Does high-end perfume necessarily mean high prices? The proportion of the cost of a fragrance spent on marketing and advertising may exceed many people’s imagination.
It is really interesting to know whether consumers are buying pure fragrance or celebrity marketing and product packaging.
Géraldine Archambault, who has more than 30 years of experience in the fragrance industry in France, attempted to break the stereotype that high-end perfume means high prices.
In 2018, she founded the brand “Essential Parfums” in Paris and teamed up with the industry’s top perfumers to reveal the truth with practical actions.
It has always been an unspoken open secret among people in the cosmetics industry that a product spends a very high proportion of its costs on commercial marketing, channel management and other expenses.
“Essential Parfums” subverts the inertial thinking of the perfume industry that generally attaches importance to atmosphere narrative and exquisite packaging.
From the perfume itself, packaging design, marketing and sales methods, all unnecessary excessive decorations are eliminated, so that high-end perfumes are no longer expensive due to complicated business frameworks, but enter everyone’s daily life with a purer attitude.
Essential Parfums’ philosophy is just like its brand name, which takes “essence” as its core and believes that the most important thing about perfume is the perfume itself.
It not only gives each perfumer a completely independent creative space, but also emphasizes the artistry and purity of the perfume works, uses top-grade perfume materials and increases the proportion of natural raw materials, and strives to create a sustainable and transparent perfume production model.
In the traditional perfume industry, the names of perfumers are often hidden behind brands, celebrities or marketing stories.
Essential Parfums is committed to bringing these perfume artists back into the spotlight and personally signing each Essential Parfums perfume bottle, becoming one of the few brands in the perfume market that regards creators as the core.
As a result, it has attracted the most prestigious perfumers in the industry to join the journey, including Calice Becker, Sophie Labbé, Quentin Bisch, Fabrice Pellegrin and other well-known giants, all of whom have poured their personal style and ideas into their works.
Each of Essential Parfums’s eau de parfums uses more than 86% natural ingredients, using ethically sourced, upcycled and other sources of fragrance materials, combined with beetroot fermented plant alcohol, making each bottle of perfume closer to nature.
The use of natural ingredients also means increased costs and adds to the challenge of creating fragrances during the perfume making process.
In addition, Essential Parfums implements the spirit of sustainability in the fragrance process.
The outer box packaging is made of FSC-certified paper, and the corrugated board cut from the bottle is stacked as a protective packaging material to avoid the use of raw materials such as cellophane and plastic; the perfume bottle is made of 25% recycled glass and is designed to be refillable, showing the concept of environmental protection in every link.