How to start a perfume brand: from brief to first shipment

The four decisions to lock in first

Most fragrance projects that stall do so because the brief was never fixed. Before you talk to a manufacturer, settle these four things:

1. The olfactive direction. Not “something fresh” — a direction and a reference point. “A fresh woody scent for men in their thirties, closer to a citrus opening than a green one, with a warm base.” That is workable. The other one is not.
2. The concentration. This determines how strong the product is, how long it lasts on skin, and a large part of what it costs to fill.
3. The bottle format and volume. 30 ml, 50 ml, 100 ml — and whether you are choosing from existing moulds or paying for a new one.
4. The retail price point you are aiming at. This sounds backwards, but it is the single most useful constraint you can give a formulator. It tells them immediately which part of the ingredient palette is available to them.

Concentration: what the letters actually mean

The letters on a perfume box describe the proportion of fragrance oil in the liquid. The ranges below are conventional industry reference points rather than fixed rules, but they are a fair guide:

A higher concentration does not automatically mean a better product — it means a different product, at a different cost, for a different customer. Plenty of successful brands launch an EDT and add an EDP later once they know the scent sells.

The “make it smell like…” question

Almost every new fragrance brand arrives with a reference: a designer scent they want to sit close to. That is a legitimate starting point, and we use it. But there is a line, and it is worth understanding where it sits.

What we will do: develop our own formulation in the same olfactive family and direction, so your product appeals to the same customer.

What we will not do: reproduce another company’s trademarked brand name, logo, bottle design or protected packaging, or present a product as being that product.

This is not us being difficult. If your product is a copy, you have built a business on someone else’s asset, and the risk sits with you as the brand owner — not with the factory. More practically: a scent that is recognisably “that one, but cheaper” competes on price forever. A scent that is close in spirit but genuinely your own can be sold on its own terms.

How sampling really works

Sampling is where a fragrance project is won or lost, and it is the stage people underestimate.

A sample is a small batch of the finished formula, made the same way the production run will be made, and filled into a small bottle so you can wear it. You should judge it on skin, over hours — not on a paper strip, and not in the first thirty seconds.

What to expect:

• Expect more than one round. The first sample is a starting point, not a finished product. Two or three revision rounds is normal.
• Be specific with feedback. “I don’t like it” gives a formulator nothing to work with. “The opening is too sharp and the base fades within two hours” is actionable.
• Wear it for a full day before deciding. Fragrance changes on skin. A scent that is lovely for twenty minutes and gone by lunchtime is not a finished product.
• Ask what the sample is. Confirm whether the sample reflects the final packaging fill and the final ingredient cost, or whether it was made with a more generous palette than production will allow.

Packaging, and the trap in custom bottles

This is where budgets go wrong most often, and it has nothing to do with the scent.

Perfume bottles come in two varieties: existing moulds, which are cheap because the tooling has already been paid for by someone, and custom moulds, which you pay to create.

A custom glass bottle mould is a significant up-front cost and a long lead time, and it usually comes with a much higher minimum order because the moulding factory has to run a batch worth running. For a first launch, choosing an existing mould and differentiating through the cap, the collar, the decoration and the carton is almost always the better decision. You can commission a bespoke bottle for the second or third range, once you know the product sells.

The same logic applies to the pump, the collar and the carton. Each one is a separate supply chain with its own minimum order. A brief that asks for a custom bottle, a custom cap and a custom carton is three separate tooling projects, not one.

The thing nobody warns you about: shipping

Alcohol-based fragrance is classified as a dangerous good for transport. It is flammable, and that does not stop at the factory gate — it follows the product through every step of the journey, including the last one.

What that means in practice:

• Sea freight is restricted. Fragrance moves under specific dangerous-goods conditions, which limits which carriers will take it and how it must be packed and documented.
• Air freight costs more. It is priced and handled differently from ordinary cosmetics.
• Your samples are affected too. Sending a fragrance sample by courier often needs a dangerous-goods declaration. Couriers that will happily carry a cream may refuse a perfume.
• Some markets have their own rules. Alcohol-based products face additional import conditions in certain countries.

None of this is a reason not to launch a fragrance brand. It is a reason to plan the logistics before you commit to a delivery date, and to ask your manufacturer what documentation they provide. If you are also launching a skincare line, it is worth knowing that the two ship under completely different conditions.

A realistic timeline

Timelines vary enormously with how quickly you make decisions, but a straightforward project with an existing bottle mould typically looks like this:

The honest summary: the scent is rarely the slow part. The decisions are. Projects that move quickly are the ones where the brand owner knows what they want and answers questions within a day or two.

If you want to see how this fits together end to end, read our ten-stage development process, or look at what we manufacture on the perfume OEM page.