BLACKBIRD FOR JULY

The Northwest Indie Perfumers Circuit will continue after a hiatus of two months with a big bash at the Blackbird Apothecary in Seattle to launch my Blackbird fragrance, made especially for them. It’s going to be a celebration of summer in the Pacific Northwest, the dry season when days last almost until midnight and a walk along the country paths and roadsides brings a flood of tangy, sun-warmed evergreen leaves and cedar wood, sun-dried fields, and the unmistakable smell of ripe blackberries.

I envision a sleek blackbird, feathers iridescent in the sun, white eyes popping out greedily as he gorges himself on the big, juicy, sweet fruit, singing his heart out between messy bites. It’s not going to be a sweet gourmand, but rather a fruit-tinged woody scent.The materials that I’m using start with a suite of woody base notes along with a little compatible musk. The dominant material is fir balsam absolute, which is a real pain to work with but worth every curse bestowed on it as I try to weigh it, get it solubilized to the point where I can actually use it, and then clean up its sticky residue. It’s one of the warmest and most delicious of the natural wood materials, giving exactly the sunny atmosphere I’m looking for in Blackbird. Dry, sun-warmed soil and baked grass will be added on top of the woods, and then come the blackberries, created through a tincture of freeze-dried fruit, fruit extract, and some other fruity notes to enhance the whole thing and make it pop.

The Blackbird fragrance will launch the new look of my bottles, too, with sleek printed-on labels and a new bottle cap design. I’m really excited to finish this fragrance, work on packaging, and plan the event itself. Stay tuned for more information about the July event if you’re in the Seattle area, and special Blackbird-related promotions if you’re elsewhere in the universe.

The actual event will take place on Saturday, July 13, from 6:00-9:00 (or whenever they decide to kick us out!) at Blackbird in Ballard, 5410 22^nd Avenue NW, Seattle, WA, 98107. It’s free, there will be good things to eat and drink, and a chance to check out this hip shop. 

THE EMANCIPATION OF JASPER AND THE MAKING OF A FELINE PERFUMISTA

Just when we had made up our minds not to have another cat, Jasper appeared on our doorstep and in our lives. It wasn’t as if he just showed up out of the blue, as his predecessor had done, walking calmly out of the woods one day after living on his own for an indefinite period of time. Michael actually found him intentionally. After Rosy died, we started seeing critters in our yard. Most bothersome were the opossums and rabbits that came at night to eat the veggies from our garden. Michael found out about a cat whose owner was moving to California, and couldn’t take him with her. We discussed the need for a “guard cat” to keep the wild animals at a distance, and agreed that it would probably be a good idea. He went to interview Jasper, and they hit it off.

Jasper Rasputin Kathan arrived at our house in December in one of those plastic pet carriers. The first thing to come out was his huge head, followed by an equally huge body. I have no idea how he ever managed to squeeze into the carrier. He proceeded to frantically rub against every object in the room as if he needed to take charge and immediately wipe out all olfactory traces of his predecessor. He never seemed to question the fact that he was coming to live with us. He said goodbye to his previous owner, and that was it. After the marking frenzy, his next order of business was to eat a huge quantity of food.

Up until the time Jasper came to our wilderness-farm, he apparently had led a sheltered life, mostly in the house with short excursions into a city back yard. I think he was intimidated by the vastness of his new kingdom. It was two weeks before he would venture upstairs, and only now, after nearly 6 months has he started venturing into the woods unaccompanied.

Jasper has long, dense fur, with an impressive mane. The collar he wore when he arrived obviously bothered him, because he kept scratching at it, trying to remove it. After a week he was comfortable enough with me to let me take it off. This was the ritual of the emancipation of Jasper. At that point he became a free farm cat. Within that first week he also learned to use the cat door so that he could come and go as he pleased. At first he spent most of his outdoor time on the back deck, but has gradually expanded his horizons to encompass at least half of the property, maybe more. One of his favorite activities is running full tilt and jumping out of the woods at us when we’re outside. We haven’t seen a critter in the yard since he’s been here. He may have no hunting skills, and a “mew” that sounds like a newborn kitten, but a 20-pound Maine Coon cat looks scary enough to make anything from a shrew to a raccoon run the opposite direction.

What has surprised me most about Jasper is his apparent love of perfume. Whenever I’m working in my studio he comes and hangs out, as if he wants to help me. When I’m testing materials, he comes and sniffs them, his nose quivering at a million miles a minute. When I’ve filled my big black transport bag with fragrant packages to mail, he comes and lies down on the bag, or next to the bag. If I put perfume on my wrist, he always checks it out. He shows an inordinate, obsessive amount of interest in materials that I’m tincturing, and I’ve had to double-bag and hide some tinctures to keep him away from them.

The most surprising evidence that Jasper has become a hard-core perfumista happened last night. I put a tiny dab of pure, high-quality oud on my wrist as a special treat after a long, hard day. Within less than a minute Jasper came running as fast as he could. He sniffed and sniffed at my wrist, obviously in olfactory heaven, and then started licking the oud oil off! I had no idea that oud would appeal to a cat. I think I should appoint Jasper as my official oud tester!

