Starting A Perfume Business

Welcome to the Perfume Making Podcast with me Karen Gilbert and in today's episode I'm going to talk about something a little bit different and that is perfume business. So the perfume industry offers tremendous potential for success and profitability with the availability of online platforms now like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Shopify. It's easier now than ever to launch a small brand on a budget. However before diving into creating your products it's essential to plan and market your perfume brand effectively. Now launching a perfume brand can be an exciting entrepreneurial journey but it does require careful planning and execution. Before you start it's important to consider the following questions who's your target market, what's your unique selling proposition, how are you going to stand out in a crowded market. By defining your brand and understanding your target audience you can tailor your products and marketing efforts accordingly. To create a successful perfume brand you really need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and this includes setting specific goals and objectives for your brand such as revenue targets, market share, customer satisfaction and by defining your goals you can create a roadmap for your brand success and measure your progress along the way. So today I'm going to talk about some of the common questions I get asked about launching a perfume brand and I'm going to give you my tips and a little roadmap to take you through your launch. So the most common questions I get asked about launching a perfume brand are how do you take something from an idea and turn it into a business? I've got loads of creative ideas for perfumes but how do I know that the product is right and people will like it? How do I build up a following and how do you turn your followers into customers who want to buy your products? Should I hire someone to do that for me or should I do it myself? What about blogging and social media? Like what should I say? What should I write? Should I wait until everything is completely ready to go before I start marketing? My product isn't ready yet so do I need to even think about marketing at this stage? Where do I start? And people often think that you need to pitch to a retailer, you need to spend loads of money on advertising, they think that maybe you need influencers to promote you, maybe you need to hire a PR agency. Now all of this is fine if you are a huge brand with lots of money to burn or you've got funding or you've got backing but PR, magazine PR, advertising doesn't guarantee sales and as a small startup who hasn't sold anything yet you really need to validate your product idea first before you spend loads of money on ads or inventory and you definitely don't want to pitch to a retailer with a product that you haven't even that there's a demand for yet. Being in a retail environment is really risky if you haven't even figured out your systems and your supply chain. So many companies have gone bust by going into retail too early. I see so many people creating great products and then floundering because they can't find customers or they don't know how to get their products out into the world. Now I've worked in product development and I've worked in retail and I've run my own successful businesses and I've been in marketing for the last 20 years and I've made a lot of expensive mistakes too and people often say but my product isn't ready yet can't I just wait until I've got all of my products done or I've got all of my ducks in a row before I start marketing. Now if you're going to have a successful launch and a profitable business it needs to be planned before you even start creating your products. Trust me on that. If you understand the basics of marketing you will never have to worry about finding customers for your products. They will be queuing up for your launch. So I'm going to give you a few tips today to walk you through the process that I suggest to all of my students who are looking at launching creating and launching a perfume brand and actually it doesn't matter whether it's a perfume brand whether it's a skincare product brand whether it's candles or any other product for that matter I would still walk people through this exact same process. So first off and this is probably the most important thing that I can share with you is to get really clear on what you want for your life and your business. How you want your life to look how you want your business to look. Now this is often overlooked and if you get it wrong it can cause you absolute misery disillusionment and exhaustion. Really before launching any brand it is so crucial to get clear on your own goals and your vision. Now I know this because I did this with one of my businesses. So I started a business many many years ago that I don't have anymore but I did have that business for 18 years. This is really important like even if you take one thing out of this podcast episode take this. So I ended up creating a business and being in that business for 18 years and it wasn't something that I truly loved. Don't get me wrong it was a great business it was something that provided a lot of value for a lot of people and the customers loved it but it actually made my life a misery because it wasn't in alignment with who I was or who I am even at the time. It wasn't something that was in alignment for how I wanted my day-to-day life to be. Now it was a retail business and I am very introverted. I am the sort of person that wants to work from home. I love talking to people. I love teaching and educating people but what I didn't love was having to rock up and open the doors to the world in a retail environment 24-7 almost seven days a week. It burnt me out. It restricted me. I couldn't go away when I wanted to. I couldn't shut myself away when I needed downtime and that's an extreme example but