The Perfume Development Cycle

Regardless of whether you are a small company or an international giant, the perfume development cycle involves the same steps.

If developing a commercial fragrance is your goal, you'll almost certainly start by working on a CONCEPT. If you are a perfumer developing a fragrance for your own pleasure, you might start with the FRAGRANCE itself and, later, articulate your concept.

The perfume development cycle, then, can be broken down into these steps:

  • Concept
  • Fragrance
  • Bottle & Closures
  • Filling & Assembly (Manufacturing)

Overall it helps to keep in mind that the perfume development cycle simply involves developing a perfume and getting it into a bottle. It's not that complicated.

Concept

For a commercial perfume, the concept is all important. The greatest marketing success is likely to occur when the fragrance (the scent itself), the name, the packaging and the marketing are tied together in a single theme. This requires a good deal of thought and planning.

Even on a less commercial project the perfumer will generally ask himself or herself, "Why am I doing this? What scent am I trying to produce?" This gives the project a focus.

Fragrance

In a commercial project, it is common for the packaging and marketing to take priority over the fragrance itself. Sometimes this can be a mistake. If a perfume is to survive on the market for any length of time, the scent itself will play a major role in its longevity.

For the perfumer who is "experimenting" with scents, the fragrance itself is all important, even to the point where there may be a willingness to produce a really edgy scent that could only appeal to a dedicated few but will never be a mass favorite.

Graphics & Packaging

As a minimum you will want a label for your bottle. More likely you will want your bottle boxed and, perhaps, cellophaned.

For a major fragrance launch, the graphics and packaging are very important. Top packaging designers are employed. You may not have this luxury but it is worth being fussy over your graphics and packaging, even if they are being done by your best friend who is working for free.

Bottle & Closure

Today major fragrance companies develop a new bottle for each new fragrance. This is expensive and out of reach for smaller companies. Smaller companies who are developing a line of fragrances may be willing to pay the design and production costs involved in producing a custom bottle if that same bottle can be used for all of their fragrances.

More common for smaller projects would be a stock bottle with a unique look created by the graphics on the box and label. Today hundreds of stock bottles are available. Some are actually in-stock in the U.S. or elsewhere. Other can be ordered from the manufacturer and will be shipped from a foreign source. Either way, the marketer avoids the design and die costs.

Bottle, closure and overshell should be planned together to insure proper fit during assembly.

Filling & Assembly (Manufacturing)

You order or produce your fragrance, you order your bottles, you have boxes manufactured to fit your bottles. Now it's time to put it all together in a finished, ready to sell, perfume.

If you are producing a small number of bottles — up to 1,000 perhaps — you might do the assembly work yourself — filling the bottles by hand, screwing on the cap of spray, attaching the label by hand, "setting up" the individual boxes and placing your fragrance bottles inside.

If you want your box cellophaned, and if you want to use a crimp-style or press-on style pump, you must take your job to a filling house — an outside contractor — because specialized equipment will be needed.

If you are producing more than 1,000 bottles you almost certainly will use a filling house for your assembly work.

Today some filling houses are willing to take on jobs involving as few as 500 bottles of perfume. If, however, these "short runs" are not a specialty for the filler, you may find your project repeatedly kicked into last place and your deadlines missed.

In selecting and using a filling house, be sure that you have good communications with the management and be sure that your job is in the hands of a reliable employee who can give you honest progress reports.


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Stainless Steel Funnels for Kitchen,Small Metal Funnels (1.7Inch/ 2.2Inch/ 2.9Inch) No Spilling Food Grade Kitchen Funnels for Essentail Oil, Spices, Flask, Perfume

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How to create an international production formula for your homemade perfume
How to create an international production formula for your homemade perfume

Homemade perfumes generally lack commercial value, regardless of how wonderful they may be, because their creators fail to record how their perfumes were made. To profit from a perfume, to sell it, to sell the rights to it, or have somebody sell it for you, you must be able to make more of it. To make more you need the formula, the record of how the perfume was made: what materials were used and how much of each material was used. While the formula is nothing more than a recipe, a simple piece of paper, it is the key to unlocking your perfume's commercial potential. With the formula in your hand you have the ability to make a few dozen bottles more or, like the celebrities, tens of thousands of bottles. How to create an international production formula for your homemade perfume is a guide to getting you started on the right foot, correctly documenting everything you do as you are doing it, and then using these notes with some basic mathematics to write a simple, accurate, universal formula for your perfume. Writing formulas for your perfumes can change the way you think about them. With your formulas in hand your creations are no longer "here today, gone tomorrow." Now, thanks to your library of formulas, your perfumes become immortal!


