As someone who has ever wanted to start their own perfume line, you’ve probably wondered How to Start a Perfume Business, what the actual steps are, how much it will cost, how to avoid the mistakes other people have made, and a lot of other things. Starting a perfume business is a great way to show your creativity while also learning how to run a business. If you do it right, you can make a lot of money. You don’t need to know a lot about chemicals and science. You only need to want to try out different scented essential oils, know how to find wholesale sellers of the materials you need, and be willing to make contacts for selling or put in the time and effort for a sales website.
This article will show you how to start your own perfume line in a realistic, step-by-step way. It will include advice on how to find good suppliers, choose the right ingredients, find the right filling company for small initial fragrance runs, and a lot more.
Table of Contents
What does it mean to make your own line of perfume?
Putting your name on something means you are responsible for it. This means that any object made for people must be safe and do what it’s meant to do. It may come as a surprise, but the first step in making your own perfume line is not doing the scent itself. We know this all too well, so here are some detailed guide on how to start a perfume busines from home.
Start with a plan and a scent brief.
Make a plan for how to run the perfume business. Include at least a mission statement, an initial goals statement, three-, six-, and 12-month goals for the number of products offered, the number of retailers selling the products, and the amount of cash that you want to come in and out, as well as financial forecasts that include budget, income, profit, loss, and cash flow statements. Make changes to the business plan all the time by adding new real-world numbers as they come in.
When you plan, you also have to choose who you want to sell to. What does it say about who will buy your new perfume? This is about looking into market trends to find out what kind of people will like your smell and what kind of product they will want. For instance, older customers may like simple smells that last a long time and are made with natural ingredients and essential oils, while younger customers may be more interested in fragrances that are supported by celebrities.
Make up new smells
Look into perfume recipes or buy some small amounts of essential oils in scents that interest you to make your own unique mixes. Spend some time getting used to the smells. Begin mixing smells together, take notes, and through this process find a few favourite scents that you can make in large quantities. Along with that, getting friends and family together to test the smells and give you helpful feedback will also help.
Find out about your clients and your target audience.
It can be hard to figure out who your target market is. For instance, most men don’t buy their own perfumes, and when they do, they usually choose one that their partner likes. 60 to 70% of all men’s products are bought by women today, and they often wear them themselves. The people who make fragrances are working hard to find marketing strategies that will get guys to buy scent sets for all sorts of situations, like day, night, work, and play. If you choose your target market quickly, you will not have to do as much study that is not important.
Before you start any kind of advertising effort for your new perfume, you need to figure out what it is that makes it special for people. There are more marketing messages than just the simple “desirable quarry” method that Tom Reichert talks about in his book The Erotic History of Advertising. His message is only to use a smell to attract people of the opposite sex. Freedom, desire, youth, beauty, peace, and rebellion are just a few of the many things that come to mind.
It is not enough to choose a scent that works for both men and women. Age range, whether it’s a day or night smell, and the right ingredients for the new scent are all part of this equation. This means knowing how to market, which in the case of perfume means offering a lot more than just a flavour. Serge Lutens, the designer, said, “It could be a place where the imagination goes.” It smells strong, like poison and pure desire. It’s like eros in person.
Think about advertising factors
The most important part of your advertising strategy will be how well you can connect your business to a vague idea like love, femininity, or masculinity. This is the reason why a lot of perfume ads, even old ones, are sexual. How many of you remember the magazine ads for Lanvin’s “My Sin” perfume that showed a black cat with three white kittens next to her, suggesting, let’s say, a “night out on the town”?’
Use news statements, demonstrations, and a website to get the word out. Make some social media pages and give first-time users a deal. Take samples to sale markets and hand them out along with written information about the smell and what’s in it.
How to Understand and Use of Internet Power
You can get people interested in your new perfume in more ways than one. Besides making a website, you can use digital platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Find out how to make your own movies and use the big social media sites to show ads to people who like perfume. Put up ads on popular websites that people in your target group visit often.
