The DFL Blog

Okay, so it’s my turn to post a blog entry.  I figure I’m going to make this about nothing.  Not the nothing that tears couples apart, nothing’s the matter, nothing’s wrong, not that nothing.  That’s too serious.  I’m talking the kind of nothing that doesn’t really matter.  That nothing when you call your best friend on the tele and ask ‘What are you doing?’, and they say ‘Nothing.’  When you run into someone you know somewhere and they ask you ‘What’s going on?’ and of course you reply ‘Nothing’.  When you happen upon an old acquaintance and you both ask each other ‘What’s new?’ even though you know they’re going to tell you ‘Nothing.’.  That kind of nothing.

I’m sitting here after a long day’s work (which, truthfully, never really ends when you’re part of a small business like Demeter.  I can see the email flashes while I type this entry), I’m watching the hockey game (once again the Islanders didn’t even make the post-season) ; the Mets are losing (again) (thanks to PIP and last channel recall, I can keep my eye on at least three games at one time even though I only have two eyes), the third game’s basketball playoffs (which to me, just isn’t the same basketball that it was when I was really a big fan and into basketball, as in playing when I wasn’t watching),  listening to my son’s pitter-patter rain down from his bedroom above (even though he went to sleep at least two hours ago, I’ve no idea what he’s doing up there) while I listen to Head Hunters (a 1973 release by Herbie Hancock) and can’t believe the sounds emanating from the winds whipping around outside (occasionally, distracting me from all these other nothings by blowing so hard the house is creaking), typing with one hand so I can sniff a glass of wine (and with a schnozzola like mine, it’s really more like ‘breathing’) which I just love to drink while I eat a pear late at night (I don’t know, go figure), and speaking of schnozzolas, I just have to wonder Who Wants To Smell Like A Tootsie Roll? (and, by the looks of it, there’s quite a few of you out there, thank you for the orders!!!), and . . .

So, there you have it.  That kind of nothing.  That’s what I’m thinking about right now; nothing.  That’s exactly what I am doing right now.  Nothing.  There’s nothing going on and I’m up to, well – nothing.  I suppose I just have nothing to say in today’s blog entry.  So, until next time, here’s to nothing!

Today I found this in my mailbox:

I love your products!  I know this is a little wacky, but have you considered a menthol fragrance like “Vicks.”  I love the smell of menthol and also anything with mint in it!!!  

Talk about lessons on scent memory.  My ex-wife, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, used menthol and eucalyptus cough drops all the time.  Steve Martin has a Chap Stick habit?  My Ex had a cough drop habit.  And to this day I cannot smell that cough drop menthol and eucalyptus scent without a major reaction bordering on an involuntary shudder.

I consider myself fortunate that I do not think it could pass the wearability test, so I am off the hook.  If it could pass the wearability test, then I would have a philosophical, if not an ethical dilemma, deciding whether to refuse to make a scent because my memory of this scent is unpleasant.  If it were deemed wearable, my decision would bump right up against our polestar of choice and individual expression in personal fragrance.  My gut is that to be true to the Demeter ideals, if we believe a scent would be commercially successful, but I do not like it personally, we should make it.

That said, I am glad I dodged the bullet on this one.

The relationship between scent and memory is a core part of the foundation upon which Demeter is constructed and is a critical aspect of what Demeter has become. Let me explain.

There is a ton of research indicating that the strongest sense memories are produced by our sense of smell. That fact, together with the Demeter perspective of developing scents based upon real life object and experiences makes Demeter completely different from any other fragrance house, because together, those elements make Demeter the most personal fragrance experience commercially available.

Why do I call it the most personal fragrance experience? Because almost all design and prestige fragrances are aspirational, meaning you may not be able to buy the $1,000 pair of Gucci leather pants, but you can afford $50 for the fragrance, and by doing so, you are “putting on” the Gucci lifestyle. Or Calvin Klein. Or Ralph Lauren. Or your favorite celebrity. But not so with Demeter.

