Two Unorthodox Ways to Measure Durability of Demand in Fragrance
Fragrance marketers obsess over sales numbers and brand image. But whether they are optimizing for performance metrics or for brand equity, neither side’s KPIs really predict whether a brand has a future – because both sides miss something that happens behind the customer’s door.
Two other metrics get closer to what happens there.
Metric #1.
The first metric gets us from the customer’s door and into their wardrobe – and directly addresses the durability of demand. But it isn’t “share of wardrobe”, “repurchase rate”, or “retention” in its conventional meaning. It’s the “share of total sprays” – e.g., how many days in a year someone actually wears a certain fragrance instead of the others they own. Among people with dozens of bottles, it can easily be zero – even if they admire and respect the fragrance and are happy to have it in their collection.
The reason someone spent money on a fragrance but doesn’t use it could be very trivial – they just forgot about it as it got buried under a pile of more recently purchased bottles. Or it’s “pretty”, but doesn’t pass the threshold of a universal perfume that’s safe enough to wear every day. Or it doesn’t seem good enough to generate the right impression in high-stakes situations. For some people, “high stakes situations” could be literally any trip outdoors where they meet other people – some of us are too risk-averse to even try to deviate from our workhorse scents in daily use. Or it could simply be “too much” for daily wear (this is a frequent scenario in the modern niche). That’s where things get interesting: someone might own a few $500 bottles, but wear a $30 body mist every day, while those expensive bottles collect dust. That’s not unusual and is somewhat expected, but also a missed opportunity – and something brands can actually control to an extent.
This is where many brands get it wrong, as spending time, money or effort on promoting a fragrance again to those who already purchased it sounds counterintuitive. But what if we reframe the “share of total sprays” as “engagement”? Social and streaming platforms obsess over engagement for a reason – even though the logic behind it is not always straightforward. With fragrance, this logic is clear and simple, but somehow often overlooked. The engagement we care about here though is not digital interactions with a brand that get stored in marketing databases. It’s engagement with the actual product at a physical level that typically isn’t tracked anywhere.
The negative outcome of low “physical engagement” is that customers don’t spend enough time with the fragrance to suddenly “get it”, to observe it in different weather and occasions, to develop unique personal associations with it or have it anchor important life moments. Worst case, it ends up resold on the secondary market, wasting the brand’s acquisition spend and eating up profit.
On the other hand, the positive outcome of high engagement is more time spent thinking about the fragrance that often results in leaving a review, recommending it to someone, and sometimes – even repurchasing the bottle. This directly translates to lower marketing spend dependency. It also means a higher likelihood of picking up adjacent products like hair mists or shower gels: if customers like the scent itself but something is not working for them in a perfume format to make it a daily choice (e.g., longevity, strength, versatility) – but they still give it a chance from time to time and the fragrance is top-of-mind – they may be very likely to consider it in other formats.
You can say there’s no direct correlation as wearing a fragrance even once a year may leave a strong enough impression to prompt a review, and using it too much may sometimes lead to fatigue rather than repurchase – and you will be right. But the point is – if we don’t focus on the edge cases, higher “physical engagement” usually leads to at least one of the positive outcomes that compound over time.
To make it very precise, this metric applies on an individual fragrance level – not at the brand level: brand-level metrics often assume a new release treadmill, and new releases cost money; a true durability of demand should work at the individual fragrance level as much as at the overall brand level. And it acknowledges that in the current climate aiming for a high repurchase rate of individual fragrances may be too ambitious – but also recognizes that behavior somewhere in between a strong habit or obsession with a single fragrance and complete abandonment is a healthy middle to aim for.
This metric is mostly relevant for consumers with large fragrance wardrobes – the very audience many niche brands target (willingly or not). It depends on the echelon of niche and the brand's primary distribution, of course, but if you are a small niche brand without travel retail presence, shelf space in large retailers, or strong DTC capability, chances are your sales come mostly from collectors. And even if you heavily rely on TikTok for discovery and pull in plenty of category newcomers, many of them will soon be adding more bottles: the share of customers transitioning from a signature scent to a full wardrobe is growing every year, and fragrance as a category makes it especially easy to start tumbling down the rabbit hole. So, this metric does get more and more relevant.
Now… how exactly to track it.
It’s a bit tricky.
