On a Thursday evening not long before Christmas, as tourists and the after-work crowd started filling up a Bath & Body Works store near Grand Central Terminal, in Manhattan, a woman walked up to a table piled with products labeled “Perfect in Pink.”
She dabbed lotion on her hands and sprayed a mist in the air, called over to the man she was shopping with and had him smell. She grabbed a few bottles of “Perfect in Pink” body cream, stuffed a pink, bow-shaped makeup bag under her arm and headed to the checkout line.
One small data point for the retailer’s big holiday bet.
Every year, Bath & Body Works releases 250 new fragrances, but it puts muscle behind just a few, like “Perfect in Pink,” that it expects to carry the holiday shopping season.
This is a crucial time of year for most retailers, but Bath & Body Works, which sells some $7.4 billion of lotions, perfumes and candles each year, especially benefits from the gift-giving imperative of the season. In 2023, the company, the mass-market stalwart of scent purveyors with 1,850 stores in the United States and Canada and 510 more in over 40 other countries, reaped 66 percent of its total net income toward the end of the year. Some of its customers shop there only during the holidays.
“People come in not because they ran out of their scent,” said Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets, but because “it’s time for ‘’Tis The Season.’ Just like people walk in to get their pumpkin spice latte.”
“Perfect in Pink” — a fruity gourmand scent built on a cherry base note — hit shelves in October. The aromatic concoction wafts from three-wick candles, hand cream, glossy lip oils, pocket-size hand sanitizer containers and a $69.95 glass bottle of Eau de Parfum, packaged in a hot pink bow-shaped box; 29 products in all.
The company is hoping “Perfect in Pink” will draw in customers even after the Christmas tree comes down — similar to the scent “Champagne Toast,” which was introduced in 2018 and continues to be a best seller year-round.
But the holiday season is its all-important debut.
When it comes to smells, the nose likes what it likes. For a company like Bath & Body Works, the trick is to first catch the eye with something new. “It’s an art and a science,” said Kristie Lewis, senior vice president of merchandising for Bath & Body Works.
“We really try to focus on making the newness the one big thing that you can see,” Ms. Lewis said. “It’s like: ‘This is your beacon in the store. Come here, try me.’”
The process of developing “Perfect in Pink” — this year’s big thing — began a year ago. The company’s merchandising team scoured social media feeds, studied fashion runway shows and pulled ideas from the cocktail of popular culture. The movie “Barbie” had pushed the color pink to dominance. (Ariana Grande’s character Glinda in “Wicked” has kept it there.) Tom Ford popularized cherry as a scent in 2018 with his “Lost Cherry” perfume, and more recently cherries, the actual edible fruit, started appearing more on bar and restaurant menus. A TikTok trend blew up with users showing off pretty pink ribbons wrapped around pickles and other unexpected objects.
The aha moment for Ms. Lewis came on a trip with her team to Copenhagen, Paris and London during the holiday season last year.
“We walked into a department store and there was probably a 30-foot-tree that was only made of bows head-to-toe, all shades of pink,” she said. “We’re like, ‘That’s it.’”
They had their marketing ingredients: pink, cherry, bows. Now they just needed a fragrance.
The Smell of Production
Once the mood board for a new Bath & Body Work’s fragrance is set, Mary Testa Gough, goes to work. Ms. Gough, the associate vice president of product and fragrance development, possesses the nose that shepherds the new scent into being.
On a recent December afternoon, Ms. Gough walked me through the process. We were standing inside the New York office of Givaudan, a venerable fragrance house based in Zurich, that has made scents for Carolina Herrera and Thierry Mugler.
Bath & Body Works uses five fragrance houses to create the hundreds of scents it makes every year. Givaudan helped it birth “Cucumber Melon,” “Vanilla Bean Noel” and “Winter Candy Apple.”
For “Perfect in Pink,” Ms. Gough and her team liked Givaudan’s proprietary scent “Cherry Yum Yum” as a starting point. More sophisticated than the cherry Chapstick of girlhood in the 2000s, the aroma, to Ms. Gough, suggested “luxury” and “giftability at this time of year.”
With that in mind, Louise Turner, a Givaudan perfumer, came up with the formula. Ms. Turner, who has been a perfumer for more than 30 years, thinks about how the notes — top, middle and base — weave together. There are schools that teach perfumery, including Givaudan’s five-year program, where students learn how to recognize 800 raw materials instantaneously.
“We really wanted to get the cherry to go down into the hearts and base notes of the fragrance,” she said on a video call from Paris. “That is a challenge because most fruity notes tend to be typically top notes, so they’re really volatile.”
