We all love a bottle of after shave or perfume. It puts a smile on our face as we start the day. Spray a little on the hot spots and then feel the confidence spread all over your body. It is one of those little things that we love. It’s a spot of luxury. We all love to feel luxurious and pampered. This is a quick way of achieving that feeling. But, the question comes up time and time again. Why is a bottle of fragrance so expensive?
Great question. With the clothes, shoes, handbags, jewellery and other items produced by top designers, we expect an exclusivity. We buy a brand name because we expect it to come with an indication that you can’t quite get the same thing anywhere else. But that’s not always the case. The ingredients are not difficult to find if you know where to look. As we near the end of this list, you will see that the oils and other ingredients that make up a bottle of fragrance don’t come to much in the way of cash.
So, lets look at why is a bottle of fragrance so expensive…
Imagine a £100 bottle of your favourite perfume or after shave. It’s not hard to imagine when Chanel No. 5 comes in close to this and the likes of Tom Ford and Creed ask way in excess of this for a 50ml bottle of their fragrances. Out of that £100, the breakdown is this.
£50 Retail Profit Margin
This is the biggest chunk of that £100. The retailer has their own costs. They have a premises to buy or rent. They have staff to employ, train, motivate and reward. And they have the costs of heating, lighting these stores.
A retailer broadly works on a 50% gross profit margin. This gives them the leeway to sell goods off at the end of the season and still make money on every sale. Of course, it is rare that a fragrance is sold off cheaply. You might get a few quid off here and there. But the prices are still high. This helps you understand Why Is A Bottle Of Fragrance So Expensive.
£15 On Marketing And Advertising
We have all seen the naked celebrity on the TV and billboard adverts at Christmas. It is designed to help us make that purchase decision. I have worked in retail for decades and I know how all of this works. If you buy a bottle of fragrance for yourself, then you go on what it smells like. You spray a few testers and decide what it is you like. But there are some subliminal things going on, as you have been exposed to adverts swaying your choice.
This effect is multiplied at certain times of the year. At the following times, your buying decision is different because you are not buying for yourself, but for someone else –
- Valentine’s Day
- Birthdays
- Mother’s Day
- Father’s Day
- Christmas
And some of these times are when the advertising goes into overdrive. The fragrance houses spend millions upon millions of pounds trying to influence your purchase decisions. Celebrities get cheques well over a million pounds to put their name to a product.
It is reported that Charlize Theron has been paid over $50 million to promote Dior J’adore perfume over the last decade or so. Now, I love Charlize, but I don’t want to spend my hard-earned cash lining her pocket. She has more than enough money.
£15 Gross Profit – Why Is A Bottle Of Fragrance So Expensive?
Now we all need to make a little money. It is fair that the fragrance house that produces the fragrance has their cash too. It is their production and distribution process that allows us to have these great smells in the first place.
It takes time to develop fragrances. They have to research and source ingredients, mix oils and test the results. This takes time and effort. A fragrance manufacturer is in this for the money. This is their profit.
£12 Logistics And Distribution
The bottle of perfume or after shave has to make its way from the factory to the shelves in your favourite retailer. By the way, if you are looking to get into mystery shopping where you can be paid to buy fragrance at times, then Mystery Shopping Tips can help you become a mystery shopper.
There are costs to get these products from the factory, through to the warehouses of the retailers of the UK. In addition, there will have been shipping costs to get the ingredients into the factory in the first place. All of this adds up and you can see this as part of the answer to the question – Why Is A Bottle Of Fragrance So Expensive?
£5 Packaging And Bottle
This is the most infuriating part of the process for me. They spend ages and stacks of cash coming up with the perfect design for their box. It will go through design stages, be redesigned and rethought time after time. And guess what happens to that box as soon as you open it? That’s right, it goes straight in the bin.
All of the effort is supposed to help you make a buying decision. Eye catching boxes should get you to buy, as far as they are concerned. But it shouldn’t work this way. You should buy on the smell. They say ‘don’t judge a book by it’s cover.’ It’s the same here – only judge a fragrance on the way it smells.
And the bottle is the same too. The amount of effort that goes into the design is massive. And at the end of it all, you will be the only one that sees it. Whether it sits by the side of your bed or in a drawer or the bathroom, nobody else sees it. Nobody else cares. All that cash goes to waste. It all adds up to mean you pay more for your favourite after shave or perfume. Why Is A Bottle Of Fragrance So Expensive? Now you are starting to see why.
£3 Fragrance Costs
And now we come to the smell. The actual smell that you buy is a tiny proportion of the overall cost of a bottle of fragrance. Just 3% of that cash you spend is for the thing you want at the end of it all – the smell!
It is the most ludicrous thing! If the general population knew where their cash was going, they wouldn’t be very happy. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Why Is A Bottle Of Fragrance So Expensive?
Great Smells has been set up to cut out all of the nonsense that makes your favourite fragrance a multiple cost of what it should be. We can save you up to 80% on the prices you pay on the High Street – or even online.
It’s because we don’t have some of the costs above –
- Our retail profit margin is much lower. We sell online and via distributors. This means we don’t have the expensive brick and mortar stores of many of our rivals.
- We don’t have celebrities to endorse what we do. Word of mouth and excellent customer feedback does all of this for us. After all, saving a pretty penny on your favourite designer fragrances is something worth telling all your friends and family.
- Our distribution is a simple process. All of the fragrances go to two places – our distribution centre and our distributors. From there we can drop off a bottle if you are nearby, or have your order delivered straight to your door.
- The packaging and bottles we have aren’t designed, designed, designed. They look great, but are all one of two simple, elegant, classic designs. This saves vital pounds in cost savings that we can pass on to you.
If you want to save stacks of cash on your favourite designer fragrances then head on over to our home page, subscribe and we’ll wing you all the details you need you start saving money today.