All five of your senses must be involved in your marketing.
You need to make your new brand appealing to all five senses if you want people to want to buy it. This is done with the help of sense marketing. This strategy is useful because it gives the customer a full experience by making an emotional connection between the product and the buyer. One engaging way to get people’s attention is through sensory marketing. The worst thing that can happen when selling something is to only appeal to one sense at a time.
It’s not always possible to use the power of smell as well as people can use their sense of touch and smell. All five senses are used in sensory marketing to get people to trust and pay attention to it. This can be done with eye-catching, bright pictures and videos, catchy music in the form of a song or a phrase, and using touch and texture to your advantage by using high-quality card stock for mail-order ads or making the perfume bottle feel special when you hold it.
Giving your fragrance a unique name and bottle
Making your scent stand out from the rest is part of building your new brand. A catchy name and a unique bottle are important for selling perfume because they help people remember it and buy it. Get the business licences you need and register your new name with the right state and city offices. Smell never sells anything on its own. It wouldn’t need any special ads or fancy bottles if it did. A lot of perfumes also smell similar and/or have ingredients that are similar. The name and the bottle will help people remember your brand.
The type of smell you are making should go well with the package you choose. People who buy perfume that costs $60 an ounce expect it to come in fancy packages. Because there are so many diamonds on the crystal bottle of the world’s most expensive perfume, each bottle costs more than $200,000. For perfumes that aren’t too expensive, a pretty box and label will do.
Design for a perfume bottle
Even though taste doesn’t really matter in this case, the sense of smell is very useful for tasting. It’s great to smell coffee and cookies making because they make you want to eat them too. Nigel Groom says in The New Perfume Handbook that you try smell strips, plastic bags, and perfume pearls, which are made up of powdered your own perfume. All of these feelings stick with customers, get them interested, and make them loyal to the brand. Find out what kinds of perfume bottles, tester bottles, and sample vials distributors sell and what styles they have for each. Pick a form and size of bottle to reflect each scent, then call the wholesaler that sells those bottles. Find out how many bottles or units you need to make a minimum purchase and how much that minimum purchase costs.
You should also ask about the tester and the size of the samples. Find a price that works for all of the packages you need and place your order.
Finish your packaging.
Come up with any other packaging you want for the perfume to finish it off, like bags, boxes, or other outer wrapping. Find places that sell these things in bulk, ask how much they cost, and then place your order.
Finding a Supply Source You Can Trust
First and foremost, anyone who wants to start their own perfume line, whether they are already well-known or just starting out, needs to find a reliable source for bottles, caps and pumps. They also need to find a bottle or box for the perfume, labels or screen prints for the bottle or box and any artwork that needs to be on the label, box or bottle. This is a great list that will help you find a good fragrance seller.
Perfume is made up of a mix of base oil, alcohol, and water that contain essential oils. The character you’ve given your unique smell will help you choose the fragrance elements. It could be sexual, oriental, woodsy, fancy, or sports. You are the only one who knows the truth. The base of any scent is made up of certain essential oils, which are called notes. The high notes fade away quickly, and then the middle notes do the same. The base notes finish off the scent and stay on skin the longest. Other things, like sea salt, spicy black pepper, and earthy vetiver, are sometimes added. Here is a complete guide on how to figure out what a fragrance’s notes are.
Essential Oils for the Perfume Business
There are different rates at which essential oils evaporate, which is why a scent changes as it is worn. As you can see, experimenting is an important part of making cologne. Because it changes the smell, the order in which you mix the items is very important. If you change the order in which you mix the ingredients, write it down because you might like the new turnout better. Additional water can be added to weaken the scent if it is too strong. Adding a tablespoon of glycerin will help the smell last longer.
Start going to stores.
It will take some time to work on this part of your perfume launch. You need to find dependable dealers or sellers who can sell your goods to stores. They will charge anywhere from 20% to 50% more, which means that a 1-ounce bottle that you plan to sell for $25 will cost them $6.25 as a distributor. Then, the distributor will sell it to the store for $12.50. The store will then mark it up to $25.00 and sell it to customers.
