Perspectives: The Impossible Dream
Christopher Brosius
A perfumer describes his quest for the perfect stock bottle.
By Christopher BrosiusIt’s the end of January, and I’m still a little bitter about Christmas. Since I began making perfume 15 years ago, every year I ask for the same thing: 5000 elegantly simple perfume bottles with ground-glass stoppers. And once again, Santa didn’t bring them. I can’t imagine why this should be so difficult—there must be plenty of room in that sleigh.
Now, I have been told time and time again that perfume is going “mass, mass, mass.” The availability of stock fragrance packaging has certainly reflected that trend—minimums have increased while choices for the smaller company dwindle every season. This is a problem for those of us who choose to run niche businesses geared to the individual.
Since I began my company three years ago, I have been very lucky. I do have stock suppliers who can ship me reasonably suitable bottles in quantities that make sense for my inventory. Fortunately, I’ve always had a fairly good eye for design and can dress up certain stock items with snappy labels or interesting boxes. I’ve also stepped outside the box of “traditional” fragrance packaging and use a good deal of laboratory glass to bottle certain of my scents. This all suits my minimalist art/science aesthetic very well.
But the beautiful perfume bottle with the ground-glass stopper remains as elusive as the unicorn.
It is popularly supposed that I am “against” pretty perfume bottles, but this is not true. Nothing is prettier than the elegant froufrou of Annick Goutal, which I love, although I prefer the quiet restraint of Jo Malone. And I still have an original bottle of Gaultier’s Fragile in its fabulous snow globe, which I think is one of the most smashing bottles since Schiaparelli first introduced Roi de Soleil. “Pretty” certainly has its place.
But for me as a perfumer, the point of my work is how the scent smells when it is worn—not about how it looks on the dressing table. My bottles must be minimalist yet elegant and fit comfortably into any environment. Possibly, this outlook is one of several important lessons I learned while at Kiehl’s.
However, I still want a better bottle than those I can currently get, and I want one with a ground-glass stopper. Although I have a very modern aesthetic when it comes to making perfume, at heart I am a traditionalist and revere the great French perfume makers. A truly elegant bottle is part of that tradition. And from a practical business point of view, if I’m asking $400 and up for a bottle of perfume, I think it only fair to my clients that it comes in something a tad better than a laboratory sample bottle.
For now, Brosius’s fragrances, such as Wild Hunt, are housed in bottles like this one.I know these bottles exist—I’ve seen other small independent houses use similar ones. I know they’re not custom made, nor do companies purchase them in lots of 50,000. Unfortunately, when one asks those companies who their supplier is, they just cheerfully laugh. I understand that secrecy, but still …
I no longer search for the bottles at industry trade shows. The minimums are generally much too high. Last year I used a total of 20,000 bottles in three different styles, so it’s going to be quite some time until I need half a million of a single kind. And since it’s written into my business plan that 75,000 per year is my maximum production, most minimum quantities would require an enormous warehouse, which I do not plan to have soon.
Another problem presented by stock sourcing is that available styles can look a bit too oldfashioned. Most of those molds seem to have been made at least 30 years ago, and it’s rare to find a stock bottle that truly reflects the fashion of today—or the fashion of forever, which is really what I want.
Should one find from a distributor a bottle that really makes the eye pop, chances are good that it’s a sample only and that the bottle has not actually been manufactured. Too many times in my past, I have sold perfume based on these “samples” and the assurance the order will ship “in plenty of time” only to find that I can’t get the bottles because they’re still a big pile of sand in Italy or France. This means that orders have to be canceled, and this has cost me an enormous amount of money, until I learned that confirmation is essential.
With markets expanding and independent fragrance companies springing up like rabbits all over the globe, I would think someone somewhere would step in to service them. And while French and Italian quality is still the best, I am curious to see what will happen with fragrance bottles when China or Mexico figures it out.
In the meantime, however, my wish list remains the same. I would love to see more choices in stock packaging and perhaps a bit more style. And as crazy as I am about ground glass, I wouldn’t be opposed to a vinyl closure, which looks the same and seals just as well. (I also understand that these are much less expensive to produce, and that’s fine with me.) I would also like to hear from distributors or manufacturers who are willing to ship in the thousands and not the tens of thousands. And should someone somewhere actually make the bottle with the stopper I want now, please feel free to phone. I am in the book.
Until that call comes though (which will probably be about the same time I win the lottery), I will continue to make the most of what I can get right now.
Perfumer and designer Christopher Brosius started his career at Kiehl’s and founded fragrance brand Demeter Fragrance Library in 1994. At Demeter, he created such famous scents as Dirt, Angel Food, and Snow. In 2002, he sold Demeter and, in July 2004, started his own fragrance company, Christopher Brosius Limited, and opened the CB I Hate Perfume gallery. Brosius has won four FiFi awards. In 2003, his fragrances were the first ever to be displayed in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s prestigious National Design Triennial exhibition.