(This draw is closed. Please make sure not to miss Day 23…)Welcome to day 22 of my advent calendar 2014. Today, you can win a discovery set with 5 samples, your choice; just leave a comment here and you’re in. I hope that you like today’s advent animal posing.

We are coming soon to an end of this calendar; 24th of December will be the last day. Make sure to check in again Dec. 23 for a special treat again! Here, in the house of tauer, we go from busy to very busy mode the next two, three days. There are a couple of things that need to get done before the new year starts; like preparing orders from shops that need to ship early January and like trying to fill those idea bubbles that I came up with during the second half of 2014 with life and words and scents for 2015.

To be honest: Shipping (and invoicing) orders to retailers is not that fun, except maybe for the bookkeeper.

Working on bubbles for sure is, except maybe for the bookkeeper who sees money going down the drain. The problem with bubbles: Most of them bust. Be it financial bubbles, crazy ideas bubbles or just niche perfume bubbles. One bubble that sure worked this year was the rose flash idea (a 10 ml roll-on, rose, perfume, hmmmmmmm!) . Therefore, rose flash will be back early 2015, for sure.

But in the world of bubbles, that was an exception. Saturday, when shopping for the kids, I passed by the perfume counters in a couple of department stores. Here, in Zurich, “niche” spills over into department stores. That’s new. Department stores, here in Switzerland at least, are still busy places, with a lot of salespeople trying to help you find what you need. Guess what: I was cruising the world of “niche” there for quite a while. Nobody dared to talk to me. Not because I am tauer. I think it is because they are helpless when it comes to “niche” stories.

I think that’s the difference to (just picking one perfumery here) a place like Les Senteurs in the UK. And I think it is very important that we all begin to understand: You cannot expect to find “niche” in a duty free like environment and at les Senteurs at the same time. I mention this because I get a lot of questions from perfume lovers why my creations are  not available in duty frees.

And if you do, then something’s wrong.

Anyhow: “Niche” is in quotation mark here because of a couple of things. And exiting this particular department store with a nice non scented gift for one of the kids I said to myself: This is the beginning of the end!

This is a bit a pessimistic post: Sorry. But the happy end note is: I am not worried at all, as I do things differently here.