Why Luxury Brands Are Dropping Whole Lines of Fragrances All at Once
The days of a single new fragrance release might be on their way out. Recently, luxury houses have opted to make a bigger splash by introducing entire new collections (five or more scents) all at once—embracing a strategy that threads a needle through olfactory experiences.
“The trend toward larger collections often stems from a desire to offer clients a more comprehensive exploration of themes, concepts, or olfactive families,” says Jessie Dawes, chief marketing officer for the Americas at Diptyque, which introduced five bottles through its Les Essences de Diptyque line in September. That line follows hot on the heels of Balmain’s fragrance launch—eight scents in the Les Eternels de Balmain line—and Fendi, which dropped seven bottles earlier this summer. Coty, which debuted its Infiniment Coty Paris line in Europe this spring (a collection with a whopping 14 scents), also brought the bottles stateside this month. And if you think that sounds like a lot of fragrance, its co-founder says there could have been even more.
More from Robb Report
Robb Recommends: This Hardworking Face Scrub Clears Your Pores for a Clean, Smooth Shave
Robb Recommends: This Pore-Refining Face Cream Is an Instagram Filter in a Jar
Robb Recommends: The Nourishing Serum That Helps Your Face Transition From Summer to Fall
“There were 30,” Coty CEO Sue Nabi tells Robb Report of the eaux de parfum she developed with her creative collaborator Nicolas Vu for the new line. “But the Coty machine that said we needed to focus on 14. So, we said, OK, let’s make an effort to select the 14 that we are the most proud of.”
But whether it’s an established fashion house or a fragrance specialist, the more-is-more strategy is designed to make a big tent even bigger. “This approach allows for a broader thematic exploration, offering clients a range of options to express different facets of their personalities or moods,” Dawes adds. Here’s how each of the recent releases approached this challenge.
Les Éternels de Balmain
“For the launch of Les Éternels, we wanted to celebrate the legacy and inclusive spirit of the iconic house of Balmain,” says Nathalie Berger Duquene, an executive at Balmain Beauty. “We created eight fragrances to represent eight different personalities and celebrate diversity; we couldn’t stop at one.”
For Rousteing’s team, a big consideration in curating the line was developing a wide olfactive spectrum to choose from: florals, musk, woods, and amber all make appearances, as well as unexpected salty elements and fresh vert de mandarine. It helps that Balmain once offered fragrances that had been discontinued. The houses’s creative director Olivier Rousteing revived and reinvented four of these scents for today, including Carbone (a standout from the line, with musky, rose notes accented by suede and sandalwood), as well as Vent Vert, Ivoire, and Ébène.
“Drawing from Balmain’s heritage to modernize these legendary perfumes has been one of the most stimulating challenges,” Duquene added. Take, for example, Ébène, created in 1983 and inspired by Monsieur Pierre Balmain’s passion for Africa: under Olivier Rousteing’s direction, it has been reimagined as an ode to his rediscovered personal origins, symbolizing a quest for identity.” It blends myrrh, an increasingly popular ingredient, with tobacco, incense, geranium, and cedar to evoke the roots of the ebony tree it’s named for.
Four new fragrances complete the collection: Sel d’Ambre, Rouge, Bronze, and Bleu Infini. Each takes its inspiration from the brand’s history: Bleu Infini, with notes of salty lichen from the ocean and woody, aromatic notes, is an olfactory tribute to Villa Balmain, Pierre Balmain’s escape on the Italian island of Elba.“Similarly, Bronze, inspired by Olivier’s personal story, symbolizes rebirth, like the phoenix majestically rising from the ashes after the fire,” says Duquene. The $300 eaux de parfum will soon be available at the first free-standing Balmain Beauty store in Paris’s Le Marais in Paris—but you can also order them online now.
Les Essences de Diptyque
From Le Marais to 34 Boulevard Saint-Germain, another French luxury house to launch a full fragrance collection this summer is Diptyque. Its five new scents were inspired by the brand’s “longstanding admiration for the beauty and mystery of nature,” Dawes says.
