow down a bit, you smell it at home, you take a little bit more time, you explore different fragrances is a much more enjoyable experience. But that means there needs to be a person that kind of comes to you and helps you and guides you through the process.

And I personally see that Again, as an opportunity for niche perfumes.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

I think buying perfume, I think buying it on, like you saying duty free department store is hard because there's all the competing smells and the noises, so it's all the other senses as well. I really like the idea you explained of your gift box.

I think that's such a clever way of people getting to try lots of your products, seeing which ones they like. Like you say, get their friends to sniff them and see what they like.

I think that's so clever and I think that's a really good thing that hopefully others can take away from sort of a similar idea.

But I just like to come back if that's, if I can, about buying perfume online, because I think buying anything online that is scented is really hard because how do you convey ascent with words and pictures? So other than the things you've mentioned about, is there anything else you're doing to help people make the perfume buying process easier?

And do you have advice for anyone looking to buy perfume online, especially if they want to try something new, something they haven't maybe had before?

I think my first piece of advice would be to look out for these kind of boxes. Ours is unusual because you've got so many. We've got 12 fragrances. Typically you might find four or six. I think that will be the first tip.

Instead of buying immediately a perfume online, buy one of these boxes and try it out the first one. The second area is, and I must be honest, I don't think I've got an answer yet. I really don't.

I think what we try to do is a variety of things to make it more comfortable. So one is, if you go onto a website, you find a little bit what you see here in my background as well, we call it the faces and Facets of London.

So as you see many different people, you kind of think, oh, yeah, we hope at least that you see yourself in one of them. And you say, yes, this makes me comfortable. The second one is there is an association which we call perfume and color.

So if you think of rose, you think of red. If you think of marine, you think of blue. If you think of grass, you think of green. And that can be used in reverse.

So if you see red, you think, oh yeah. And I say rose, you kind of think, oh yeah, I know roughly what this is going to smell like.

Same with if I say aqua and blue, you kind of think, oh yeah, I know roughly what this will smell like. So color is one thing that you'll notice on our website, we use color. Very targeted.

The other thing we have, and that's maybe unusual for us, as I would say, probably only because I'm a perfumer, that we're doing it. You see on our website everywhere these effective triangles where we literally list and split the ingredients by their phase of the evaporation.

And we don't just put a word there, but again, we kind of have a little image beside it to kind of illustrate what this ingredient looks like. Well, it might smell like. So we use these triangles. The next thing we do is we try to describe the perfume with words.

So we say, this is a wonderfully floral fragrance that would be fantastic on a summer day, etc. Etc. So the perfume description is another thing that we do. I think, to be honest, after that, we're kind of exploring different things.

I wouldn't say that I found the definitive answer on this yet. It's still an area that we, as an industry struggle.

And lots of people have tried little gadgets of saying, I put a box at home and it sprays something whereby, you know, this could be the perfume that you're smelling. But these little gadgets tend to be quite limited. It's the same as when you have a color printer at home.

You know, the color printer has four colors in it and makes all the pictures out of those four colors.

When you go back to what I mentioned earlier, that we have 3,000 ingredients, how can you reduce these 3,000 ingredients to three or four so that you can create something at home? So, pardon me. So as an industry, we struggle. I personally don't really have a solution.

I think from our side, we try to have me as a person there so that you feel I'm kind of comfortable who I'm buying from. I think that's the answers. If people have suggestions that they feel we should try, then I'm very, very open for that.

And we'll be very grateful for those suggestions.

Thank you. I was just really interested because I can see it's a huge challenge.

So I was just curious, and I completely understand that you wouldn't have the ultimate solution yet, because also, I don't know if there is overall solution. I think it's one of these areas where you do what you can and maybe you'll come up with more ideas.

But until we're able to actually go to the screen and sniff if that ever happens, this challenge will always exist. But for anyone who sells scented products, I think.

I think the best solution at the moment we have are these Boxes. Because, you know, you mentioned earlier the challenge of buying in an apartment store or in a beauty, and it's very true.

You know, we find that our noses get blocked and it's roughly three perfumes. Once you've smelled three perfumes, your sensitivity goes down. It's easily explained because our nose is designed as a warning instrument.

You know, we smell things when we come into the room and they're either safe or dangerous.

You know, gas is a good example, but that means that when you walk into an apartment, so you've got this cloud of perfume that you're walking into and this cloud blocks your nose immediately. So you've already reduced your sensitivity as you walk in. You then smell the first three perfumes and you say, oh, yeah, lovely.

After that, everything starts to smell a bit the same. So you've got these, I would call them inherent challenges in the current way of buying perfume in a department store.

If, on the other hand, somebody sends you this box and you're at home and you smell this in your own environment, so your own smell at home, you've time to smell it because you're not rushing through the airport and you suddenly have a chance to actually smell the fragrance. The top note, the heart, the base note, so you can smell it with time and over time, even better.

The ones that you love, you can put on your skin so you can see whether it actually works with your skin, whether it adjusts to your skin, whether it feels right as you go through the day, so you can experiment with it. So these are some, you know, big advantages that using one of those boxes at home has over buying in a department store.

And it's, it's one of the challenges for us to get that across and to incentivize people to say, no, I will try something new like this. We, we always obviously give guarantees that we say, you know, if you don't like it, we take it back.

What we also do is that we say, if you buy one of these boxes and you then say, I'm going to upgrade to a full size perfume, we actually give you the money back. So the box effectively is free of charge. In that context, that all reduces, from my perspective, the barrier to trying perfume online.

Another thing that we recently launched and we find that it, it's popular on the Internet is what we call the travel size perfume.

You know, they're really popular now with the younger generation that say, I don't necessarily want a full size bottle, I'm quite happy with a smaller bottle, the price point is lower so the risk to trying online is lower. And we also discover that if for whatever reason you say, I've bought this, it's nice, but not really me.

