The year 2023 was certainly an exceptional year for the events and trends that characterized it. Regarding our industry in particular, Karen Marin's article "The Niche/Artistic Fragrance Journey: Highlights of 2023 and Thoughts for 2024" does a rather thorough and comprehensive analysis and highlights for us the aspects to keep monitored during the year we are beginning.
One question arises for me from reading it, which is whether the major changes that the many M&As will bring will not limit the opportunities of brands, whether new entries or existing brands still in the development phase, that are characterized by great innovativeness and risk-taking propensity to come up with possible new trends that are decidedly far from the currently market-leading themes, even in artistic perfumery.
The growth in the turnovers of many independent brands that have become important references for artistic perfumery over time and are now being acquired by large investors or multinationals, if based fundamentally on a limited number of fragrances in the portfolio, risks tying the identity of the brands to the best sellers alone, which are increasingly promoted and communicated, and making the other wonderful and unique creations that in their varied complex are an expression of the creativity and innovativeness of the brands themselves, less and less offered.
The tendency to choose fragrances that are not widely distributed, very close to one's own personality and style that we have witnessed with much pleasure even under the pandemic, is likely to remain unfulfilled by these brands while the possibility of debutant or minor brands to be supported by a network of independent retailers capable of running a business based on a large number of very original slow movers seems to me to be progressively diminishing. The return to brick-and-mortar is certainly positive, but, as Karen points out, it manifests itself in an exponential growth of single-brand stores rather than in a harmonious and overall growth of multi-brand specialty stores.
As I often write, I believe that the innovative creations, which for decades the artistic perfumery has offered, have been extremely positive research and development that has always benefited the mainstream, which has been able to invest in new trends that had passed the test of the niche consumer by reducing the potential risk of launching certain fragrances new to the mass-tige consumer.
This is why 2024 will be a great test case to see that acquisitions will not lead to a reduction in courage to come up with unexpected new creations and that the spaces guaranteed to independent and highly original brands will not be drastically reduced in department stores and multi-brand stores. Let us hope that the new players with robust financial potential will not only seek immediate commercial success, but also support their niche brands' pursuit of quality and originality while always maintaining their own vital and coherent activities.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ESSENCIONAL.COM
Almost 4 years ago I started working with a team of passionate experts on a portal project dedicated to Artistic Perfumery. After many meetings, exchanges of ideas, evaluations on the complexity of the project and the resources that needed to be put in place, we came to the conclusion that it was time to take an extra step: add to our web listening and survey activities to monitor the sector in support of the educational and analytical activities that we managed for Esxence (and which in 2018 gave birth to the "whispers about artistic perfumery" survey), the website www.essencional.com which was born a year ago when the pandemic exploded.
A debut among the most complicated but which occurred perhaps at the most suitable moment considering how the internet and its services have assumed an even more important role.
Our Karen Marin details in her article what we started doing and how we integrated and developed our services.
As founder and editor I am particularly proud of what our team has achieved with the resources available and I sincerely hope that all of us have been able to make a valuable contribution to the wonderful sector of Artistic Perfumery and Beauty which, in my opinion, has a very bright future in front of it, also thanks to the creative personalities that are increasingly able to attract and involve.
A heartfelt thanks to all my team, which includes my daughter Giulia Levi, Chiara Toniello, Laurence Klove and Karen Marin, to whom most of the results are due and I sincerely hope you will soon meet in person in the next editions of Esxence but also on many other occasions in which essencional will certainly be present and a special thanks to our much appreciated audience of passionate readers.
Silvio Levi
Essencional's Director
EDITORIAL
When I started to deal with Artistic Perfumery in 1994, coming from a completely different environment and professional experience, I realized immediately that an identity of the sector did not already exist: the operators acted in a scattered order and a community was far from having been built, except for random groups of consumers and for some relationships between distributors and shopkeepers that went beyond just the commercial aspect.
In Italy, where in the last fifty years Artistic Perfumery has had more fertile ground to take root and grow, it was more than 20 years ago that some distributors began to organize events and moments where the industry could gather to compare, to think, and to meet, albeit with many budget limits due to the market size. After several years of intense work, mainly dedicated to the Italian market, we decided to create an event that had the objective of becoming a sort of hub for the sector and favoring the exchange between the various operators on an international level. Thus, Esxence was born in Milan in 2009. This small event celebrated its first 10 years in 2018, attracting over 8,000 visitors and more than 200 exhibiting brands from all over the world. In recent years the community has taken shape and the longstanding activity carried out during the Esxence workshops has highlighted the sector's problems, expectations, needs and viewpoints.
For this reason, starting from June 2017 I began to evaluate the idea of a portal dedicated to the Artistic Perfumery in a series of meetings with Sarah Colton that led on January 19 2018 to a meeting in Paris with a small group of people to examine what would be useful, interesting, and if not indispensable, what would support the sector and give it the opportunity to grow and develop internationally.
We therefore began a process of exchange of views, meetings and analysis of the possible services to be made available and to hypothesize an IT structure that could allow the gradual addition of resources and services.
In the 2019 edition of Esxence we presented the Essencional Study Center, founded and directed by me, and its first original production: a web analysis and a survey, created with the technical and analytical support of Develon Group, which represented the starting point to evaluate the state of the art and the needs of the sector.
Thanks to the direct or indirect involvement of many colleagues and friends, Essencional comes to fruition with its website where it begins to provide a service that we consider essential and the starting brick to build, little by little, the common home of Artistic Beauty in every sense.
In its apparent simplicity this project has required a lot of work and we are sure that it will be a very useful tool for the whole sector, reinforcing and giving even more substance to the community by sharing and making more visible information that is produced by sites, small or large, that deserve to be circulated due to the quality and seriousness of what is reported.
Today the operative group is made up of a core group of four people who you will get to know along with the external support of a number of very valid experts in the sector, our Advisors, whose participation in the project is voluntary and enthusiastic. This first-class parterre is destined to grow and lays the foundations for a sort of "virtual meeting place" from which we will also draw inspiration to define the themes of the workshops at Esxence, now coordinated by Essencional in support and in agreement with Esxence’s Organizing Committee. We will give voice to the follow-up of the workshops with original contributions that will be published on essencional.com during the year.
A huge personal thank you I have to address very warmly to those who created this site and now manage it: Karen Marin, Chiara Toniello and Giulia Levi. A job that has been done with passion and dedication for months, outside of daily commitments, in the evening or on weekends. As Director I was not able to be as close to them as I would have liked and if today my dream comes true, I owe it to their availability and professionalism.
It is my desire to also give recognition to those who participated in this adventure from their first steps and sat around that table in Paris. Each of them, whether still with us or not, has made a fundamental contribution to what is Essencional today and what it will be. A heartfelt thanks therefore to Karen Marin, Wouter Wiels, Helder Suffenplan, Ulrich Lang and the indispensable Sarah Colton, who acted as Project Leader as long as her personal commitments allowed it.
I hope this beginning is only the first step of a long and exciting journey.
Our commitment will be to ensure to the best of our ability that any useful contribution made to the development and diffusion of Artistic Perfumery and Beauty can be heard by the public and operators who have made this magic and exciting world their passion.
Silvio Levi
Essencional Director