With Demeter, the choice is yours. You choose a scent that makes a personal statement about you. Moreover, the nature of your choice is not always immediately apparent. Indeed, the reason for your choice may be shared with just those you choose to make the underlying statement known to. For example, you might choose to wear Poison Ivy because it reminds you of the best summer camp days. For me, it might mean working in my yard, or the time a bully chased me through the woods and he contracted a case of poison ivy but I did not. The point is Demeter is an intensely personal statement, and that is a very sophisticated concept. We demonstrate this in radio projects where I do an interview with the man on the street asking for the person’s associations with a particular Demeter fragrance we ask them to smell. Ask five people about the same scent and you will usually hear five radically different sense memories-and therefore, five different reasons to want to wear that particular scent.

Many of the suggestions for fragrances I get from are based on just such sense memories, and the very particular and personal associations they involve. The passion and power of those sense memories are often obvious to me when I read the suggestions. Indeed, it was a scent suggestion today from Allison that inspired today’s blog :

As a part-time beekeeper, one of my favorite smells of all time is opening a beehive on a warm spring day. The smell of beeswax would be the primary fragrance, mixed with that of honey/ripening flower nectar, new lumber (from the wooden hive itself), and possibly a hint of wood smoke (from the smoker used by beekeepers).

I’m smiling as I write this! It’s a great thought on a January day in Minnesota (currently with a -30 degree wind chill).

What smell would make you smile when it is -30 outside?

Among other things, I realize what a terrible blogger I am. I mean, “Occasional” is one thing. Once in three weeks is simply not engaged, and I do so want to be both engaged and engaging. Oh well, let’s settle for trying to add some rigor to the posting schedule henceforth.

I was going to write about international business today, but I think I will hold that off for another post. Instead, let’s talk about charity events.

I hate to be cynical about charity, because there are so many good people out there, working hard to put these events together and to make them attractive enough for people to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a plate to attend. Yes, we are willing to overpay because it is charity, but even within that inflated sphere, you had best deliver relative value if you want to exceed last year, and have a shot to succeed again next year. It would be a mistake to confuse non-profit with non-competitive: at least with other charitable events. They are still competing for your entertainment dollar, albeit with a twist.

All of which is a lead in to the number of requests we get to contribute product to gift bags supporting charitable events. How many requests, you ask? About one a day. And most of these are not of the “Can you give a gift basket to the silent auction” variety. They are for 300, 400 or more pieces of full sized products for gift bags at events that can cost $1,000 or more a plate. And almost everyone is a worthwhile cause that people have given their time and money to support to make the world, and their communities, a better place to live. How do you say no? But how do you say yes? We can only make about 2,000 pieces a shift, and most of the year, we run a single shift. Give away almost 20% of our production and you could simply close the doors.

We have handled it with a couple of guidelines :

• Focus locally: If it is not in the tri-state area (we are based outside NYC) or the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania (where our factory is located) it has to really capture my imagination

• Think small: We do not do large events (300 gifts+) unless it is a charity with which our personal interests are aligned

What that has worked out to is that we provide a lot of support for a few local charities, primarily :

• Multiple Sclerosis, because that has hit very close to home and very young, at that. We primarily support the Long Island chapter because that is where we live, although both my adult daughters are active in the NYC chapter, and we also help them on occasion.

• Hope & Heroes Children’s Cancer Fund, because my daughters are both deeply involved, it is local, they are also tied into the New York Mets (one of my passions outside of fragrance – we have had season tickets since 1988), and well, it is kids!