If you go and give it to a friend, the friend is more likely to take a small perfume rather than when you give them a big bottle. Because if you give somebody a big bottle, they feel obliged. I have to give something back, so I'd rather not take it.

This is a little thing, you know, so I'm happy to take it. So even though they're called travel sizes, you find them in handbags of women, you find them in sports bags of men, you find them in the cars.

They're just a very versatile product. And they've brought down the barrier to trial of a perfume online, literally, because it's a lower price point.

So it's another thing that we've done and it's. It's working for us.

That's brilliant. Thank you. And thank you for sharing all of that. I feel like we've covered so much. It's been brilliant.

I have one final question for you, if that's okay, before we end. This is the one I ask everybody. What would your number one piece of advice be for other product creators? And you can take this wherever you like.

That's a very good question.

I think the biggest advice I have there is, I would say, and this is just my learning, most people when they create a product, they get so involved with their product, and whoever starts a business typically has a limited budget. So the limited budget is spent on their product. When they then have a finished product, they suddenly sit back and say, how I want to sell this.

And I think that's where the biggest piece of advice is. It should be the other way around. Keep your money for the time you start selling your product.

Put there your major investment into marketing and sales, rather than putting all this time, energy and money into the actual product development. Obviously, your product has to be good, but, you know, a lot of big multinationals bring products to market where they say, these are 90% perfect.

We know we can do better, but these are really good. Much better than what's out there. But it doesn't have to be 100% perfect.

So put your money or preserve a big chunk of your money for the marketing and the sales.

I would say that's my biggest piece of advice for anybody starting a product company or thinking about product development, do it the other way around.

That's really good advice. Thank you. And also, I love. No one else has said that yet, so I really like it when I hear something that's not new advice, but different.

Different advice. That's brilliant. Thank you.

Is it not something that you. That other people would have said yet?

Not yet. And that's what, that's what's really nice. We obviously have lots of themes that are, that are the same. No one has actually said that before.

And I think that's definitely something to consider because I can, I totally relate to what you're saying because I used to have a product business and I did just that. I put all my money into the manufacturing. And then when, okay, how now do I sell this with no money? I definitely did that.

And so I think, I wish someone had said that to me all those years ago.

And it's, you know, Vicki, it's something. You're quite right, I did it. So, you know, it's. I'm not claiming that I'm any wiser, but it's, it's a pattern that I see.

You know, I'm obviously interacting with a lot of other entrepreneurs in the product development field, in the ingredient area, in the fragrance area, and I'm always interested in other new products. And it's one of the common mistakes that I continuously hear.

And I think the weird part is it's one of the things where the people that I speak to, very few of them are receptive to it. They hear it, but they think, oh, no, I must get this tiny detailed product on, my product totally finalized.

And in all fairness, if you sit back and you ask your friends and family, do you even see this tiny detail? Probably none of them do. I'm again and again surprised how little people see of our products.

So if you hand them a product full of flaws, how little of that people see. Obviously we make sure that products are, you know, superb and absolutely spot on.

Because I do think having a well developed product sell sends subtle signals. You know, the detail has to be in the labeling, the boxes, the glass. We never use inferior materials and ingredients.

But sometimes you can go over the top and forget that you afterwards have to have money to still present your part, introduce your product promoted. And that takes a lot of time and energy and money.

Yeah, that's right. Thank you. I think you're right as well that I.

Something that I definitely learn is that the things that we think will be important and the things we can agonize over getting 100% absolutely right. Sometimes other people, they don't even see that or that's not what's important to them.

And I, I think if you focus on what's important to your customer, obviously making sure the standard's really high. And know that, okay, if for your point of view, Maybe it's only 80, 85%, but you can improve upon that.

As long as it's hitting the things that matter to your customer, I think that is okay. And that's a hard thing to learn because we all want everything to be perfect. But I'll show you another.

As a final touch, I'll show you another little thing. And there I have to give a compliment to my wife. This is our gift bag.

Oh, that's beautiful.

Yeah, it's lovely, isn't it?

And if you're not already, you should be watching this on YouTube as well as listening. This is on YouTube. You can see.

I, for, for a long time I thought, oh, no, we don't need this. We have a perfume. This is it. And it was my wife that said, no, no, you have to have this.

And it's, this is what people see and it's probably, it's the first thing they see. It's probably one of the least expensive items in the entire product. It's the first time they touch something.

It's the first impression and, you know, it's exactly what you describe. We get hung up about so many other things.

That here is this little detail which is a little add on that lifts the product to a completely different level. And it's, it's the gift bag. And you think, well, it might be a small element, but it's such an important element.

Because let's be honest, if I come home tonight and I say, vicki, I've bought you this. This is much more impressive than when I come home and say, vicki, I've bought you this.

You know, there's such a world of difference between the two that, you know, the recipient, whether it's, it's a gift at a birthday or it's a gift for you, or it's even, you know, just a treat for yourself. We get lovely compliments where people say, I've kept the bag and I walked around town with it and putting all, all my other shopping into it.

So, you know, it's. It does seem to have an enormous perceived value.

Well, that's brilliant. Thank you so much and thank you for everything you've shared. I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Vicky, fantastic. Thank you very much for inviting me. And as I mentioned, this was my first podcast.

So thank you for all the leeway you've given me and for the charm with which you've guided us through here today. I really enjoyed it.

I really did enjoy it and I look forward to actually seeing what you make out of it in terms of how you post it, how you put it online. I don't presume this is live now, as such. This is going to go out at a different date, isn't it?

Yeah, this will go in a different date, so don't worry. But yes, I'm really looking forward to sharing it. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for listening. Right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickiweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.