Obviously, it would need to be self-reported, which points to a roadblock right away: many brands don’t own customer communications as they primarily sell through distributors/retailers – and can’t really ask customers directly. This is partly solvable by negotiating package inserts with gift codes for free samples or similar mechanics with retailers.
Another tricky part is the measurement framework itself. There’s high seasonality of use in the fragrance market (layered on the unique climate of each region), and customers tend to use perfumes in binges – obsessively, then not at all. So, the question shouldn’t be anchored to just use in the “last month” or even “last quarter”, but at the same time, it should avoid large recency windows like “past year” as that is prone to recall bias.
This can be solved by asking additional questions that help model the use, or by using alternative methods: for example, by using photos of the used bottles capturing the level of use as a proxy. “Send us a high-resolution photo of your collection with our bottle in the middle in exchange for a free sample of the brand's new release” – you capture both the relative use against the wardrobe competitors and other invaluable info, such as who exactly you compete with.
If this metric isn’t available at all, a good proxy could be looking at things that drive this metric – or at least remove the friction. Here are three examples (there are more):
The scent. Brands can do a ton of marketing, but if the scent structurally doesn't support wearability, people will ignore the marketing. The most natural way to drive “share of sprays” is making fragrances that people actually want to wear to begin with. That means resisting the urge to chase extreme performance or novelty at the expense of wearability. It means avoiding compositions that are overly loud, too polarizing, or unpleasant in the drydown.
The balance between artistic expression, the market’s demand for performance, and wearability is hard to reach, and it’s something recent niche releases are desperately missing. Brands that dare to optimize the formula for wearability and versatility despite the risk of being eaten alive for the lack of artistry or performance are often the ones with the highest durability of demand. This approach needs to be supported by a well-researched understanding of what wearability actually is for consumers – and industry-wide efforts to educate consumers on what artistry isn't.
The bottle. Another factor, this one working primarily by removing friction, is bottle grabbability – from ergonomic and non-intimidating design to the ability to withstand storage in places where customers actually tend to grab a bottle. If we are talking about fragrance enthusiasts, and the bottle is transparent, most will put it into a closet to preserve freshness… and to use it much less than they otherwise could. If the bottle is made of dark glass or another light resistant material, it is far more likely to end up on display in the bedroom. But the real win is to take over… the bathroom. No sane perfume enthusiast will put a perfume bottle there – while the bathroom is arguably the most naturally inviting place to frivolously spray oneself after the shower. A brand claiming their bottle can sustain the bathroom weather conditions will definitely win the battle here.
The marketing. The measures above are one-and-done (and often not done for a reason). They both are upstream and locked – brands can't really change them when they are already sitting on a stock of produced bottles. What they can change and manage live is marketing. Brands can use the same tools they use to push their next releases to existing customers (direct mail, retargeting, owned social media), but instead of pushing anything new – focus on reactivating the bottles their customers already own. Re-engage, but without the selling agenda. Use new angles, share customer reviews or aspirational imagery, highlight an interesting fact about the sensory properties of the scent, or simply ask a question. These little things remind customers about their bottles and softly revive interest – when done with taste and imagination, the customer gets an impulse to open their closet, pick up the bottle, and spray it again. Sometimes the reason for abandonment is purely irrational, but reading someone else’s review that highlights unexpected angles and edges of the scent will make a customer curious – and oh, how convenient – they already have a bottle/sample in their own drawer. There are countless ways to craft and personalize this kind of content to make it work, and brands that do things in that direction are arguably set up for a higher durability of demand. The bottleneck here, again, is not owning customer interactions when most sales are done through retailers and distributors – which like we discussed, is partly solvable.
Metric #2.
A lot has been said about how dupes and fakes harm fragrance brands, but the secondary market often gets overlooked. Meanwhile, high activity in the secondary market can be a strong indicator of a brand’s commercial potential. Just not in the way it’s usually framed: it may be a signal of strong demand, but also works in reverse: the higher the resale rate, the lower the realized potential. You spend money on customer acquisition, but a meaningful share of that spend never converts into money that lands in the brand’s pocket, while also shaping price expectations and making full-price retail sales harder.