As she spoke, Ms. Turner sprayed the “Perfect in Pink” perfume on a white paper tester — similar to the ones beauty counter workers wave at passing customers in department stores — to get a whiff.
“When you talk about it, you have to smell it,” she said.
Ms. Turner then sends the written formula to the Givaudan lab in New York, where robots and workers in white lab coats start mixing ingredients.
The lab had a distinctive scent that, to this reporter’s untrained nose, felt difficult to pinpoint. When asked to describe it, Stephen Nilsen, vice president of perfumery at Givaudan, said, “It’s called production,” the smell of dozens of fragrances swirling around at once.
The Bath & Body Works team receives testers, or “mods,” to try. Ms. Gough will spend a weekend wearing a scent to see how she likes it and how those around her respond. The scent is tested in different forms. At Givaudan, candles are burned and wall scents hang in ventilated glass rooms. Employees can test out the body washes in showers and sinks. The formula will be adjusted to make sure the smell is the same whether from a burning candle or on the skin after a steamy shower.
“Perfect in Pink” went through 150 different mods before the two companies — the perfumer and the purveyor — agreed it had the right blend of cherry, pink camellia and a scent called whipped almond crème. The eau de parfum has 74 ingredients.
It’s hard to convey an olfactory sensation. During the tour, Ms. Gough and others often gestured with their hands or leaned in with their shoulders, using their bodies to convey the experience of a particular aroma. When talking about a gourmand — a scent so good you want to eat it — Ms. Gough cupped her hand in the shape of a cherry as if to bite it.
Fragrances for Everyone
The era of buying and giving fragrances took off in the late 1800s, at the same time that many winter holiday rituals were codified, according to Jessica Murphy, an art historian at the Brooklyn Museum, who writes about the culture of perfume. In the United States, more people were putting up decorated Christmas trees in their houses, wrapping gifts and sending greeting cards, all aided by new methods of mass production and marketing through popular magazines and department stores.
Before the late 19th century, perfumes were made from natural ingredients like flowers, deer musks and spices that often needed to be imported. But then came the creation of “synthetic aroma materials that are cheap and stable and can be produced in large volumes,” Ms. Murphy said. “So perfume becomes very affordable for many people.”
Bath & Body Works pushed fragrances even further into the mainstream when it came on the scene in 1990. The company, based in Columbus, Ohio, was a branch of the mall empire run by Leslie Wexner, which once also included Victoria’s Secretand Express. Its ubiquity in American malls introduced scores of shoppers, used to simple bars of soap, to fruity washes and mists.
In naming products, the merchandising team tries to connect with broad audiences, often using universal cultural moments like New Year’s Eve (“Cue the Confetti”) or comforting moments like curling up with a book (“Book Loft”) to describe their scents.
“We’re trying to create something for everyone,” Ms. Lewis said. She distinguishes the company’s naming conventions from those of high-end scents, which “doesn’t always feel comforting as a place that you can relate to. In some cases it’s very elusive or aspirational.”
Once the team has a list of 20 names, focus groups help whittle down the options. Alternatives to “Perfect in Pink,” included “Perfectly Pink,” “Pink” and “Cherry Pink Fizz.”
While sales for mass-market candles were flat in the past 12 months, those for mass-market fragrance rose 15 percent, according to the data analytics firm Circana. The prestige fragrance market has also expanded, growing at nearly the same clip.
Inside the store near Grand Central Terminal, Ms. Lewis stood by and watched how customers walked in and fanned out, interacting with the tables of candles, stands of body lotion and counters of lip gloss. She watched customers spray themselves with “Vanilla Noel Bean” and others put “Perfect in Pink” in their shopping baskets. While not sharing sales numbers, Ms. Lewis said that the company was seeing “great receptivity” to its newest fragrance.
Ms. Lewis casually chatted up customers, asking what scents they gravitated toward, whom they were buying for and why they thought the recipient would like that gift.
One of those customers was Jessica Facey, 23, who had come into the store to exchange an item and was enticed by the candle display. As Ms. Facey brought different candles to her nose, Ms. Lewis asked her what scents she liked and suggested she try “Cookie Butter Truffle.” Nope, too much. What about “Caramel and Vanilla?” That’s better.
When Ms. Facey first walked into the store, she had briefly stopped to smell “Perfect in Pink.”
“I liked it, but not enough to get it for my house,” she said.
But a few minutes later, she circled back, took a deep breath and sniffed the “Perfect in Pink” candle again. It was worth reconsideration.
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