everybody has their own variation of that and so the exercise that I want you to do at the end of this podcast episode if you are thinking of starting a business of any type whatsoever is what do you want your life to look like? What do you want your business to look like? Get a piece of paper, write it down, take as long as you want on that and journal it. What do you really want it to look like and create your business from that place because trust me you can have as many you can have like hundreds of ideas like I've got ideas you know that I come up with every single day and I write all of those ideas in a book but I don't necessarily need to act on it all of those ideas. I pick and choose the ones that fit for how I want to live my life and what is in alignment for me at any particular time because the business that I created back then was something that was an idea. It was like oh my god it was a great idea let's do this and I had the I think it was like the year that I launched that business I had the idea in July and by October the doors were open or actually December the doors were open and I did it really quickly without really thinking about it and I sort of created this like beast if you like that took on a life of its own and you know three or four years down the line I realized that it was making me so unhappy and it took me because I'd built my whole life around that particular business and I had invested loads of money in it and you know all sorts I actually couldn't extricate myself from that business very easily at all. And so you know it all worked out fine in the end but I could have created something that was way way more in alignment early on and so I don't want you to make that mistake. So really think about what it is you want and what you want your day to look like and create the business from that place. Okay sermon over. Also you want to create a picture of who you are also creating your products for. Now this is sometimes called your target market. I don't really like the term target market because it's a bit like you know you're shooting an arrow at someone to kind of lure them in. I prefer to call it your dream customer. Now most people know that they should do this but a huge percentage don't do it because it feels too hard and they don't know where to start. Often the ideal customer avatar is like way too broad and not clear enough and the products don't match up. with what the audience wants to buy. So I would suggest that, yes, you get a clear idea of what you want for your life and your business. And you also get a clear picture down on paper of who you are actually creating your products for. So define your target market or your dream customer and tailor your products and your marketing efforts accordingly. So who are the people that you want to reach with your perfumes or your products? What are their preferences? What is their lifestyle? What does their lifestyle look like? What are their values? Understanding who your target customer is, understanding who your dream customer is, is going to really help you to create products that meet their needs and desires. And actually, you know, if you're talking about a perfume as opposed to a skincare product, I think sometimes it's easier. If you're creating, say, a skincare product, you can understand, you know, okay, what are their, what is the problem that you're solving? And in perfume creation and with perfume brands, it's a little bit more amorphous. You know, you're not specifically fixing a problem as you would with a skincare product. So you've got to like broaden it out a little bit. So look at lifestyle, look at, you know, where do they hang out online? What other brands do they buy? You know, what are their favorite websites? What do they read? What podcasts do they listen to? What TV shows do they watch? So all of these things are really going to help you build up a clear picture of who your dream customer is. Okay. So once we've done that bit, what I want you to do is start to think about creating your brand manifesto or your brand story. Now, we talked about this in a previous episode, of, you know, creating a sense story, but widen this out and start thinking about creating your actual brand story or a manifesto. So a brand story or a manifesto is going to help you engage with your audience on a much deeper level. So develop a brand manifesto or story that really reflects your brand's values and mission. And this is going to really help you to connect with your audience on a much deeper level. So what I want you to do is start to think about creating a sense story. So for example, if your brand is focused on sustainability and natural ingredients, your manifesto could emphasize your commitment to the environment and use of eco-friendly practices. What is the moral of your story as well? What is your big why? So think about the, you've got to think about your dream customer, but you've also got to think about you and your brand story and your, what I would suggest is your big why for creating your product or brand. What is, what has been the thing that has been really, really fundamental for you in deciding to create this venture, this business? What is the reason that you do this? You know, why did you decide to do this in the first place? And this is going to be the story that you will be sharing on blog posts. You'll be sharing it on social media. You're going to be sharing it on your website. And when you get further down the line, you're going to be sharing this when you're interviewed, when you go on podcasts, it's going to be something that you share at every single opportunity with every single person that you speak to. It isn't enough nowadays to put a product description and a price on your online shop and hope people will find it and visit and buy. You need to start doing this bit and publishing your content before your product is even ready or you're going to