If you have a cat, does it pay any attention to perfume? If so what is its reaction? 

WELCOME SUMMER!

The ebb and flow of academic life creates its own seasonal pattern, much like the seasonal patterns in nature, primitive cultures, and farming communities. Last week was the final week of classes and the official beginning of professors’ three months of summer unemployment. The financially lucky ones take on a temporary job funded by a federal agency through their grant(s) and spend a luxurious three months concentrating on their research. Others dig into their meager savings account to pay the mortgage and buy groceries, hoping that the summer doesn’t bring any major house or car repairs or other expensive disasters. The pre-tenure people and the post-tenure masochists continue working their butts off as usual, without pay, while the hedonists take the summer “off” to regroup and write.

In any case, having a 9-month salary and benefits is infinitely preferable to being one of the increasing crowd of poorly paid and horribly exploited part-time faculty who are in the precarious position of being hired by the semester or quarter to teach undergraduates, often at multiple institutions.

When I started writing this post, I intended it to be a joyous ode to the beginning of summer, but maybe I was influenced by the fact that the weather today is cold and cloudy rather then the beautiful warm sunshine we’ve had for the past week or so. In any case, Thursday evening after teaching my last class of the year and attending the last faculty meeting, I collapsed and slept for a full 12 hours. When I woke up, I suddenly felt restored to a near-normal state, and ready to launch into my summer activities, sort of a mini death-and-rebirth experience.

The onset of summer has brought all kinds of little gardening treats. The tuberoses that I planted last year have come up again, stronger than before, so there’s hope for them. We ate the first artichokes from the garden yesterday. They were tender and delicious, better than anything I’ve had from the store.  Cherries and strawberries are getting ripe. The outdoor garden orchids are all in full bloom, as are the peonies and roses. Yesterday I bought a star jasmine plant in full bloom, and will be adding it to the garden as soon as I decide where to put it.

In the greenhouse, there are distinct olfactory contrasts. Angraecum didieri is blooming with its powerful, gorgeous, tropical white flower nocturnal fragrance, and Rhynchostylis coelestis is emitting its lilac-like daytime fragrance for a 24-hour perfume fest. The Rhynchostylis is one of those orchids that has bluish-colored flowers, something fairly unusual among orchids.

As a counterpoint to the lovely floral perfumes from the orchids, I’ve had a Stapelia hirsuta blooming for the past week or so. A Stapelia is a type of South African succulent plant that looks vaguely like a spineless cactus. When the bud first appeared, I was amazed at its size, and was even more amazed when it started to open, revealing a zebra-striped flower covered with long, maroon-colored hairs. Then the flower started to emit its fragrance. It smells exactly like rotten meat, obviously to attract flies to pollinate it. I think the scent lure was effective because there were some big flies expressing an interest in it. Who knows – maybe it will produce a fruit and seeds to go into my collection of other seed-grown baby cacti and other succulents.

WINNER OF THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY DRAWING

The random drawing for the Perfumer's Perfumes Discovery Set

took place this morning, as usual, with little wads of paper well-shaken and drawn blindly. The winner is: MARLA.

Congratulations!

CHANGES COMING ROUND PART 2: BOTTLES

Sometimes trying new things is a good idea and sometimes it turns out not to be so good. This has certainly been the case when it comes to perfume bottles. It’s really hard to find interesting and fully functional bottles off the rack. All of the really unique and/or attractive ones that you see in stores are custom designed and manufactured, with minimum orders far beyond anything a small-scale indie perfumer could afford or use. Unusual-looking bottles are also available ready-made, on a wholesale basis, from manufacturers in China, but they’re generally ugly and cheap-looking and reportedly tend to malfunction in every conceivable way. I haven’t been tempted to try them.

What I was tempted to do was to buy a bunch of 5-ml spray bottles with metallic gold and silver cases (above photo) from a US supplier I hadn’t used before. They cost less than the sturdy shiny black or red ones I’d been using, and supposedly held more juice, 7.5 ml to be exact. Once I started using them, though, I discovered that they might be able to hold 7 ml or so if one were able to fill the glass interior bottle all the way to the brim, but that if one left enough space to accommodate the rather bulky spray mechanism and screw it on, the available space was back down to about 5 ml. Something ventured, nothing gained.

The other thing I didn’t like about these bottles was the fact that the outside casing was designed to make them look like they hold more than they actually do. Like a lot of packaging, they feature a big exterior box with a small interior container, and take up more packing space than they need to. A couple of the sprayers on the testers didn’t work properly, and there was no way to test the unsprayed ones before shipping. I didn’t get any complaints about malfunctioning sprayers, and I hope no one got one, but I’d like to minimize that possibility in future.

I’ve gone back to the old model 5-ml sprays with a sturdy glass bottle, a shiny black casing, and a better quality sprayer. I’m holding a special sale to sell off all of the old model sprays, including testers, so that I can completely transition to the new bottles.

