‘It’s the brand speaking to you’: the scent firms making smells for Subway, Abercrombie and more | Retail industry
When Dallas Pratt worked at an outpost of Aesop in an outdoor shopping mall outside Chicago, one of her and her co-workers’ favorite ways of drawing in new customers was making a concoction they called “sidewalk tea”. They would put a few drops of scented lotion in a cup of hot water, and then they would pour it on to the slab of concrete outside the shop. As the water evaporated, the smell of the lotion would fill the air. “It drew people in,” Pratt tells me. “They asked questions. They spent time.” And, crucially, they bought stuff. This isn’t a novel marketing trick: stores that sell items with distinctive smells, such as perfumeries and bakeries, have been pumping smells out into streets and shopping malls probably since the beginning of retail. But starting in the 1990s, sense marketing became a more organized discipline, and now dozens of firms exist to help store owners develop distinctive custom smells. But sidewalk tea, for Pratt, was also about creating an experience: “It was about hospitality more than …