The things we tend to support beyond those are just things that, for whatever reason, resonate. Over the weekend I received one from Emily to help an animal shelter, I do not even know where yet. Now I like animals as much as the next guy, maybe more. I mean, we are up to seven cats, two of whom were rescues, and two dogs, both rescues from physically abusive situations, but I am one of those people who tends to focus on people issues when it comes to charitable giving. We cannot help everyone, so I would rather help people (the background noise is my son Seth, and his significant other, Marissa, disagreeing). Setting all that aside, however, how could I not reach out to help Emily, who wrote this :

“I was brainstorming with my friend Jose Cuervo recently and I was wondering if there is a way I could set something up to use Demeter products at one of my fundraisers…”
Well, you just KNOW we just have to find a way…

Demeter has always encouraged our customers to create their own personal fragrance statements by mixing, matching and layering our single note and single experience fragrances. Indeed, even changing the order of the layering will create a different olfactory result. Yesterday I received an email from Matthew G., who suggested the concept of Perfect Match, the idea of mixing Demeter scents to create an entirely new object, and proposed a few of his own to get things started:

Caramel Cinnamon Buns: Caramel and Cinnamon

Movie Theater: Popcorn, Dust, Bubble Gum, and maybe Rubber or Tarnish

Playing in the Grass: Dirt, Grass, and Dandelion

My own Perfect Match could be called “Backyard Stogie”: Humidor layered on top of New Zealand, layered on top of Dirt.

What’s your Perfect Match? I have started a topic in the Demeter Forum at www. DemeterFragranceBlog .com/bb . That would be a great place to share these ideas. Please register and share your thoughts. It is also a place to suggest and discuss new fragrance ideas, in addition to writing to me directly at Scent Suggestion @DemeterFragrance .com.

Just another day in the never-a-dull-moment of entrepreneurial living. After four lovely days off, I came back to the office to find:

1. 2 of our 3 phone lines are not working
2. The factory ran out of heating oil over the long weekend and we cannot manufacture today. This is especially aggravating, because I maneuvered our entire Holiday schedule to give everyone a long weekend, accommodate taking year-end inventory (Friday and Saturday), and still allow us to:
1. Ship orders for Italy and Switzerland that have to ship today, regardless of the cold, and
2. Manufacture emergency orders for Sears Canada and Korea, both of which should ship by January 4^th, but that must ship by January 7^th.

Unfortunately, there was nowhere in that very tight schedule to LOSE A DAY OF PRODUCTION. Nor does it accommodate all the physical work and paperwork required to prepare for inventory, close the 2007 books, open the 2008 books, prepare all new order forms and selling materials (something we have to do 2 to 4 times a year to support new products), - you get the picture.

While this may not be a busy time from a retail selling perspective, there is a ton of work to do, both in manufacturing and shipping, and administratively, to get ready for 2008. Now we have to do it without the factory and only one phone line.
If I were a drinker, today would most definitely be a multiple-martini luncheon. Jeez, 4 days of calm up in smoke in an hour . . .

Because Christmas falls on a Tuesday this year, we decided to do something we rarely, if ever, get to do; we closed Christmas Eve day and made a 4-day weekend out of it. As an organization, we needed it. Business stayed strong right up through Friday, and it feels like our entire organization has been running 100 miles an hour for the past 6 weeks to try and accommodate everyone’s gift needs for the Holidays.

We do our best with our limited resources, and this year the entire organization really pulled hard through the season, our most successful to date. Even with that, I know everything will not go perfectly; there will be someone, somewhere, who does not get the right thing or a gift will not arrive on time. I am sure there will be problems to solve, angry customers, and all the issues associated with closing the books for one year and starting another when we return to work on Wednesday. Having said all that, it is time to kick back for a couple of days and enjoy the success we achieved this year before we get ready to fight the battle again next year. Because in another week, there will be a new, clean set of books, and each week, each month, and for the year, we will have all new goals-and what we accomplished, or did not accomplish in 2007, will not matter so much.

It is also a time for reflection; I think it is natural to be a bit introspective at the end of one thing and the beginning of another, and the change from one year to another most certainly qualifies. While it is not New Year, I guess I am, nevertheless, in a reflective state.

