Recruiting "helpers" to sell your perfume

'Magic Moment' by Daggett and Ramsdell, Distributed by the Fuller Brush Company

    Making perfume is on thing. Selling it is another. To sell perfume you can either develop your own brand, so that sales bring credit and fame to your company, or you can "partner" (i.e., "make deals") with other companies to have them sell your perfume under their name and brand.

    The idea of building a perfume empire under your own name and brand is a grand one. But the path is a difficult one, strewn with failures. Why? Simply because the marketplace is competitive. Consumers have many choices. And to win their admiration and dollars can be slow, difficult, and expensive. This is why companies explore alternatives.

    I've written elsewhere about my own efforts to find marketing partners and even now, after the first successful partnership, I continue to be open to new and additional arrangements. Why? Because I enjoy making perfume, I've developed a number of formulas which I would like to get out there, to consumers, and I have neither the time, nor the organization, nor the money to risk to make a big push to develop the "Lightyears, Inc." brand.

    Thinking about this issue, the selling of your perfume under another organization's name, I stumbled across a bottle of perfume on eBay that was produced by Daggett and Ramsdell but marketed by the Fuller Brush Company.

    As best I could find out, the fragrance dates from 1951 which was a time when the Fuller Brush Man still sold Fuller brushes door to door.

    Magic Moment -- or any small, inexpensive perfume -- was an enticement to garner the good will of the housewife before launching into the Fuller brush sales pitch.

    Also note that Avon's roots involves a similar practice -- the giving away of a small perfume in order to pave the way for book sales.

    Daggett and Ramsdell, like Fuller, was an old, respected company but, while it had marketed a number of fragrances over the years alongside its cosmetics, the brand never become famous for their fragrances. Thus a marketing partner made good economic sense.

Footnote:

In addition to Magic Moment, Fuller also marketed a line of Daggett and Ramsdell cosmetics, door to door. But by the 1950's, the "Fuller Brush Man" could also have been the "Fuller Brush Woman."