Put together the perfume
Put the different scents that are meant to be sold into the bottles, tests, and jars. Stick the labels on the bottles, and then put them in any other outer packaging that you have.
Pick Out Your Displays for Sales
To look professional and well-organized when calling potential buyers out of the blue to make sales, look into options for a sales show display case or carry mechanism. Make a small business display for stores that agree to sell the product again.
Make a website.
Make a website, even if you don’t plan to sell anything through it. It’s just as important to have an informational and promotional site as one that’s meant to make sales. This is because the informational and promotional site helps build the perfume brand, promote the company, and make potential customers and dealers feel comfortable with the perfumes. In the beginning you might want to start non technical website builder like shopify.com
Choose a Price
After adding up all the money you spent on the steps above, including the different prices of the essential oils used to make the different smells, you can make a price list for the perfume line’s scents. Print or have properly made price lists to give to possible resellers along with promotional materials and lists of ingredients.
Choose which stores to go after.
Make a list of stores that fit the image you want the perfume to have. That is, if you want the perfume to look exotic and rare, you should go after high-end, exclusive stores that sell designer clothes, shoes, and sunglasses. Adding day spas. Get rid of places like department shops and convenience stores. You can either call the target stores ahead of time to set up meetings with the buyers for those stores, or you can just walk up to them and ask to talk to the buyer right then.
Make a deal with a mass producer
Pick a company to make a lot of the scents that you want to use in your perfume line. When you talk to these possible mass makers, find out if they also package the goods. Talk about the costs of hiring some or all of the manufacturing and packing, as well as the minimum orders and the price per minimum order. You should come up with a contract that works for the business at this point in its growth, and it should have an option to be expanded as demand and sales rise.
Sell the line of perfumes
Discover perfume, massage and day spa trade shows to show the queue at. This is how to reach the mass market and get more people to buy the perfume. Pick out a display booth, have a lot of each piece of sales material printed, sign up for a few shows, and staff the booth during the shows. Make sure you have a lot of testers and sample bottles of all the scents in the queue. Give out a lot of sample bottles, cards, and handouts and tell people they can try any perfume they want for free.
Keep all of the business cards, and one to two weeks after the show, call them and offer more free samples. As soon as the shows send orders, quickly fill them by calling the hired mass producer, making the order, and having it shipped straight to the dealer.
Get your friends to help you create buzz.
Again, you should ask your family and friends to help you promote your perfume line. Make some posts about your brand and new perfume smells that people can share. Putting pictures of your product in the posts is a good idea because people are more likely to be interested in pictures. After that, let your close friends and family know that the posts are ready to be shared.