Making perfume by the quart
Making Perfume By The Quart: A do-it-yourself project book

While much is written about perfume – the beautiful fragrances... the beautiful bottles – little is available on the "mechanics" of perfume production – the steps that take place on the "factory floor" where a beautiful vision is turned into a finished product, a "ready to sell" perfume. Now you can experience all of these steps, hands on, by making just one quart of your own perfume. If you follow each chapter and do what you are instructed to do, you will end up with from 8 to 64 bottles of your own perfume, depending on the capacity of the bottles you select. Along this "insiders journey," each step is profusely illustrated with professional color photographs and you'll learn — • Exactly what alcohol you'll need and where to get it • Why you'll want (just a little!) water in your perfume • What type bottles you'll need and why you cannot use others • Why you will use a spray and not a cap • How to fill and seal your bottles • How to label your bottles with the correct information so they will be legal for sale • How to select a name for your perfume that will allow you to acquire powerful trademark rights free. If you are a developer of scents you are encouraged to use one of your own for this project. If you are not a scent creator yourself you'll learn how to get a fragrance oil that is exactly right for this project. Online sources are given for all required supplies and materials. Nothing can hold you back from starting your project immediately!


Creating your own perfume with a 1700 percent markup
Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup! (3rd edition)

Perfume is famous for the markup it can achieve, even for a middle market fragrance. While "everybody knows" that perfume costs next to nothing to make (not completely true) the making of it is often considered an esoteric secret. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" details how a 3-person company with no experience created their own fragrance in response to a marketing opportunity that was too good to pass up. The book explains exactly what was done to create a fragrance for that opportunity but it is far more than a history of the author's project. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" lays out every step in the process of creating your own perfume, either as a do-it-yourself project – and without the benefit of automated equipment some compromises and workarounds are required – or full bore professional production under your supervision. Either way you will be producing a quality fragrance at a remarkably low cost. Do you have a marketing opportunity that would be wildly profitable if only you could obtain your fragrance at a ridiculously low cost? "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" is the guide you need to do it.


Creating your own perfume from dropper bottles
Creating your own perfume from dropper bottles: Methods, mechanics, and mathematics

Now when you make your own perfume you can make it fully "commercial" meaning you will be creating a product ready for regular, continuous sales to friends, relatives, and the public! If the fragrance you've made has already won praise, why not share it with others? Some might pay you for it and want it for their web stores or retail boutiques! Creating your own perfume from dropper bottles: Methods, mechanics, and mathematics guides you through steps that can turn your hobby project into a perfume business. Discover how close you are now and how little more you must do to take what you made with essential oils and dropper bottles into a business of your own! For an introduction to this book, watch this video.


How to launch your own business
How To Launch Your Own Perfume Company: A Simple Business Plan

You can build a perfume business of your own using this business plan as a guide. By following its detailed strategy you learn to identify motivated groups of potential perfume buyers. Members of these groups are near the tipping point of desire for a new perfume. You don't know these people and they don't know you but you know a marketer they trust, one who does not currently sell perfume and might never think of selling perfume were it not for your approach. Here is where you step in with a professional plan, promotion, and perfume to take advantage of this ripe opportunity for mutual profit. Before your first promotion has peaked, you will already be developing a relationship with your next marketing partner. Following this plan, you will gain more and more profit with each new marketing partnership.


naming your perfume and protecting your name
Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name

A really great name, a special name that is just right for a particular perfume or perfume marketer (or entrepreneur with money to invest!) can be worth a ton of money. But few individuals with great ideas ever manage to cash in on those brilliant ideas. Instead they wait while others "discover" their idea, acquire legal rights to it and make all the money while they are left out in the cold without a penny having been earned for what was once THEIR idea.

If you are struggling to name your perfume and are looking for a name that will have real value, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" will help you weed out low value names and point you to names that have better marketing value plus the potential to become valuable assets in themselves.

If you have a great name you want to protect but no fragrance, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" will guide you through the simple steps you must take to acquire a legal right to that name before someone else grabs it! Best of all, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" shows you how to gain strong legal protection for your name without a lawyer and without spending more than pocket change.

Never had an idea for a product name? Never thought much about perfume? "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" may stimulate your interest in a whole new game that, when played well, can make you lots of money without your having to leave the comfort of your home office.


creating a more valuable name
How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume

When you name a perfume you create a valuable asset – the name itself. To sell your perfume you want the most effective name possible. But a good name can have value beyond the edge it gives your sales. In naming your fragrance you are creating a trademark and a trademark can have value independent of the product. The value of that trademark can vary. Much depends on how well, in naming your perfume, you follow the trademark "rules." How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume first helps you develop a name that will be effective in selling your perfume. It then prods you to make use of certain techniques that can turn a good name into a great trademark, strong and valuable. If you have questions about how to protect a name, How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume will answer many such as:

  • Can you protect your name yourself or do you need a lawyer?
  • Can you register a trademark without a lawyer?
  • What does it cost to register a trademark?
  • How do I enforce the rights I have established?

How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume covers both state, federal, and international protection.


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Philip Goutell
Lightyears, Inc.