What's a Fragrance Brief? - Charenton Macerations

What’s a Fragrance Brief?

I have to admit, aside from actual fragrance formulation, my favorite part of the development process has to be writing the fragrance brief. The brief is the blueprint, the underlying story you expect your scent to tell. A good brief not only includes notes for designing the olfactive story, but also any relevant inspirational pieces a perfumer and the rest of the creative team might use to begin formulating scent ideas. Without a coherent brief, there is no structure to the fragrance being created, no point of view. The brief gives the work direction… purpose.

Manufacturer vs. Creative: 2 Types of Fragrance Brief Design

Ultimately, there are two types of fragrance briefs: manufacturer and creative. The manufacturer’s brief is put together by the marketing team of a brand or company (i.e. Estée Lauder or Elizabeth Arden) and normally includes a fragrance profile (suggested direction of the scent, possible notes to include…), RMC (estimated Raw Materials Cost), the development schedule (typically about 18 months and pictured above), as well as any other supporting marketing materials available (packaging ideas, design concepts, communication strategy, etc…). This document is sent to the fragrance houses along with the initial request for submissions.

Creative briefs refer strictly to an internal fragrance house project. Sometimes also called “Blue Sky” briefs, they are drafted more openly, with no direct client in mind. Instead, the creative brief is a chance for a perfumer and his team to meditate on a particular source of inspiration, relatively restriction free. In many ways, the creative brief version is the haute couture of fragrance development, meant to inspire both the perfumer and perspective clients, though not always commercially viable to bring to market. Variations on these fragrance themes may be further translated into ready-to-wear scents for public consumption. However, oftentimes these are the scents forgotten in the back of a perfumer’s library, smelled only by a handful of people. An olfactive purgatory sometimes referred to as “The Wall of Lost Dreams.”

Over the years, I’ve written thousands of briefs of both types. The reason I enjoy the brief crafting process is because of its central connection to the overall scent story; it’s truly where a scent begins to make a statement. If the fragrance juice is the star actor on the set, the brief is the director controlling all the action from behind the camera. His job is to not only get the best possible work out of his star, but also to ensure continuity exists between the performances, the set, and the cinematography, and do so under the strict guidelines set by his production budget. The brief can also be viewed like a score for a music conductor, who then uses it to set the tempo and mood of the orchestra.

“Perfume has the power to persuade that is more convincing than words, than appearances, sentiment or willpower. You cannot say no to the persuasive Power of Perfume…” – Perfume, Patrick Suskind

Regardless of preferred metaphor, the point remains the same: crafting and executing a fragrance brief involves an awareness of not only how the fragrance is being composed (its olfactive profile and impact), but also an eye for the strategic path required to be implemented in order to connect with an audience of fragrance wearers (telling a compelling story that people identify with). Get the story wrong, set the wrong tempo, and risk altering the impact of your work irreparably. Get it just right, and potentially create an ethereal moment, a lasting fragrance memory that is embedded forever in the hearts of people it touches. For me, this is a moment of absolute beauty.

With notebooks full of brief ideas (good, bad, and some just plain strange), I thought it might be fun to share some of the different ideas I’ve worked on over the years. While in looking at each brief I may not be able to discuss every intricate detail of a project (confidentiality is and should be respected), I can none the less still supply a deeper look into a process normally kept from public view. It’s a chance to sneak everyone behind the stacks and see yet another interesting facet of the fragrance creative process.