be launching to nobody. And so this is something that I know people really get bogged down in and people really get stuck. And we're all very tempted to dive into our materials and have our fragrance ideas and even create our scent story. But it's not enough to just do that and hope that a customer will find you and buy your products. There's a lot of noise out there. There is a lot of competition. And I don't say that to put you off because I'm really a champion of everybody launching a perfume line if they want to. Creating a fragrance. I believe everybody has got at least one fragrance in them. And actually, on that note, I'll talk about that in a little bit more depth in a moment. But you only need one fragrance to start with. You need a really strong story for your fragrance and but also mainly for your brand as well. And digging into that before you even think about creating your products is going to really, really help you get clear and help to draw in your ideal dream customer. And there's another way around you can do this, actually, which I just want to dig into a little bit here is that if you are thinking, I don't know who my target audience is. I don't know who my dream customer is. But what I do know is why I want to do this. I know my big why. I know what my brand manifesto is. I know what my brand story is going to be. So if that is the case, what you can do is is put all of your focus into that and put that out in the world. Start talking about that to people. Start sharing that, you know, create a blog, create a social media presence, whether that is on Instagram or whether it's on TikTok, whatever resonates with you and start talking about that first. And what you will then find is that you will attract the people who are attracted to your brand story. So you don't always have to have your, you know, your target customer nailed. And especially if you are creating a fragrance brand that is, you know, fragrance for the sake of fragrance, as opposed to a skin care brand that is solving a problem, it is really, really much easier to do that than trying to figure out who your target audience or your target customer is. It's definitely something that you should do both. Don't do one or the other. Make sure that you do the work on creating at least a sketch, at least an idea of who your target audience will be, but really dig into your why, your brand manifesto and your brand story. And that will help to attract that person to you. Now, of course, you're always going to find that you might create this particular customer avatar and you start talking about different types of people that you didn't expect. That's completely normal and you don't need to worry about that. But what you really want to be doing is getting your manifesto, your brand story nailed and talking to one person. And if you try to talk to everybody, if you try to communicate or sell to everyone, you end up communicating and speaking to no one. So don't be afraid of being too narrow at this stage because this, remember, is just the start. You are not going to have your products created, manufactured and then start with this work. You're going to start this work first. And so actually you've got nothing to lose if you don't nail it the first time around. Okay. So then you want to make sure that your products are priced properly. So this is, we're moving on a little bit to the logistics here now, but you want to make sure that you price your products properly and you keep your costs under control. This is really, really important. Right. At the very beginning of your business, because you might be on a budget, you're not going to have a huge amount of money to spare because you haven't sold anything yet. So anything you put in at the beginning, you need to really be very careful about spending it in the right places and making sure that you price your products correctly. I see a lot of people underpricing their products and, you know, obviously, there's going to be a bit of mindset that comes into this as well. And you might look at fragrance brands out there and say, well, you know, like they're charging like £300 or $150 or, you know, $500 for a particular product. And that's overpriced. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to sell everything for 50 bucks, or I'm going to just price everything at £95 and keep it under the £100 price mark. Just keep in mind that you really properly need to cost your production. And this is something that you'll come on to over time, but don't shoot yourself in the foot right from the get-go. It's a lot easier to give people a discount, or it's a lot easier to launch with a special price if you've already pre-framed your price at the start. So for example, if you set your price, and this is something that I do with my programmes as well. So if I'm launching a new course, I might say, okay, well, the programme is going to cost this much. But actually, because it's a brand new one, and I haven't tested it out yet, we're literally just launching it. I'm going to launch it for this particular time frame at this price. And then after that time frame, the price is going to go up. If you pre-frame your pricing with your audience from the start, it's a lot easier because people are expecting it to go up. So it also gives people an incentive to buy in at the launch price. So make sure that you've got your costings done and you know exactly how much your materials are going to cost, but you also factor in costs that might come in further down the line. So you might be doing everything yourself right now, but think about, okay, if I wasn't doing everything myself and I had to hire a member of staff, what would that cost me? So there's lots of things that you need to keep in the back of your mind, but also don't think about spending that out right from the get-go. Have that in the back of your mind and have it all costed out, but don't feel like you