List of Common Perfume Ingredients
| Perfume Ingredients | Description | Additional Information |
|---|---|---|
| Agrumen | A fragrance compound used as a base in perfume creation, with a characteristic green, musky odor. | Used to provide a light green aroma. |
| Aldehyde | Synthetic compounds used to add sparkle and a bubbly feeling to fragrances. | Became popular in the 1920s with the launch of Chanel No. 5. |
| Amber | A warm, powdery, sweet fragrance note combining synthetic and natural ingredients such as vanilla, patchouli, labdanum, styrax, and benzoin. | Provides sophistication and sensuality to fragrances. |
| Ambergris | Derived from sperm whales, ambergris is a fixative in perfumery with a subtle, long-lasting odor. | Develops a more pleasant aroma the longer it cures in saltwater. |
| AmberXtreme | Intensely boosts fragrance compositions with woody and ambery notes recognized and loved by consumers globally. | Described as the superpower of perfumers by Carlos Benaim. |
| Ambrette | Obtained from ambrette seeds, used as a substitute for true musk, known for its soft animalic character and warm nutty milk undertones. | Provides a natural musk sensuality. |
| Amyris | Often used as a less expensive substitute for sandalwood, sourced from a white-flowering bush or tree in Haiti and South America. | Acts as an alternative to sandalwood. |
| Benzoin | A balsamic resin from the bark of a Styrax tree, offering a milky and sweet, non-sugary scent reminiscent of vanilla with a hint of caramel. | Blends perfectly with patchouli and spices. |
| Bergamot | Extracted from the bergamot orange, it emits a fragrant, tart, sweet, uplifting, and aromatic scent blending well with other aromatics. | Popular in fragrance due to its versatility in blending. |
| Blackcurrant bud | Offers a fruity effect boosting juiciness in the top note of fragrances, reminiscent of the Kir Royal cocktail blending cassis liqueur with champagne. | Loved for its fruity enhancement. |
| Calone | A synthetic aromatic chemical adding a “sea breeze” or marine-type note with hints of watermelon, credited for starting the “Marines” fragrance subfamily. | Known for its fresh, oceanic scent. |
| Cashmeran | A synthetic aldehyde providing a unique woody, musky, and dry mineral effect resembling the feel of cashmere. | Loved for its distinctive character in fragrances. |
| Castoreum | An animalistic secretion used to impart a leathery aroma, often reproduced synthetically due to its origin from Castor beavers. | Adds depth and warmth to fragrances. |
| Citron | The oil extracted from the lemon peel, offering a zesty and juicy scent adding brightness to fragrances. | Blends harmoniously with citruses, fruits, florals, and woods. |
| Civet | Musk produced by the African civet cat, adding depth and warmth to fragrances in small quantities despite its strong natural odor. | Known for its primal and alluring appeal. |
| Clary Sage | An herb with sweet-to-bittersweet scents, offering notes of amber, hay, and tobacco, available in oil and absolute forms. | Loved for its clean and versatile character. |
| Coumarin | A perfume compound with sweet fresh hay notes along with blond tobacco and soft, creamy nut-like nuances, often derived from tonka beans. | Known for its ubiquity in fragrances. |
| Frangipani | Derived from the fragrant tropical flower, Frangipani offers a lush and sophisticated floral fragrance. | Known as “West Indian Jasmine” in perfumery. |
| Frankincense | A gum resin with a balsamic, woody sweetness and citrus, spicy fresh inflections, offering depth and opulence to fragrances. | Known for its historical significance in fragrances. |
| Galbanum | A gum resin providing sophisticated earthy and floral hyacinth tonalities with a bitterness reminiscent of gentian. | Considered super-chic in perfumery. |
| Guaiac Wood | Offers a warm, woody note with balsamic and smoky features, native to South America and possessing rosy tea leaf tones. | Known for its unique woody fragrance. |
| Hedione | An aroma compound with a delicate, elegant, radiant, and floral character, reminiscent of jasmine with citrus freshness. | Used in iconic fragrances like Eau Sauvage by Parfums Christian Dior. |
| Heliotrope | Produces a strong, sweet vanilla-like fragrance with undertones of almond, typically not obtained directly from the plant in perfumery. | Known for its sweet and fragrant nature. |
| Indole | Widely used in perfumery, offering a floral note at low concentrations but a fecal aroma at high concentrations, adding intrigue to scents. | Known for its intriguing and seductive edge in fragrances. |
| Iso E Super | A chemical aroma with smooth, woody, amber notes, adding fullness to fragrances and diffusing a velvety sensation. | Loved for its woody and diffusive aspect. |