Uniquely, while many nature-inspired fragrance collections tend to call upon richly scented botanicals or resins, Diptyque sought to emulate elements of nature that are devoid of an inherent scent: coral, mother-of-pearl, bark, water lily, and desert rose.
“To capture these elements, we collaborated with some of the most talented perfumers in the industry—Fabrice Pellegrin, Alexandra Carlin, Nathalie Cetto, and the late Olivier Pescheux,” Dawes adds. “Each was given the freedom to interpret their assigned natural treasure through scent, focusing on the emotions and sensations these elements inspire.”
In addition to the liquid itself, Les Essences de Diptyque is drawing attention for its elegant new eco-friendly bottle presentation, inspired by their brand heritage and modeled after the bottle design for Diptyque’s first-ever fragrance, L’eau, released in 1968. Each new bottle features line drawings by artist Nigel Peake, as well as watercolors by Peake on the outer packaging. Finally, the scents are formulated with a higher fragrance concentration of 22 percent, in contrast with the 15 percent featured in Diptyque’s core collection.
“By distinguishing this collection, we honor nature’s rare and exquisite elements in a manner that stands apart from our existing core line.”
Infiniment Coty Paris
Francois Coty is widely considered the grandfather of modern fragrances. After all, he was the first perfumer to commercialize scents made with both natural ingredients and synthetic components—a practice contemporary noses still follow today. That innovation puts a focus on scientific research at the heart of what his company still does today.
So when Coty’s current CEO, Sue Nabi, and her creative collaborator Nicolas Vu, thought about what a new line of fragrances would look like, they focused on putting innovation at the forefront. “When we visited the Geneva laboratories of Coty, they told us, we own a technology that we can put into your creations,” she says. “This is going to act like a prism that’s going to diffract the light, you know, transform a ray of light into a rainbow.”
That technology, which Coty has named Molecular Aura, is used in every bottle of Infiniment Coty Paris, and enhances each scent’s staying power. Coty claims that the chemical component will help its fragrances last for up to 30 hours—much longer than the six or eight that even the most concentrated formulas can claim.
The scents are as inventive as the science that powers them. The range of 14 is divided into early morning, day, and evening fragrances, and ranges between the direct (Aristo Chypre, a modern answer to 1917’s green and herbaceous Chypre by Coty), to the conceptual (Un Parc des Roses en Alabama, a rosy, leathery ode to Rosa Parks’s central role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The other standouts include Entre Genres, a citrusy cloud of musks, and Noir Encens, with notes of black incense and black pepper that seem well-suited for fall and winter.
Coty is a big business—it makes fragrances for every brand from Burberry and Tiffany to Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein—so to invest in such a niche line might strike some as being at cross purposes with its mission. But Nabi is convinced that she’ll find an audience for even the most abstract of the new scents.
“We believe that today the main rule of commercial success is more and more authenticity, more and more quality, and more and more surprise and distinctiveness,” she says. “Being surprising, being distinct, being true to who you are, is probably a recipe for the future.”
Fendi
On the subject of a brand’s core, a newly released fragrance line by Fendi finds inspiration in key members of the Fendi family. The highly intimate, refillable new scents were unveiled earlier this summer—part of the Italian fashion house’s upcoming centennial celebration—and are the first of the brand’s fragrances.
Original matriarch, Adele Casagrande Fendi, is channeled through Casa Grande—a warm scent with rich notes of leather and fur. The childhood of current Artistic Director, Kim Jones, sees an olfactory nod in the form of Prima Terra, with notes of tangerine and oakmoss evoking his early years spent in Africa. Gourmand lovers, though, will want to follow their nose after a waft of La Baguette, named after the iconic Fendi bag with notes of sun dried Madagascar vanilla, suede and iris. The collection features seven fragrances in all.
Some may say that releasing such a menagerie can cause each individual fragrance to be lost in the shuffle, but an increasing number of houses seem to realize the potential within such a strategy—one in which consumers are given the keys to explore different facets of the brand’s identity. These expansive collections use fragrance as a medium for storytelling, adding a new level of sensory depth to an already well-established name.
Best of Robb Report
Sign up for RobbReports's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