have to do all of that for launch. So many people overspend right on branding. They overspend on packaging. They do big fancy websites and spend thousands without even doing a pilot launch. Now, as much as you want your product and your image to be perfect from the start, unless you've got a huge budget, this is really, really risky. What I would suggest that you do is test the market first with a limited run of products. So a simple one-page website and first iteration of the packaging and the branding, because people, you know, we all do it. We look at someone who has launched, you know, we think, oh yeah, just launched a brand and it's got this amazing website. It's got this amazing packaging and we want ours to be like that from the start as well. But what we haven't seen is the first, the second, the third iteration that they launched to a very small group before that big all singing or dancing website. And, you know, they popped up in Selfridges. You know, we are judging ourselves often in our year one and sitting ourselves, comparing ourselves to somebody else's year five or 10. So I would suggest to everyone that you do a pilot launch first and you launch that to a very, very small group of people and you test it and you don't get your packaging, you know, the most expensive and the most snazzy it can be. You don't spend a lot of money on it. You don't spend a lot of money on advertising and websites. You do it really, really small pilot launch first, first iteration of packaging and branding and see what the response is. So the other thing that I would suggest and people, you might think, well, how do I do that? You know, how, how do I do a soft launch? How do I do a pilot launch? You start gathering emails before you launch by creating a wait list. Now, this is not a guarantee of sales, but it is going to give you an idea of whether people are even interested in your product and you can start to build up excitement and anticipation in the run up to your launch. Now you can start doing this before you even have your product finished, before you have your product ready. You would start to create a social media following and do all of that bit before you actually even put anything into production. Building anticipation before launching your perfume brand is going to create a lot of excitement and anticipation. So if you're doing this, you're going to start to create excitement and generate buzz. So one of the most effective strategies that I know for any launch of any type is to build an email list of potential customers and engage with them through things like newsletters and exclusive updates. And social media is great, but unless you've got that person's email on your list, they're not really your audience. They're not really someone that you can guarantee that you're communicating with. You can also run a pre-sale launch with special offers exclusively for those people on your email list. And so throughout the process, you can continuously improve and adjust based on the feedback that you get from your audience. So to build anticipation for your perfume brand, start by creating a buzz around your upcoming launch. This is where you can start to use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, to give your audience a sense of sneak peeks of your products, behind the scenes footage of your manufacturing process, and teasers about what they can expect from your brand. Now, obviously, this part is a bit further down the line. What you want to do is start to create your social media presence way before your launch. You don't want to think about this two or three weeks before or even a couple of months before. This is something that you want to start building. As soon as you've had the idea for your perfume brand, you start with your social media presence and you start creating that engagement with bloggers. Maybe you start creating that engagement with people by creating content. And then as we move closer and closer to your launch, you want to be creating the buzz around that launch by utilizing the audience that you've built up on those platforms, giving them sneak peeks. You can also do this as you're learning, as you're growing. And don't underestimate people's curiosity. There is a reason why reality TV is a big phenomenon. You know, people are nosy. People want to see what's going on in other people's lives. And so you can incorporate all of this in your business building process and utilize it in your launch as well. And it's really important to continuously engage with your audience throughout all of this process and encourage them to provide feedback on your products, your packaging, your marketing materials, this is going to help you not only improve your brand, but it will also create a sense of ownership and loyalty amongst your customers too. So just a little bit of a caveat here, just because a customer, or just actually, let me just scratch that, you know, just because someone on social media says, oh, I think you should do this, or I don't like that. Just sense check it with yourself and always go back to your story. Always go back to your brand manifesto, go back to your sense check. And if somebody says you should do something, it doesn't mean that you should change your entire strategy just because someone on Facebook or just because somebody on Instagram has given you feedback. So that's just an important distinction to have. Use it as a tool to engage, use it as a tool to get feedback, but don't always, you know, don't be a slave to it is what I'm saying. Okay. What else do you need to keep in mind? So get your legals and logistics in place as well and test everything. So before you launch, and this is one of the reasons why I suggest you doing a very, very small pilot launch to start with. You need to make sure that you have everything in place. You've got all of your legal requirements. Does your country, in the country that