| Jasmine | Known for its powerful green fruity facets reminiscent of honeysuckle, it has been popular throughout the decades in perfumery. | Universally recognized for its fragrance. |
| Jasmine Sambac | Adds richness and naturality to floral bouquets with its confident, sexy, and feminine scent, exuding modernity through its green facet. | Known for its richness and modern appeal. |
| Labdanum | Offers a complex aroma described as ambery, leathery, woody, animalic, honey, warm, smokey, balsamic, and fruity. | Loved for its versatility in fragrance creation. |
| Lavender | Known for its strong floral scent and relaxation properties, commonly used in aromatherapy. | Offers a calming and floral fragrance. |
| Mimosa | Emits green, floral, powdery, and honeyed scents, embellishing perfumes with its beauty. | Known for its beauty-enhancing fragrance. |
| Monoi | Made by macerating Tiare flowers in coconut oil, Monoi absorbs the floral scent of the Tiare petals. | Known for its beautiful floral fragrance. |
| Muguet | Offers green, rosy, and slightly musky scents, growing wild in the undergrowth with a sublime power. | Known for its elusive scent that can’t be captured naturally. |
| Musk | An aromatic base note derived from natural and synthetic sources, providing alluring, smooth, and powdery fragrance. | Often lingers on the skin after other notes disappear. |
| Myrrh | Provides long-lastingness and elegance with its addictive woody, licorice-like, and resinous fragrance. | Known for its elegance in perfume compositions. |
| Narcissus | Offers a musky scent with hay-like vegetal notes, adding a musky sensuality to perfumes. | Known for its musky and sensual fragrance. |
| Neroli | Distilled from orange blossoms, Neroli offers transportive beach moments with its fragrance. | Known for its transportive beach-like scent. |
| Oakmoss | Initially heavy, Oakmoss becomes refined and earthy, reminiscent of bark, seashore, and foliage when dried. | Undergoing a renaissance moment in modern chypre fragrances. |
| Opopanax | Produces a scent similar to balsam or lavender, grown in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. | Known for its balsamic and lavender-like fragrance. |
| Orris | Offers powdery facets reminiscent of rice powder, with leathery and woody accents, bringing unique nobility to perfumery. | Known for its nobility and versatility. |
| Osmanthus | Known for its fruity and animalic facets with honey and apricot notes, adding a velvety touch to compositions. | Known for its fruity and velvety fragrance. |
| Oud (Oudh) | Revered in various cultures, natural oud oil has references to dry woods, ambery resins, and leather, used sparingly due to its high cost. | Known for its complexity and high price. |
| Ozone | Mimics the smell of fresh air after a thunderstorm, commonly used to provide a large trail in fragrances. | Known for its post-storm freshness. |
| Patchouli | A magical ingredient that can transform scents into chypres, fougères, or ambers, offering a musty-sweet and spicy aroma. | Known for its transformative nature in fragrances. |
| Rose | Universally recognizable, rose has a unique signature that brings uniqueness and endless reinterpretations into fragrances. | Known for its signature scent. |
| Rose de Mai | A rich, warm, and voluptuous rose odor, used in classical and modern fragrances, but quantity available is limited. | Known for its strong effect despite a small amount. |
| Saffron | Emits warm, spicy, and slightly sweet notes, pairing well with floral scents, but is one of the most expensive spices globally. | Known for its rarity and expensive nature. |
| Sandalwood | Offers a creamy, milky, and buttery scent with sun-kissed skin tonalities, derived from the Indian sandal tree. | Known for its creamy and sensuous fragrance. |
| Tonka Bean | Provides vanilla-like aromas with strong hints of cinnamon, cloves, and almonds, serving as a less-expensive alternative to vanilla. | Known for its sweet and aromatic nature. |
| Tuberose | Highly perfumed white flowers with a strong, sweet fragrance resembling lilies, creating an atmosphere with its perfumed presence. | Known for its strong fragrance. |
| Vanilla | Derived from orchid seed pods, offers creamy sweetness with synthetic vanillin sources allowing its addition to various fragrances. | Known for its broad application and creamy sweetness. |
| Vetiver | A grass with earthy, woody, leather, and smoky undertones, adding character and complexity to fragrances. | Known for its earthy and vibrant scent. |
| Ylang Ylang | Offers fruity top notes and elegant floral softness, providing sensuality to both feminine and masculine fragrances. | Known for its fruity and sensual fragrance. |