So the happiest of Holidays to all of you. Thanks for making 2007 such a great year for Demeter. I hope we amazed and surprised you a few times, and did not disappoint, or at least not too much or too often, either with our scents or service.

It is now five full years that we have owned Demeter Fragrance Library, and when I look at what we have accomplished, there is little I would change. If I could have found a smoother road to get to this spot, and if I could have made less mistakes along the way, the journey might have been a bit less stressful and painful. But I would not trade greater financial success, or less stress, for the opportunity to achieve my primary goal; to wrap my work around my life, not my life around my work.

There is no substitute for being able to take the kids to school in the morning, for being there to greet them and help with homework in the afternoon, or to attend a little league practice or a dance class, or being able to have a cup of coffee with my wife, Debbie, any time during the day I want to (or when she will let me interrupt her work…).

While I did get the gift I wanted this year - surround sound for the flat screen TV (Thanks, Deb!), the real gift is the one I have all year long: being able to do this fascinating work, including interacting with our Demeter customers, the people who “get” the Demeter concept, and still being able to be there, for and with, my family. If I had a Holiday wish, it would be to maintain that exquisite balance again in 2008.

Here is a little Demeter lore, about how some of our scents came by their unique names:

SEX ON THE BEACH: In 2002 when Debbie (my wife) and I bought the company, we were sitting at the counter in our kitchen smelling all sorts of Demeter scents, and fawning over how cool it all was, and how pleased we were with ourselves. I mean, who wouldn’t want to own the company responsible for fragrances with names like Dirt and Funeral Home? So one of our twin daughters, Lindsay, then 19 years old, was home from college and came breezing through the kitchen. Proud of our new-found hipness, I called her over to check out the scents, and handed her a bottle of Gin & Tonic. She took a sniff, thought it was great, and as she swept back out of the kitchen, sort of threw out over her shoulder that we needed something cooler and more “today”, like a Sex on the Beach cocktail. This, of course completely popped my bubble and made me feel very old, all at the same time. We immediately went out and created our Sex on the Beach fragrance, the first scent Demeter developed under our ownership. It has been our best selling fragrance since it launched in the spring of 2003, and remains so today.

FUNERAL HOME: This scent actually started out to be Flower Show. Now our founding perfumer personally did NOT like most white flowers so this was a tough fragrance for him to develop, so he consulted on it with co-founder Christopher Gable. When he first smelled this one, Christopher Gable exclaimed “It smells like my Grandfather’s funeral… Let’s call it Funeral Home!” So we did. And it well outsells Flower Show.

THIS IS NOT A PIPE: Pipe Tobacco was an early entrant into the Library. Sometime after the founders launched Pipe Tobacco (and before we owned the company), one of them became enamored with the art of Rene Magritte. One of Magritte’s best known works is a picture of a pipe, titled “This is not a Pipe”, designed to be both a play on words and the metaphysical truth, as the painting is a picture or representation of the pipe, obviously not the pipe itself. So too are Demeter scents olfactory representations of the thing, not the thing itself, and thus Pipe Tobacco also became This is Not a Pipe, a Demeter Fragrance Library tribute to Magritte.

I hope you enjoyed some of our stories about Demeter. I will post more lore, from time to time.

Running a small business in and of itself is a fascinating and frustrating proposition. There are just too many things to do and to keep track of than people to do them. So you set priorities based on what seems most important, or at least those things which seems to have the largest direct impact. This is simply following the Pareto Principle, or the 80 - 20 rule, which states that 80% of the effects are the result of 20% of the causes - best known as the rule of thumb that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers.

So you focus on that 80% and damn, if the other 20% doesn’t seem to find a way to bite you in the butt every time! Here is a story that started about 2 weeks ago.

Coming into the Holiday season we checked inventory levels on just about everything significant we use; perfume oils for fast moving scents, bottles, glass, pumps, caps, you name it. We were ready… except for one thing… inner shipping cartons.

