I'm running a campaign to find marketers for my perfume -- people who can take a bottle of one of my perfumes -- with their name and artwork on it -- and go out and sell it. My campaign is in the form of a contest and the prize is perfume. You can find the basic details here, and more information at my Perfume Strategies blog.
Meanwhile let me share an insight with you -- not one that will be useful for the contest but one which will help you to understand, in the big world of fragrances, how companies select their licensing partners and distribute their fragrances. I am not going to give you direct links to follow. You will learn more by discovering them for yourself. But I will give you all the clues.
Publicly traded perfume companies -- I am thinking in particular of Elizabeth Arden, The Limited, and Parlux -- produce annual reports and their annual reports can be downloaded, free, from their corporate websites. They are typically found under the heading, "Investor Relations."
These reports can run over 100 pages. You don't need to read them from cover to cover. But, in these reports, you will find discussions of the fragrances the company sells, sometimes a few words about how they are produced (always by an outside contractor), and how they are distributed.
This information is not likely to help you market your own perfume directly. But it will help you understand how large companies work with perfume.
Now about my contest ...
