Done with Justin Bieber -- back to last summers perfume project

    I've finished my "story" about the strategies behind Justin Bieber's "Someday" fragrance launch and posted it for members of the Perfume Makers & Marketers Club. Even with all I know and have written about the deal, there's a lot more that I would like to know but will never find out as, no doubt, that information is highly confidential. Leave it to say that there are deals on top of deals, multiple parties and corporate entities, and lots of cash or credit lines from somewhere.

    Essentially the story is all about promoters from the music world busting their way into the perfume world -- quite successfully. This is the wave of the future and the keys are strategic thinking and "fearless" (a word used by the promoters) action.

    Now back to a simple perfume.

    Yesterday evening I was finally able to resume work on a fragrance I started last summer, thought I had finished, then, after a few weeks, realized that, whatever it was (it was a NICE fragrance), it wasn't a match for the fragrance of my mental image -- the fragrance I had been TRYING to create.

    It's easy to create a nice smelling fragrance. It's not so easy to mentally envision a fragrance theme and then create a fragrance that pays off that theme.

    So here I was, at it again.

    Being away from this particular fragrance -- which for now I'll just call "Tokyo" -- gave me a chance to think a bit about the notes I wanted to include and those I wanted to exclude. This is a non-floral fragrance, which means it's a bit more abstract. So yesterday evening I was doing experiments, trying to pick up the direction, mixing multiple (small) samples to see if I might get back on track.

    This morning, sniffing yesterday's samples, I felt that progress was being made -- an "outline" had been created. So now it may be a matter of "decorating" that outline to complete the job -- and this means more experiments and many small trials. Patience is required.