The appeal of the indie and niche fragrance market still had yet to reach the mainstream consumer then, both in terms of mind and wallet share. This was a time when designer fragrances were flourishing (Narciso Rodriguez For Her and Euphoria Calvin Klein both received Women’s Prestige Fragrance Foundation Awards in 2006) and the popularity of celebrity scents was at an all-time high. While people like Frederic Malle and Serge Lutens were first to blaze a trail with niche fragrances, Ford was arguably the first to take artisanal fragrances and grow them on a significant scale. He turned niche into mainstream.
— Women's Wear Daily writes about the Tom Ford beauty behemoth, which is "expected to hit $1 billion in sales by 2020", in Tom Ford Beauty: Lauder’s Next Blockbuster. Look for a bunch of products celebrating Black Orchid's 10th anniversary this summer, including a solid perfume in Velvet Orchid and a Lalique edition of Black Orchid.
Calling Tom Ford fragrances artisanal seems so wrong to me….
I cannot disagree with the sentiment.
Artisanal?? Feh.
🙂
I would also suggest that “niche” and “mainstream” are by definition mutually exclusive. I think niche has two components: you can’t just buy it anywhere, and, maybe as a consequence of that, your average person knows little to nothing about it. Tom Ford scents can’t possibly be niche, because you can buy them at any Sephora at any mall anywhere.
It is not the way the industry defines it, that’s all. And now that some Sephoras carry Serge & Histoires de Parfums & whatnot, it leaves almost nothing that is really niche except those brands that have not yet snagged larger distributors. So in the end the way the industry defines — by number of doors — might turn out to make the most sense even if it is unrelated to the way perfumistas think of niche.
I think that this definition is quite dangerous, since that you can’t buy it anywhere is also applied by the more luxury mainstream brands with their collections of exclusives. Cartier and Prada line, for example, are very hard to be bought.
I believe that the correlation between door distributed and quality doesn’t make sense anymore in a world with e-commerce becoming stronger each year. You even have now stores like luckyscent, first in fragrance, essenza nobile, twisted lily and aedes (just naming a few ones) which shows that nowadays the distribution of those fragrances are not exactly you can’t buy anywhere.
It might have made sense in the eighties where the online commerce was not as strong as now and where the online perfume community wasn’t developed.
So yes, you do have a blur today between niche and mainstream, specially the better produced brands. Niche should be, in my opinion, intuition and creativity based, which was the gap that started to appear in the 80’s with the blockbuster fragrances, the massive ads, the cut in formula costs and the orientation towards consumer demands. But you see that most of brands popping recently still focus on consumer demands instead, they just take a better care of distribution and scarcity approach that makes them coveted products.