you live in, do you need a license to sell cosmetic products? Do you need to have your business set up correctly? And you don't always, not every country you need to have create a big business entity. You could sometimes do it in the UK. You don't need to be a, a limited company to sell perfume. You can be a sole trader. You can sell as an individual, but you do need to have your product safety tested. You need to comply with regulations. You need to have your labeling correct. You need to have, if you have a website, you need to have all of your GDPR pieces in place. You need to have, you know, your cookie policy, your privacy policy. So this is going to vary from country to country. But what I would suggest that you do is you need to have your product safety tested. You need to have your is you create a, your pilot launch with a small group of people. You test everything first before you launch to a wider audience. And you want to make sure that your products are tested. And you can do that with a small pilot group. You can get a, like a little focus group together and they know that they're, these products are not finished. They know that they are just pilot launch. They're not, maybe they haven't gone through the complete safety testing yet. And, you want to make sure that you test your website, make sure your marketing complies with your country's regulations. Make sure that you're not making any claims that are illegal in wherever it is that you live. It's not going to be so much of an issue with perfume, but if you're creating skincare products, you want to make sure that you're not create, you're not making any claims that could get you in trouble down the line. You also need to make sure that your manufacturing, your ordering and your shipping process, works smoothly so that you don't run into massive issues if you open the doors to lots of customers. So again, another reason why you need to do a soft launch, a pilot launch to a very small group to make sure you test all of these things out before you launch to a wider audience. And there, can you imagine if you got a huge advertising campaign in a magazine, or you worked with a big influencer and you hadn't tested any of this and you got huge numbers of orders in? I've heard of businesses going bust because they have not tested all of these things. They haven't anticipated the amount of orders that they might get either over or under. So you might think, well, I think I'm going to get a thousand orders and you might get two. Then what? On the other, on the flip side, you might think, well, I'm only going to get a hundred orders and you, maybe you get a thousand. Maybe you haven't anticipated for that. Maybe you can't fulfill all of the orders that actually end up coming in. So all of these things, need testing and need planning out so that that you do not open the doors and then run into all of these issues with a live website and potentially hundreds of customers. So create your launch campaign. So create that launch campaign and plan it out ahead of time to build excitement. Run a pre-sale launch with special offers to those who've joined your waitlist. So what I would suggest you do rather than doing your big full blown website, put one page up with a waitlist. You market to that waitlist. You build that waitlist as big as you can. And then you sell behind closed doors to that waitlist first. So you're not blasting your launch out on social media. You are selling those a small number of products to that waitlist. And this gives you the opportunity to get some revenue in. It gives you the opportunity to iron out any glitches. And it also makes those people on your email list feel like VIPs. They are your people who are going to be the most engaged. They're going to be the people who are going to be potentially your ambassadors, the people who are going to give you reviews for your product. So what you could do is create this little pre-launch to your email list and make them really feel special. You know, give them the first batch of product that you create and ask them to in return to give you a review. So it will almost feel like a little VIP club. So you can also as a part of your launch campaign, do outreach to bloggers, to people in the fragrance industry and get them to review your product as well. So when you are actually launching, you've already got a bunch of reviews. So I hope that has been helpful. I covered a lot in this episode. And if you want help with this process, if you want me to guide you through these steps, I do have a program called the Perfume Business Launch Plan. I will link it in the show notes. But what I would suggest that you start with above all else is really start to think about one, what you want your life and business to look like, who your dream customer is, what your big why for doing this is, and use that to create your brand manifesto. And then start to create a social media presence. And once you have started to build up some content, create content on social media, maybe it's little one minute reels, maybe it's TikToks. It doesn't have to be about your brand. It doesn't have to be about anything particularly just to get a following. It has to be maybe about your, you know, your big why, maybe things that inspire you. You could share images of things that inspire you, anything to get some engagement, get a following up, and then put your one page website up, start your mailing list and start collecting names, start building that buzz, building that anticipation. And then behind the scenes, you're going to be developing your product. You're going to be developing your fragrances, making sure that they are all priced correctly. They are all fully tested. And so that when you actually do do your big launch and open your doors, you know that it's going to be a success from the get go. So as always, thank you so much for listening and I will see you all next time. you