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A 5 a.m. visit to the Malleswaram flower market in Bangalore, a trip to a temple to take in the camphor smells, walking on crowded roads, travel in a city bus, these were all the little things that Titan's Business Head for its new fragrances segment Rajeshwari Srinivasan had the master perfumers from France do during their three-year research in developing perfumes for Titan. “I wanted them to understand the smells of India,” she says.
Senior perfumers from French perfume houses, Olivier Pescheux of Givaudan, which has developed the range of three men's perfumes for Titan, and Luc Berriet of Firmenich, which developed the women's range, said they needed to understand what smells excited Indians. The brand did ethnography studies on Indian men and women as well to understand how they used their perfumes, stored them, and used them for what occasions.
Fragrance strength
Titan's business head for fragrances says that one of the points made in their brief to the perfumers was that Indians liked their perfumes to last longer, given that the weather in most places is hot and sweaty. While most international brands use around 12 per cent fragrance strength (the rest is alcohol and other stabilisers), Titan's brands use 15 per cent fragrance strength so that the scent lasts longer. Applying the perfume to the warm spots of the body such as the inside of the wrist, behind the ears and on the throat, is what helps the perfume stay through the day, the fragrance changing as well through the day, she points out. The smell ‘trail’ has to remain strong, she says.
Rajeshwari says that the market potential in India is huge, given that there is only 4 per cent penetration of the market against 93 per cent in an almost similar market such as Brazil. Latin America, she says, traditionally uses a lot of perfumes and people across all income spectrums use it. “In fact, in Brazil, when they hug each other when meeting, they actually say, ‘let me smell your smell’,” she explains.
IP rights
These six perfumes have been developed exclusively for Titan, she says, and the company owns the IP rights for these perfumes. The perfume oils will be made by the perfumers - which Titan will pay for by the kilo - and the blending of alcohol will be done by a partner in France. The bottles, made by Piramal glass in India for Titan, will be sent to France for bottling. So far, for the launch, Titan will distribute one lakh bottles of perfume over 8 months in the market across India.
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