Selling men’s fragrances online is a tricky proposition for any digital retailer. The reason is simple and transparent — you can’t smell it first — and since quality fragrances tend to be relatively pricey — few men are willing to take a gamble on something they might think stinks (literally and figuratively).
We hop into this as we’ve just added some new, luxury and cult-like fragrances to groominglounge.com. You may ask, why given the above statements we would do so? That’s a fair question. To be honest, we’re still trying to determine exactly how much “scents” it makes at an online destination (our stores are a different story obviously as guys can spritz and sniff as much as they want).
Well, when it comes to online fragrances, you really have two options for generating sales (and we don’t think we’re revealing any trade secrets by letting people know we’re interested in selling stuff — as long as it’s quality):
- Carry high-profile, well-known fragrances that are uber-established. Ones that everyone knows what they smell like and you don’t need to test before you buy. Think Polo, Drakkar (you know you wore it to your prom), etc. Good stuff, but probably not what the Grooming Lounge stands for.
- Carry brands that offer you up a crap-load of samples so you can send them out to existing customers with the hope that they’ll spray, love the scent and come back and buy some.
Well, what we’ve done is none of the above. We’ll see how this works we guess. We’ve formed fragrance partnerships with brands that while first-rate, aren’t the ones you’ll see with full page ads in GQ. They aren’t the ones being knocked off by Designer Imposters (you know the knock-offs available in the drug store) and they aren’t real mainstream.
These fragrances are ones that have a niche, stand out, offer something different, but at the same time are tried and true. Basically, our crew thinks these products have style and smell great. You didn’t wear them to your Sadie Hawkins dance, but some well-groomed stud is definitely wearing them on his personal Gulfstream right now.
Here are our new ones and based on some sales moving forward, we’ll see just how much “scents” it makes to expand our fragrance lineup. Feel free to scratch and sniff the products on your personal computer if you have the new version of Windows:
