Producing more than 200 new scents a year, Bath & Body Works’s fragrance development is nothing to sniff at.
Its latest, Sweetest Song, will buoy its second-largest holiday for sales, Mother’s Day, sold in a whopping 19 different forms, from perfume to body cream to hand sanitizer.
Some of its newest scents have proven powerful in driving new business, especially amid the recent fragrance boom. Last spring, the retailer went viral when it introduced Everyday Luxuries, a “prestige-inspired” line of fragrance mists, that many dubbed dupes for scents by luxury brands like Tom Ford and Le Labo. CEO Gina Boswell noted the line has been “attracting a new, younger, and more diverse customer base” and helping drive sales growth in the body care segment. In Piper Sandler’s latest Taking Stock With Teens survey published this month, Bath & Body Works was named the No. 3 beauty destination for teens, the first time it broke the top 10 since 2018.
But before consumers can spritz on the scents, they take a year, and many steps, to create, Lewis said.
“It’s really just meeting [consumers] where they are and making sure that we’re on top of the trends that they’re wanting from us, or that we see coming down the pipeline,” Kristie Lewis, SVP of merchandising at Bath & Body Works, told Retail Brew. “It’s a skill set and a balance of, ‘What do I know about you today and how does that kind of translate tomorrow?’”
Scent packing: Trends change, and Bath & Body Works has had to keep up. Three years ago, floral fragrances flourished. Now, consumers are gunning for gourmand (for those fledgling perfumers out there, those are scents with edible-inspired notes, like vanilla), with no signs of slowing, Lewis said.
The Everyday Luxuries line, which now gets new scents added every six to nine months, was created with fragrance houses that develop scents for prestige brands, but formulations are unique to Bath & Body Works, Lewis said. Insights for other fragrance launches come from global travel, fashion trends, focus groups, or social media comments.
When the retailer is developing a new fragrance, the team looks for holes in the assortment and where customers, and the market, are leaning. For Sweetest Song (a gourmand fragrance, of course), they approached fragrance houses asking for something sugary and mom-friendly, but also approachable for younger consumers, too. They’ll typically go through 20 “mods,” or variations, before landing on the perfect scent, Lewis said. At the same time, they’re conducting blind fragrance testing with consumers. Once the fragrance is locked in, they must ensure it can translate across not just a fragrance mist, but also smells the same way in other forms like a candle or body wash—a process that can take another few months. The packaging is also in the works during this time, as the team ensures the name, storytelling, and colors all align.
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When Bath & Body Works is creating fragrances, it balances “protecting” those core consumers, while creating products that are “a little more innovative or pushy” to attract Gen Z, Lewis said.
“Ideally, we want to create the pipeline to bring in the new customer and they grow with us,” Lewis said. “It’s really thinking about the life journey of what will bring them in and what they will graduate to as they age up with us as a brand.”
Collaborations can help bring in new shoppers, too. In February, it worked with Disney to debut The Disney Princesses Collection, ranging from a Cinderella fragrance mist to a Moana body cream. These collections help maintain “cultural relevance” and “broaden our reach of who we can obtain into our customer base,” Lewis said. The development strategy for those seasonal or limited-edition products (which make up about 60% of the 200 scents produced annually) can differ from its core products—the company calls them single fragrance launches—in that they’re able to be more trend-forward than the evergreen products the retailer intends to keep on shelves longer term.
And it can’t leave the classics behind, either, working to give older offerings “a new lease on life,” Lewis said. It recently released trend-forward, bow-adorned packaging to boost one of its oldest scents, Sweet Pea.
Nose bounds: Churning out 200 smells a year, does it ever feel like they’re running out of scent runway? The answer, Lewis says, is no, pointing to the popularity of pumpkin, once only a candle scent, now popular in body care, too.
“The consumer, they want to know what some of these unexpected, fun things smell like,” she said. “It actually gives us a lot of leeway just to experiment and try new ideas, but then also stand behind the tried-and-true core favorites that are there year round, that we know that they’ll come back to us for because it’s part of their daily routine.”