I just thought I would share some quotes from a book that I read a little while ago - I believe that the scentiments expressed could equally apply to needlework designers.
The Perfect Scent – by Chandler Burr
Page 116
Jean-Claude Ellena – Legendary perfumer working for Hermès
“It’s very important to understand that the price of perfumes is not the price of their materials. You pay for the creativity.” He lifted his shoulders, made a rather Greek gesture: he meant himself, the guy right in front of you. “You don’t pay for a painting the value of the paint the guy’s thrown on the canvas. You pay the years of experience. Tu me paies, quoi!” You pay me! “That has value as well, a value that I put into the perfume. This Marxist idea that the price of a thing is the price of its materials is false.”
Page 158 – 160
Dubrule and Gautier were, naturally, conscious of all the variables. They were also facing a growth rate in perfume sales of about 3 percent a year, which was anaemic. It meant (everyone knew this) that any growth would come from pillaging the competition. It was brutal, and getting more brutal to a great degree because the industry had shifted to a new, aggressive, policy of developing fragrances that would appeal to the maximum number of people, which meant fragrances offering no resistance – sweet, coy things that didn’t just sleep with you on the first date but in the first ten seconds. The problem was that these scents were like Roman candles, a swift, awesome rise in sales (boosted by all your marketing expenditures), fifteen minutes of fame, and a swift crash as the next one got shoved onto the market. You generated large volume from “global appeal” and sudden death because each of them smelled exactly like the other. Why shouldn’t the client jump from launch to launch? Banality.
The second problem from Dubrule and Gautier’s perspective was they were – oh yes – in the luxury business. That meant exclusivity. But the industry guru Yves de Chiris had been observing that everyone was acting like mass marketers. The fragrance problem was that the client couldn’t “reference” the truly original perfume, and what consumers couldn’t reference worried them, and what worried them was not commercial. Consumers claimed they like original fragrances, but they got out their credit cards for the familiar.
“When I arrived at Hermes,” Gautier told me, “we were going in all sorts of directions and were not as strong and coherent as we could be. So I took us in a direction completely different from the rest of perfumery and the rest of marketing.” Gautier was given to repeating, with the conviction of a mantra, that the error the luxury houses made was to do marketing for grande consommation which essentially consisted of analysing a demand and then creating a product that, one hoped, anticipated it. She was not that. She was Hermès, and Hermès was luxury, and luxury’s logic turned that theory upside down by starting with l’offre that would create a desire, and a demand. “It’s the opposite of marketing,” stated Gautier simply, with the assurance of an economics professor.
Dubrule’s comment was that in true luxury, one worked with artists, creators on whom one placed few constraints. One worked from an artistic vision, not (she said with only less disdain that did Gautier) from market studies. Which she had done; she had a business degree from one of the best business schools in France, thank you, and she knew perfectly well how the focus groups and so on worked. But to her – and to Gautier, who stated it adamantly – luxury meant an if-you-build-it-they-will-come strategy. Luxury to Gautier, was proposé."
Page 116
Jean-Claude Ellena – Legendary perfumer working for Hermès
“It’s very important to understand that the price of perfumes is not the price of their materials. You pay for the creativity.” He lifted his shoulders, made a rather Greek gesture: he meant himself, the guy right in front of you. “You don’t pay for a painting the value of the paint the guy’s thrown on the canvas. You pay the years of experience. Tu me paies, quoi!” You pay me! “That has value as well, a value that I put into the perfume. This Marxist idea that the price of a thing is the price of its materials is false.”
Page 158 – 160
Dubrule and Gautier were, naturally, conscious of all the variables. They were also facing a growth rate in perfume sales of about 3 percent a year, which was anaemic. It meant (everyone knew this) that any growth would come from pillaging the competition. It was brutal, and getting more brutal to a great degree because the industry had shifted to a new, aggressive, policy of developing fragrances that would appeal to the maximum number of people, which meant fragrances offering no resistance – sweet, coy things that didn’t just sleep with you on the first date but in the first ten seconds. The problem was that these scents were like Roman candles, a swift, awesome rise in sales (boosted by all your marketing expenditures), fifteen minutes of fame, and a swift crash as the next one got shoved onto the market. You generated large volume from “global appeal” and sudden death because each of them smelled exactly like the other. Why shouldn’t the client jump from launch to launch? Banality.
The second problem from Dubrule and Gautier’s perspective was they were – oh yes – in the luxury business. That meant exclusivity. But the industry guru Yves de Chiris had been observing that everyone was acting like mass marketers. The fragrance problem was that the client couldn’t “reference” the truly original perfume, and what consumers couldn’t reference worried them, and what worried them was not commercial. Consumers claimed they like original fragrances, but they got out their credit cards for the familiar.
“When I arrived at Hermes,” Gautier told me, “we were going in all sorts of directions and were not as strong and coherent as we could be. So I took us in a direction completely different from the rest of perfumery and the rest of marketing.” Gautier was given to repeating, with the conviction of a mantra, that the error the luxury houses made was to do marketing for grande consommation which essentially consisted of analysing a demand and then creating a product that, one hoped, anticipated it. She was not that. She was Hermès, and Hermès was luxury, and luxury’s logic turned that theory upside down by starting with l’offre that would create a desire, and a demand. “It’s the opposite of marketing,” stated Gautier simply, with the assurance of an economics professor.
Dubrule’s comment was that in true luxury, one worked with artists, creators on whom one placed few constraints. One worked from an artistic vision, not (she said with only less disdain that did Gautier) from market studies. Which she had done; she had a business degree from one of the best business schools in France, thank you, and she knew perfectly well how the focus groups and so on worked. But to her – and to Gautier, who stated it adamantly – luxury meant an if-you-build-it-they-will-come strategy. Luxury to Gautier, was proposé."
It is a very interesting book following the creation from scratch of two new fragrances at almost opposite ends of the market. Hermes 'Un Jardin sue le Nil' and Coty's Lovely for Sarah Jessica Parker. As I used to work in the fragrance and beauty business I'm always drawn to books on the subject!
Well, that's my thought for today :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment