On a fragrance counter crowded with hundreds of scents launched last year, a simple glass bottle doesn't cut it any more. Packaging is getting more elaborate: The cap of Marc Jacobs's Dot is a large Lucite butterfly. It took six months of testing to get the crocodile to stick properly on the new Lacoste men's fragrance bottle. Glowing by Jennifer Lopez lights up for 15 seconds when sprayed.
— Read more at Perfume Bottles Gone Wild at the Wall Street Journal. Hat tip to Bill!
What a sad state of affairs. Slowly the bottle is taking on more significance than the juice.. whatever captivates the short attention span of your average consumer, I suppose.
Not sure it is really all that different than it has always been, just that the ante has been upped!
Also, by googling Perfume Bottles Gone Wild you can view the entire article, not just the first snippet.
Yes, thanks — WSJ is funny about how their incoming links work in terms of accessing content, & so I don’t think there’s a way for me to get a working link to the whole thing.
Oh goodie, I still have yesterday’s WSJ and read this article!
While I agree that bottle / packaging can be the difference between noticed vs. … not, my opinion is that quite often it is the marketing of and/or celebrity association that had sold perfume. Take, for example, Someday – the rubbery flower topper seemed to be patterned after the Daisy topper concept, not particularly pretty nor unique such that anyone walking past the counter could have just dismissed it as a “wanna be”; however, because it is JUSTIN.BIEBER (can you hear the screams?), all the FANS just had to have it, the matching laptop case! the TOUCHABLE (whatever this means) Body Lotion! etc. Sometime in future, I see a Bieber-Bobblehead bottle with perfume packaged like harajuku in because who doesn’t want THE BIEBER in your room, looking at you and nodding his beautiful head?
I wish there were more collaborative efforts with artists in terms of bottle design. For example, wouldn’t it be delightful to have a perfume series with Jeff Koons’ balloon sculptures — either the same sculpture with different colors or a series with different sculptures?
Yes — celebrity names, even fronting the designer perfumes, are a huge draw regardless of the bottle. Cracking up at the bobblehead idea — it will probably come to pass!
“It took six months of testing to get the crocodile to stick properly on the new Lacoste men’s fragrance bottle.” Granted I don’t know the manufacturing process first hand, but this seems an incredible amount of time to properly adhere that little label on a bottle. My beau received a bottle as a gift, so I have examined the finished product; it’s stuck on rather securely, but come on, six months!
Obviously they aren’t familiar with SuperGlue
Ha ha, exactly! Robin, you could have saved Lacoste thousands in R & D!