Pack it in style

“I don’t think art should be only for a select few. I think it should be for the mass of the people” Andy Warhol’s famous 1960s quote was important in the context of the pop art movement. Almost 50 years later, luxury fragrances seem to have taken a page out of the Warhol book, of taking art to a larger universe of consumers through their showstopper perfume bottles. Pop art truly peaked in the ’60s as the art’s practitioners like Warhol and Roy Liechtenstein sought inspiration from everyday objects. Today’s fragrance manufacturers are seeking differentiators in a cluttered market place.

Classic scents from the ’60s or ’70s rarely needed a face or fancy packaging to stand out in a department store shelf. That’s changed since the ’00s. Consumers are fickle and competition is intense. Fragrance brands need to do everything to make it easier for salespersons to lure consumers to airport duty-free and department stores. If celebrity endorsements were the first wave, packaging seems to be next big thing and almost every brand seems to have jumped in.

Good-girl-gone-bad Good Girl, Carolina Herrera’s biggest launch in a decade was driven by its stand out bottle. Carolina Herrera Baez, the brand’s creative director (and the daughter of the brand’s founder) chose a stiletto-shaped bottle as the ultimate symbol of modern femininity. The brand experimented with multiple prototypes before zeroing in on a bottle that has generated unprecedented buzz. It’s certainly ‘good-to-be-bad’ (the scent’s tagline), this scent is poised to cross the $100 million mark in global sales in the first year of its launch in 2016.

Shock and awe A few decades ago, brand reputation, such as what Paris’s legendary fragrance house Guerlain enjoyed, was enough to translate into sales. Gen X and Gen Y need a different script; packaging might bring the new edge for new fragrances. Moschino’s 2015 scent Fresh was an apt throwback to the pop-art era. The brand chose to juxtapose the most mundane of all products, the household cleaner, with something precious — a luxury fragrance. The brand took it one step further with an ad campaign that was a throwback to the ’50s. Canadian super model Linda Evangelista posed with a housecoat and the bottle in an ad that oozed retro charm. The outrageous packaging for this fragrance provoked extreme reactions from consumers, but gave fragrance salespersons enough talking points to peddle the scent. Many consumers might never be able to look at their household cleaner in the same light again.

Inglot gold While Moschino might have taken the pop-art route, other brands use standout packaging to reinforce heritage value. Paco Rabanne’s obsession with gold is well known — in the late ’60s, he crafted a dress made with nine kilogram of fine gold. Four decades later the brand launched One Million, an exclusive party scent housed in a gold ingot-shaped bottle. It didn’t just end up being one of the most successful men’s fragrance launches of the last decade but the brand has multiple follow-up editions that have not deviated from the ingot template. It’s the same with Prada that launched the Luna Rossa line in 2012. Prada’s sailing team triumphed in America’s Cup, one of the world’s oldest sporting events. Prada borrowed more than just the name for this high-energy scent. The brand roped in Swiss designer Yves Behar (who later worked on the Movado Edge) to design the bottle that borrows heavily from the sleek and dynamic lines of extreme sailing boats — a seamless blend of metal and glass.

Proof in the packaging Leading brands have used the design of the bottle in the 2010s to reinforce the key product composition of the scent. Davidoff worked with leading design firm Alnoor design to sculpt a bottle in the shape of a dumbbell for its 2010 launch of Champion. The bevelled grip of the chunky dumbbell is made with stirring black-glass while the weights were crafted with real metal. The unique shape complemented Champion’s high-energy citrus top notes.

Issey Miyake’s 2016 women’s scent — Pure, used a teardrop-shaped bottle to make a connection between the scent that is supposed to be fresh like a drop of pure water.

Old-school perfumers and brands might not approve, but the juice in the bottle seems to matter less. Flacon design is not a new trend, even a century ago perfumes came in showstopper bottles but most brands didn’t alter the design significantly. But the 21st-century consumer has come to demand quirky elements and bold design that breaks clichés. Some of these brands continue to focus on high quality ingredients rather than splurge on packaging and promotions. But for a whole new generation of luxury consumers, packaging and product design are what perfumes are about. A stiletto-shaped flacon makes a prettier picture on Instagram after all.

Ashwin Rajagopalanis a Chennai-based lifestyle and travel writer

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