marketing and branding

tauer goes shopping

That was a great weekend, sort of productive. I have been working on a formula that sits in Excel for a while now and tweaked it here and there a bit. Usually, during the week, I don’t work on formulas very much, at least not physically. I think about it and do the mixing over the weekend when I have time hoping that the perfume muse is working over the weekend, too.

This week will see me working a lot in the factory; I am looking forward to it and with temperatures down a bit it should be a touch more fun, too. Last Thursday, when I got the delivery of the next batch of tauerville bottles and stuff, it was more than 30°C there, and piling up those boxes and bottles was like …well: I was sweating like a horse. All these bottles et al. will have to be packed for air transport now. And that’s what I will do.

And some tauer perfumes packaging, too. For the ZEN feeling…

I also decided to do some countdown, starting in the coming days on my tauerville facebook page. Three, on tauerville’s facebook presence I have by today 3208 page likes. On the tauer perfumes facebook page I got so far 2825 page likes. It makes you wonder, right? Page likes are important because folks who like a page are more likely to see content that is published on that page. So there you go…Maybe I should devote a post or two on this topic, the facebook “like” economy. Interesting!

On the tauer perfumes side: I am getting mentally ready for autumn. And I bought a pair of sneakers. For the Pitti Frangrance fair 2015 in Florence. That turned into some sort of tradition and you can expect to see many shoe pictures on facebook then! I love that. There is something joyful and fun about it. It takes the seriousness out of Pitti and this od glamour world of perfumes and their creators and the folks selling them. You know: After I got my sneakers, I sneaked into the niche corner of one of Zurich’s larger department stores. By US standards you would be super amazed to see the brands there compared to “US department stores”. Compared to the offerings by stores like Twisted Lily or Tigerlily or others it is of course still a modest offering. The brands there: Everything that I consider industrial niche. You know them, no need to drop names here. What did I do there? Sniffing a few bottles, because I heard so much about this and that. I did not spray one scent on paper. It was all just to, well: standardized might fit to describe the offering.

And you know what: That’s perfectly fine. I mean….if you are a department store you need to sell. A lot. No time for complicated stories. My little side note is just: Please, please, please… stop calling it art.

So the sales rep of a particular brand asked me “do you know the scent”?

“Yes, I do”. I said.

“Ah”, she replied.

That was it. The communication ended there. If I was the brand owner of this particular brand: Get the sales rep back into school.

Another take home message there, in the department store: Not a lot of folks buying. In the niche area I mean. But at least there was a good crowd. This is great: There is a growing interest for different perfumes, also in Zurich, Switzerland. In the classical perfume theatre, where you find Chanel and others: It was amazingly quiet. Dead as a dodo. If I was brand owner of one of these classical brands: I would be worried.

Anyhow: It was a busy weekend, and I realized again, how much is going to happen in the next months. And the more I think about the more I see how well tauerville and tauer perfumes go together and how each of my scents complements and broadens the line of things that I offer. That’s why I picked today’s picture: I took it this morning in the living room, in a corner where I always put some of my pictures. I do so in order to see them daily and see what is good and what’s not so good about them. The pictures are very diverse in nature (watercolor soldier sitting over kitsch oil painting, a wolf hiding behind a pencil portrait of Ms. Merkel, and so one…but I can see a pattern there). In the mean time, I have so many that I need to do some serious thinking about what’s next and how to deal with the flow of finished pictures. The same is true for my scents (pipeline). But that’s another story.