The other mistake I made was ordering a lot of 30-ml spray bottles from the new supplier as well. They’re basically functional and attractive, but the sprayers seem lower quality than those from my old supplier. The cost is about the same. I just used up the last of the “new” 30-ml bottles and have transitioned back to the better ones. The difference probably isn’t immediately obvious to the consumer, but I hope the sprayer will be more reliable with long-term use.

 Over the next year or two, I have plans to change my labeling from the stick-on labels that I currently use to labels printed directly on the bottles. These will look nicer, be more resistant to damage, and make my life easier since I will no longer have to print, cut and apply labels. Getting them all done is a far away dream, but I’ll be starting in July with the special edition that I’m making for Blackbird, a Seattle boutique specializing in men’s clothing and fragrance and will make the transition one fragrance at a time.  

Upgrading my packaging has been a continuously ongoing, trial-and-error process over the entire three years that I’ve been in business.  A major makeover is one of the goals, and I’m sure that, even if it doesn’t all get completed, at least some headway will be made on this project over the coming year. I know that quality packaging is an important aspect of perfume, and will be doing what I can, as I can, to make sure that the packaging better reflects the quality of what’s inside. 

[Fountain of Youth painting by Lucas Cranach, 1546] 

THIRD ANNIVERSARY AND CHANGES COMING ROUND: PART 1 - SAMPLES

It’s hard to believe that this blog celebrated its third anniversary this month. Somehow those milestones are starting to just slip by without my noticing. The blog is starting on its fourth year now, and I’m finally coming to grips with the fact that it’s OK if I don’t post something every day, as long as I do it fairly regularly, when I have something to say, the time to say it, and the mental discipline to sit down and actually do it. At this point there’s a certain amount of mild momentum going on, it’s all working reasonably well, and I plan to just keep on doing what I’m doing blog-wise over the coming year.

Olympic Orchids Artisan Perfumes will be three years old in July, and that’s where the changes will happen. It seems like I just started with the perfume-making process and am still in the infant stages of learning about production, packaging, marketing and everything having to do with the business end of things. I keep experimenting, finding that what works at one stage becomes maladaptive at the next stage, and I need to rethink processes, products, and presentations. Here are a few of the changes that I’ve made, or plan on making.

Samples

Formulating fragrances is the easy part of the process. As a perfumer who does everything myself, the hardest task is making samples. It’s tedious work labeling and filling all those tiny vials, but it has to be done. I keep changing the way I label and package the smallest, 1-ml samples, trying to find the best way to present them. I finally broke down and bought a label maker that spits out the stick-on labels that go on the vials. That’s great, but what I found was that when the vials were packaged next to each other in my storage bins or in a plastic bag, the tiny bit of exposed adhesive on the edge of one label would sometimes stick to the adhesive on the label of its neighbor, causing the labels to try to pull each other off the vials. No one complained about this, but I’m sure it must have happened to customers, not just to me.

The solution I’ve come up with, at least for the immediate future, is to put each sample in a tiny labeled baggie of its own, so the sample is double-labeled, once on the vial and once on its baggie. One of my pet gripes is with unlabeled sample vials that are on a card or other container, so that once taken out of their wrapping there’s no way of knowing what they are. Another gripe is with samples that are labeled with the name of the fragrance, but not the brand, or the brand but not the fragrance. I put both on each vial and each baggie.

With 28 different fragrances in production (how did that happen?) it’s no longer practical to send out sample packs of everything. For the 1 ml vials, customers can now order individual single samples, 5-sample packs, or 10-sample packs. I’m still selling the 16-sample deluxe variety pack of 2-ml screw-top bottles (photo on left), but will probably discontinue it once I use up my current supply of little bottles.

Because many people prefer larger spray samples I’ve added several boxed discovery sets containing 5 or 6 samples in 3-ml glass spray bottles, each with its own theme (Just Orchids, Scents of Place, etc), and these have been very popular. I just put together a special Father’s Day discovery set containing the 6 most popular fragrances with a “masculine” tendency.

One thing that struck me at the Seattle Artisan Fragrance Salon earlier this month was the number of people who wanted to mix and match samples from several of the pre-made discovery packs. To accommodate this desire, I’m going to add a “build your own” discovery pack of 6 spray samples.

As the queen of sample hoarders (I have a library of over two thousand!), I’m very much aware of the need to have a good sampling program. I try to keep costs down, more or less covering materials and my own less than minimum wage work producing them, thinking of them as sort of a hybrid between advertising and a commodity for people to purchase and enjoy.  Shipping of samples is free within the US, and a nominal amount internationally, and will stay that way unless postage rates go up dramatically. All orders for full bottles include a pack of free samples.

I thought I would cover everything in this post, but just talking about samples is filling up what seems like all the available space in a single post. If any of you have suggestions, please leave a comment. What kind of samples do you like? How do you like them packaged? What else can you tell me that would improve my sampling program? The spray sample discovery sets were in response to a customer’s comments, so this sort of feedback is important.

If you leave a substantive comment, you will be entered in a random drawing for a Perfumer’s Perfumes Discovery Set. 

[Both third birthday cake images from Wikimedia]