Fragrant greetings on this Friday, January 6, from Zurich. This Friday sees me writing a few commercial invoices for boxes that go into airplanes and fly over the seas and mountains over the weekend. It sees me on the phone, talking to retailers interested in my brand, and talking to suppliers who supply too slow, and this Friday sees me continuing trying to lay out a few facts and figures in Excel. And lay out the consequences: All fact based. Only cruel brutal number facts. No Andy in wonderland hopping around allowed.

I give you one example. We did these wonderful fragrant cards, printed, with relief, and soaked in the scent of Carillon pour un ange, individually wrapped in a little transparent bag, sealed. We used them to give these during the launch of the Carillon pour un ange, a little gift for clients, so they could take the scent with them home. And many orders, especially sample sets, leaving my house do so with one of these cards, with a hand written note on the transparent bag. (Sometimes, when giving free samples with perfume orders, I write on the back of the sample hanger directly.)

Anyhow: We put a good pile of money onto the table to get these scented cards done. We did thousands. We still have a few hundred and then they will be gone. I get a lot of mails, where perfume lovers tell me what they received and that they like this and that or did not like this and that. Not one word on these cards, though. I am not sure they were even used in the shops. And I saw on youtube once a video, one of these cool unpacking videos that I find thrilling like a crime story,  especially when they unpack my products, and I am sure the guy doing the unpacking did not even realize that the cards are scented…

Thus, fact based and without Andy hopping in wonderland: These cards were wonderful, a great design, a perfect encapsulation of the scent, but a failure. A complete failure. Too expensive, not understood, not used, never asked for by retailers. A simple printed card, printed in 10’000 pieces, for 1/20th of the scented card’s price would have done the job. Better. Because they would be understood. And appreciated.

This is what I do these days: I comb through my universe of bottles and caps and labels and cards and all the tools that we built. Many of which have worked wonders for my venture. Analyzing where I stand. Based on this Excel I will move on.  And the pendulum will swing back and forward at the same time.

Ah, and yes! I will start smelling my beloved apricot all natural oil in some seriousness, and maybe even do a little mix, thinking apricot, patchouli, rose. Ah… roses! In Excel, too.