Compared to the car market, where resale is predictable, inevitable, and factored into costs as a standard stage of the product lifecycle, or categories like art and investment-grade luxury goods, where an active secondary market contributes to value creation, fragrance resale is far more chaotic and unpredictable. Some of this activity is driven by blind purchasing that never converts into loyalty, some is relatively harmless, as it leads to organic promotion from partial bottle buyers, and decanting as another flavor of resale is a valid discovery tool. From this lens, resale is not inherently harmful, and a certain level is expected and healthy for any brand – the devil is in the scale and nature of that activity.
That’s where we come back to wearability, again. Wearability determines whether resale is destructive (offloading regrets) or constructive (decant-driven discovery), and in what proportion:
When wearability is not there, customers are far more motivated to offload a partly used bottle through resale groups or sites like eBay and Mercari. Depending on each market’s regulations, the infrastructure for this can be remarkably elaborate, making it easy to sell or buy – at half price or less.
When wearability is lacking, a single bottle gets split among 5-20 people and even those 5ml decants never get finished, so the money spent on increasing awareness and interest never materializes as a retail purchase among those people. This could be seen as unrealized opportunity cost – or the lost acquisition spend – depending on how you look at it.
The niche segment is particularly vulnerable to the destructive power of resale as a large share of customers are heavy collectors with low loyalty to a single brand and not always high purchasing power, and the niche bottles are expensive. The higher the inflation/economic downturn, the bigger the problem. To amplify this, niche brands’ marketing dollars are concentrated on an audience that disproportionately overlaps with the secondary market: the same highly engaged fragrance enthusiasts who discover fragrances via reviewers (including paid sponsorships) also frequent Facebook resale groups, Basenotes, Fragrantica swap threads, etc. – unlike, for example, the audience of designer brands who may not know decanting culture even exists.
Why these metrics are important:
When paralyzed by an abundance of choice, consumers return to the few fragrances they fell in love with before the market became too crowded to keep up with – the classics and the everyday workhorses of their wardrobe. The same logic applies to the often overlooked segment of those who went through a phase of fragrance overconsumption, then “decluttered” due to changing life events and settled on just a few bottles they use regularly. Given the state of the market, the importance of durable demand will only grow from now on, making the divide between lasting brands and passing fads even more prominent.
Looking at sales alone, it is difficult to isolate truly durable demand from demand driven by experimentation and obsessive overconsumption, let alone from the effects of competition, marketing spend, or shifts in channel and promotional strategy. At the same time, a high share of sprays and a secondary market characterized more by discovery than liquidation provide a clearer signal of sustainable demand (along with other intangibles like the concept being designed to last and being resistant to bad PR, of course).
But do we need both metrics or are they overlapping too much? There are definitely scenarios when one metric is positive and another one is negative and vice versa, so it does make sense to track both. Let’s look at each scenario.
Scenario 1. The share of sprays is high (good) but the resale rate is also high (bad).
Structurally, the resale problem is more nuanced than the share of sprays: it's not just about wearability or bottle grabbability, but also the scarcity, regional availability, and the cost-value mismatch that sometimes drives the resale rate even when the owners like their bottles and are willing to wear them, but… just not that into them. Not at that price. There are two cheaper bottles of other brands they can buy for the money they’ll get from reselling one. Niche fragrance consumers are very promiscuous.
Scenario 2. The share of sprays is low (bad), but the resale rate is also low (good).
Some possible reasons:
The main target audience are people who typically don't bother reselling – and don't like buying second-hand.
The fragrance is designed for ceremonial use or to be treated as an art object or a collectible. The branding is strong and spot-on, leading to high emotional attachment, but low share of sprays.
Some brands literally engineer resale friction and futility into product development and go-to-market strategy – by making it easy to sample before committing to a full bottle, by expanding distribution to increase availability for those who happened to get interested organically as to not lose the momentum (and not drive blind purchases), and by researching and applying the exact price point at which customers actually hold on to a bottle versus try to resell it. Oh, and by using opaque bottles that make it hard to gauge how much juice is left.
That's a slightly better scenario, but still not the place where you want to be. Ideally, you want to be in scenario 3, where both metrics are in good shape.
TL;DR
With fragrance, the competition doesn’t end when someone puts your fragrance in a basket. It continues after the purchase, when the fragrance is sitting in a drawer. At that point, your job isn’t just to sell them another fragrance – it’s also to make sure they come back to the one they already bought – and don’t try to resell it. The work on this starts at the moment of fragrance planning, long before the launch – and continues long after the purchase.