In accordance with Pareto’s principle, about 80% of our sales come from colognes (and yes, about 80% of the cologne sales come from about 20% of the scents). When we ship colognes to a wholesale account, whether it is your local store, Sephora, Victoria’s Secret, or our Demeter distributor in Japan, we pack the colognes into small boxes, called inner shippers, which hold three of the same flavor of cologne sprays. Then we label the outside of the plain, white box with the name of the fragrance, so it can be received and identified in inventory without opening the box. I suspect many of the people who read this post will have ordered from DemeterFragrance .com at one time or another, and if you ordered at least 2 colognes, you probably received them protected inside one of these white inner shippers.

In the case of Demeter, which comes without secondary packaging (meaning there is no protective box or folding carton surrounding the fragrance bottle), the inner shippers are especially important. Without the inner shippers to protect them, it is all too easy for the caps and pumps to get damaged. So shipping without the inner shippers, especially for large, bulky orders going a long way is asking for trouble, and my experience is when you ask for trouble, you usually will get it.

So when I got an email from Seth, my son who runs the factory, that we had 12 boxes of inner shippers left, I absolutely panicked, and I think there was some yelling and screaming involved, too. Each box of inner shippers contains about 250 shippers, which can accommodate 750 colognes. Therefore, 12 boxes will pack out about 9,000 colognes. Here is the problem - it takes us about a week to make 9,000 colognes. Unfortunately, it takes at least 3 weeks to get new inner shippers, which are custom made to fit our bottle, pump and cap. This means we cannot properly pack and ship large orders properly for two weeks, during the last of the Holiday rush.

I will spare you the details, but basically two things resulted, as not shipping was simply not an option:
1. packing orders was far more labor intensive, and therefore far more costly, than normal. We had to hire extra people just to pack the goods we had already manufactured, and run additional overtime, as well. And additional packing supplies.
2. We had much higher damage claims from our international customers than normal, and we had to accept the claims without question-also a costly proposition.

Well, today the shippers came in, a week earlier than anyone could have reasonable thought possible (Thank You, Ares Printing!), and the crisis passed. But it made the period, always a challenging one from a manufacturing and shipping standpoint, that much more challenging.

And in a small business, it is always something, this was only the current crisis. I call them non-reoccurring reoccurring events, my own personal oxymoron, meaning that every month I am going to have a disaster of some sort, but I just can’t tell you exactly what it will be about yet. It’s coming; I just don’t know what it is yet, or when it will hit, but it is surely coming.

As a follow up to the scent suggestion post, I thought it might be interesting to see how I dealt with a swath of today’s suggestions from my inbox:

• Egg Cream: a good idea and a definite possibility for future development

• Wet Dog, Clams, Steamed Shrimp and Tacos: all fall into the category of “not wearable”. Our focus is on personal fragrance, so I require that everything we develop must be wearable as a personal fragrance. It is true that in the early days of Demeter we did some scents that were not wearable, but that is no longer the case, so developing these is highly unlikely.

• Thanksgiving: Demeter, as you know, focuses on real everyday objects about which there can be basic agreement regarding what they smell like. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is too interpretive. Your experience of Thanksgiving is likely to be very different from mine from an olfactory perspective. In short, Thanksgiving is one of those things that is too subjective to be the inspiration for a Demeter scent. And, I am thinking it could not pass the wear-ability test, either.

• Magic Marker-this is actually the kind of thing that is on the edge of wear-ability, but is cool enough for Demeter to make, but…the real problem here is the name itself. Unless you can call it Magic Marker, it does not mean much-no one gets juiced by Felt Tip Marker. In order to use the Magic Marker name requires a license. It is similar to our experience with Play-Doh, where we had developed the scent years before we attained the license and started selling the fragrance.

• Mimeograph scent: This is one we get asked for regularly, and it is possible we will develop this one day.