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When Victoria Beckham presents her Spring/Summer 2024 collection at Paris Fashion Week on 29 September, the venue will be spritzed with a scent unfamiliar to many guests. It’s part of a rollout of three fragrances that the brand is introducing this week.
The Victoria Beckham launch — which is being teased on its dedicated beauty website, where users are encouraged to sign up to a waitlist — is a new milestone for the designer. She launched a joint perfume with her husband David in 2006, but has not pursued fragrances as part of her standalone business.
The news might come as a surprise to those who believe that celebrity fragrances are dead, amid growing influencer fatigue. The reality is quite the contrary. In the US, celebrity fragrance sales amounted to $148.5 million in the 12 months to August 2023, up 30 per cent on the same period in 2022, according to market research firm NPD Group.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the biggest stars saw an opportunity to make a profit from licensing their names out across eyewear, alcohol and perfumes. However, as savvy celebrities started building a more direct relationship with their audiences through social media, and the barriers to launching a brand lowered, many are taking control and launching their own businesses, making them less of an ambassador and more of an executive. Fashion, beauty and skincare have been popular categories. Now, fragrance is having its moment.
Victoria Beckham’s beauty brand, launched in September 2019, is owned as a joint venture between Victoria and David Beckham, and Simon Fuller’s XIX Entertainment. The new fragrances — which were inspired by the designer’s personal memories, such as her first romantic getaway with her husband to Portofino in 1997 — are produced in-house, without a licensee, and are being marketed by a high-fashion team. The advertising campaign was shot by highly sought-after photographer Steven Klein and styled by Christine Centenera, who is also the editor-in-chief of Vogue Australia and co-founder of fashion brand Wardrobe.nyc. The products will be sold on Victoria Beckham Beauty’s e-commerce site and flagship store in London, and comes as the brand targets $100 million in near-term sales.
Other celebrities coming to market with perfumes this year includes actress Millie Bobby Brown, who entered the category last month with her beauty brand Florence by Mills, which regularly tops the list of brand searches identified by the Vogue Business Beauty Trend Tracker. Musicians Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande have been rolling out a fleet of fragrances. Singer and actor Harry Styles’s lifestyle and beauty brand Pleasing has been teasing the launch of three upcoming fragrances. Beyoncé is also about to launch her first new perfume in almost a decade.
More will follow, predicts Patti Williams, the Ira A Lipman associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and vice dean of Wharton Executive Education. “Celebrities realise that this is a way of earning money in ways that they didn’t before.” Many talent agencies now make this a focal point of their work, she notes. “It comes down to their abilities to bring celebrities not only major acting roles or musical opportunities, for example, but also their name to a broader array of popular culture. That is becoming part and parcel of what it means to be a celebrity and to have a celebrity business model.”
Much has been made possible by the rise of social media. “Less than 10 years ago, you had to attach yourself to a retailer or a large incumbent because it was the only way to get awareness and critical mass,” reflects David Schneidman, senior director in Alvarez & Marsal’s Consumer and Retail Group, a global professional services firm. While many celebrities still partner with established luxury retailers like Net-a-Porter or beauty specialists like Sephora, most have engaged audiences on TikTok and Instagram and can lead consumers directly to their own websites. “There’s not really a large cost per acquisition. One of the reasons we're seeing an uplift in celebrity brands is that it’s a lot more frictionless to drive a sale,” Schneidman says.
Targeting a different customer
The nature of celebrity fragrances has changed considerably, with new launches marketed on values, inclusivity and product quality, as much as on their pop culture appeal. Recent offerings have also come from much younger celebrities with different personalities, which are likely to reach a different target market than some celebrity fragrances have in the past, experts say.
Billie Eilish, for example, the 21-year-old singer-songwriter, is known for her dyed hair and a grungy, off-kilter style. The singer’s unique aesthetic, and activism against the climate crisis, has resonated with Gen Z and Gen Alpha fans who are more climate conscious and suspicious of bigger, mass-produced brands. Eilish’s first fragrance, launched in November 2021, was reported to have sold out online within hours after it was released.
Harry Styles, who stands out with his boundary-pushing style, has put a focus on inclusivity and product formulation. In November 2021 he launched Pleasing, a direct-to-consumer lifestyle and beauty brand that includes nail polishes, multi-use gloss and cream pigments that can be used on the eyes, lip or skin. Three new sex-inspired fragrances, produced with fragrance house Robertet and its perfumer Jérôme Epinettes, who has developed scents for Byredo, Atelier Cologne and Frapin, are currently in the works. Samples of the scents were included in all recent Pleasing orders as a way to reward its most engaged community, the brand told Vogue Business.
While the beauty sector is becoming more diverse when it comes to product development and representation in marketing, much of the progress has been made in colour cosmetics, Wharton’s Williams believes. There’s plenty of white space in fragrance, which has traditionally catered to Caucasian women, she says. Issues remain, such as the industry’s use of the term “Oriental” both as a scent classification and in marketing. “I don’t think that a 60-year-old woman will be buying Billie Eilish’s fragrances, or Harry Styles’s, who is bringing gender fluidity into the space,” says Williams. “There is a broadening of the traditional base of fragrance customers.”
“A lot of larger incumbents [in fragrance] are becoming less relevant,” agrees Alvarez & Marsal’s Schneidman. “You’re seeing a new generation of celebrities coming through, who have clear clout with mostly Gen Z and younger millennials. Their core demographic is people who are now just coming into money and have a future purchasing power.”
Finding longevity
For celebrities, it’s easy to get attention and drive short bursts of sales. Rihanna turned her 2023 Super Bowl appearance into the ultimate beauty marketing opportunity, when she paused during the 13-minute performance to touch up her makeup using Fenty Beauty’s Invisimatte Instant Setting and Blotting Powder. When American football coach Deion Sanders wore the Prime 21 sunglasses he developed for Safilo-owned Blenders Eyewear on the pitch last week, the company made $1.2 million in pre-orders in one day.
The challenge is longevity when the fragrance sector is already packed with offerings from pure players such as L’Oréal, Estée Lauder Companies and Coty, luxury houses including Chanel, Dior and Hermès, and the ever-growing pool of influencers launching their own brands. Large conglomerates are also looking to get in on the action: this month, Richemont formed a new beauty division and appointed a new CEO, as it seeks to scale fragrance. Kering launched its new beauty entity in February and in the summer acquired luxury perfumer Creed. “Fragrance at a higher price point has really good margins. There’s money to be made,” says Wharton’s Williams.
While celebrities want “something tangible that they can own”, too many dabble in the same territory, believes Alvarez & Marsal’s Schneidman. The fragrance market, in particular, is “completely oversaturated — without a doubt”.
To get it right, brands must observe the key changes in consumer behaviour and preferences, experts say. For example, today’s customers are no longer loyal to just one scent for years; they have a wardrobe of perfumes that they pick from daily to reflect their mood, the way they would with their clothes and accessories. By Far, which entered the fragrance category last September, has made this a core part of its strategy. Gender-neutral scents are also growing in popularity, with consumers moving away from historically popular floral or fruity smells, adds Williams. As a result, savvy brands are investing in a wider array of olfactory notes in their new products, she observes.
Those that do something different have a first-mover advantage. Schneidman notes the launch of Chamberlain Coffee by YouTuber Emma Chamberlain or Jessica Alba’s Honest Beauty, aimed at mothers and baby care. By finding a unique space that naturally translates with their brands, they have “a higher chance of being successful”, he believes.
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