When the air gets its own brand strategy

This week: Scent has long been part of how places make themselves memorable. Now we’re seeing it move more deliberately into food, fashion, hospitality and travel.

Fortnum & Mason built a fragrance into its Biscuitorium. The Savoy is putting Liberty’s Adelphi Sun into every guest bathroom. Etihad is carrying a signature scent through its lounges and cabins.

Once smell becomes part of a room, a journey or a shop, fragrance starts behaving less like an object and more like infrastructure. And the process can also work backwards: experience the scent in the hotel, then buy the candle that recreates it at home.

Elsewhere this week, the bottle itself is doing something interesting. M&S is selling 100ml eau de parfum for £22.50 while Harrods is adding new fragrances above £1,000, and five houses have recently put discontinued perfumes back into circulation.

The fragrance business is stretching in several directions at once.

The fragrance stories worth knowing this week →

Where fragrance is happening in London →

DedCool and Space NK are bringing Café DedCool to London for the UK arrival of Mocha Magic. The format follows the brand’s September New York Fashion Week push for the same fragrance, which included a temporary Café DedCool built around Mocha Magic.

Space NK now carries the scent exclusively in the UK. The London activation runs over two days at Shreeji News.

Australian body-care brand CIROA is taking over EL&N on Wardour Street for a one-day Vanilla-icious activation. Order the special latte or cake and the first 100 customers receive three full-size body products, with minis up for grabs through the day.

Maison Diptyque is offering complimentary personalisation at its New Bond Street maison, adding initials, a name, date or message to pieces bought in store.

Historian Will Tullett, author of Sniff: A History of Smells, joins Catherine Clarke, author of A History of England in 25 Poems, for an evening about using smell and poetry as routes into the past.

Neal’s Yard Remedies is running a guided aromachology session around its natural fragrance collection, looking at the relationship between scent and mood. Tickets are redeemable against purchases made during the event.

What we’re reaching for now →

Alice du Parcq’s new The Philosophy of Perfume joins the British Library’s The Philosophy Of… series, moving through perfume history, the psychology of smell, fragrance design and how we choose what to wear. Published this week in hardback at £12.99.

British Library

The ideas changing how we think about fragrance →

From a biscuit shop to an aircraft cabin, scent is becoming part of the architecture of a place. And the same smell is being packaged so we can take it home.

Fortnum & Mason sells biscuits, bakes on site and has commissioned a fragrance to make its Biscuitorium smell of biscuits. There is something rather wonderful about the air getting its own recipe.

Fortnum’s describes the result as a “warm, welcoming biscuity fragrance”. In an interview with LBB, DLMDD’s Hannah Crawford recalls testing formulations with Fortnum’s pastry chefs, brand team and CEO. Diffusers were concealed behind false walls, with the scent designed into the room as it was built.

And DLMDD has gone further than individual commissions. The company, best known for sonic branding, has now built Scent by DLMDD, a dedicated scent-branding agency that takes brands from an olfactory brief through fragrance creation to the places and products where that scent eventually appears. The Fortnum’s project starts to look less like an eccentric extra and more like a new piece of brand infrastructure.

We already understand this kind of stagecraft in a museum. At Jorvik in York, recreated smells help furnish the Viking streets. They belong to the story you have come to enter.

Across town, Outernet’s Now Trending space offers atomised scent alongside its screens and directional sound. Smell sits on the equipment list, ready to become part of whatever environment a brand wants to construct.

What has changed is that scent is no longer the flourish, it’s part of the fit-out.

Air Esscentials president Spence Levy told Trade Show News Network that scenting a standard hotel lobby can cost around $85 a month. At Connect Marketplace in Tampa, the company supplied different scents for the opening reception, conference area and meeting rooms. At lobby scale, ambient fragrance can now be bought almost like another monthly building service.

Hotels are taking the idea a step further.

Later this month, The Savoy will put Liberty London’s Adelphi Sun bathroom collection into all 263 bedrooms and suites: hand wash, shower gel and hand and body lotion made by LBTY Beauty specifically for the hotel. The same products will be sold downstairs at The Florist.

At Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, the movement already runs in the opposite direction. Since 2022, guests who associate a scent with their stay can buy a candle or diffuser designed to reproduce the hotel’s atmosphere at home. The hotel creates the scent memory; the product allows you to leave with it.

In the skies, Etihad is now introducing a signature fragrance across its lounges and aircraft, using the same smell at different points in the passenger journey.

A visible perfume bottle asks to be judged as perfume. A scented space can pass as the character of the place: warmth, a sense of welcome, or just something good in the oven.

Then somebody puts that character in a candle and sells it by reception.

The air has become part of the merchandise.