Coty Celebrates 120 Years of Fragrance Creation With Immersive Event
PARIS — To celebrate its 120th anniversary this year, Coty Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a multisensory happening in its birthplace of Paris that outlines the company’s timeline in the world of perfume.
Lasting three days, the immersive experience, called “Coty, A Fragrance Disruptor Since 1904,” is welcoming invited professional partners of the company, as well as journalists.
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Sue Nabi, Coty’s chief executive officer, said during an interview beforehand that she considered this as a great occasion to cull images, words, formulas and technologies to crystalize the company’s trajectory. Coty, she said, “started as an innovation company. In 1904, Fran?ois Coty wanted to create a flower that never fades.”
This idea for its first feminine perfume, La Rose Jacqueminot, was cutting-edge because it was composed of synthetic and natural notes, but also since it already had a performance attribute. Over the past four years Nabi has been focused on product performance again inside the group’s prestige division and, more recently, its consumer beauty branch.
“It’s a company that was creative, inventive,” added Nabi.
She highlighted that Coty birthed two of the biggest olfactive families in the fragrance industry, which today generate 40 percent to 50 percent of its overall sales. One is the modern-day chypre, an accord that mixes notes of bergamot, oak moss, patchouli and labdanum.
“It was a totally new way to compose a fragrance,” said Nabi. “This chypre family gave birth to most of the biggest successes of the ’90s, the years 2000s and [today].”
The amber accord can also be credited as a Coty creation, she explained. “It has a softness, not a dryness, that woody accords usually have,” said Nabi, who added ambery notes are currently included in many top scents in the niche perfume category.
Those fragrance families – and the Coty scents that kicked them off, such as Chypre and Ambre Antique, in their original bottles – are showcased in the first, “innovative origins” part of the happening. Their juices, including that of La Rose Jacqueminot, were reconstituted by perfumers for the occasion and waft in the room for visitors to experience.
Coty’s trailblazing gives Nabi pause for thought.
“It’s a responsibility — or an honor -— depending on how you see it, to continue this legacy and to take it into the future,” she said. “So we really wanted this event to be told as a story of the past, present and future.”
As such, in the “iconic scents of today and tomorrow” section, Coty homes in on some perfume icons it created through brand licenses. These include Musk for Women by Jōvan, from 1972, that was considered the first counterculture scent and was just relaunched in the mass market. Davidoff Cool Water, from 1988, and CK One, from 1994, were fresh and clean, but still long-lasting fragrances. CK One kicked off the gender-fluid movement, as well.
Boss Bottled, a 1998 launch, was marketed as the perfume of success. Adidas Ice Dive, out in 2001, was a pioneering long-lasting cologne, and it remains Coty’s number-one fragrance by units sold.
Daisy by Marc Jacobs was introduced in 2007. “It invented what I call today ‘figurative fragrances,’” said Nabi. “Usually, fragrances were quite minimalist, and then Marc came with this bigger-than-life daisy flower that was impossible to miss on shelves.”
Chloé eau de parfum, aka Signature, from 2008, is now being launched again, and a recent blockbuster is 2023’s Burberry Goddess, channeling empowerment.
Each of those scents springs to life in its own installation. Boss Bottled’s showed the inside of a closet, hung with Boss suits of the Nineties, as well as shirts and men’s accessories, such as watches and cufflinks.
The CK One area was composed of a pile of vintage TV screens that showed, for instance, the scent’s iconic fragrance ad spangling a bus, while Chloé’s was staged as a French café.
Guests could also peruse vintage Coty fragrance posters for the likes of L’Origan and Jasmine de Corse, see the associated original fragrance bottles and smell their scents.
Stéphane Demaison, vice president of olfactive development at Coty, described fragrance creation and led visitors through a sampling of widely used fragrance notes, such as orange blossom, vanilla and aldehyde, and how they’ve been used in recent product launches.
The “olfactory studio” highlighted how Coty mixes creativity and high tech. Important elements here are the sciences of performance, emotions and sustainable perfume. It was revealed, for example, the company analyzes people’s voices in describing a fragrance, but what’s unstated is as important as what is said.
“This event and this anniversary is really the great occasion to explain that this company is unbeatable, incomparable in its ability to fuse creativity hand-in-hand with the designers of the fashion houses, the ability to catch the mood of the moment…and at the same time the ability to bring innovation in an invisible way in terms of aesthetics, but in a very visible way in terms of performance,” said Nabi.
For her, the epitome of this is Infiniment Coty, which she cocreated with Nicolas Vu and melds science, art and emotion.
“This is really what I believe the future of fragrances is made of,” she said, adding that’s where quality is a given.
“What is most important is inside the bottle,” continued Nabi. “The concentrations are very high. It’s the most noble, ethically sourced and creative ingredients.”
The fragrances are long-lasting, as well, in the same vein La Rose Jacqueminot was back in the day.
The last room of the visit showcases the line of 14 Infinement Coty scents. They could be experienced wafting from oversized metallic flowers or from glass cloches.
When she began at Coty in 2020, Nabi felt it key to give substance to the company’s name.
“The substance cannot be a story, book or even a museum,” she said. “Substance is what is the essence of our business, which are beauty products. And what better than the fragrance could do this?”
It was a small — start-up-like — team of dedicated people that developed the Infiniment Coty line introduced in March.
“Which is the way I believe I am going to work more and more inside the company, because I am super happy about the outcome of this launch,” said Nabi. “These start-up launches do not enter into the big Coty machine.”
Infiniment Coty fragrances use proprietary Molecular Aura technology, allowing for each perfume to have a consistent scent on the wearer for about 30 hours.
Fragrance is Coty’s largest product category and the top-selling beauty segment worldwide today. That’s due to a host of drivers, including Generation Z and Millennials’ product preferences, other rising demographics’ love of perfume, as well as scents’ feel-good factor and growing performance.
“In a way, we are trying to write the next page of this fragrance index,” said Nabi, who describes perfume as an offer business, not a demand business. “People will never tell you what they want, but they want you to surprise them.”
The emotional quotient is high, as fragrance can set off chemical reactions in a person’s brain. “Odors shape us,” she said.
Nabi believes Coty will continue shaping the future of fragrance.
“If there is one single company at this level, which can sell to people these outstanding creations — technologically advanced, with a unique know-how, from $500 to $50, [it’s Coty],” she said. “In a way, this 120th anniversary is also a declaration of how much this company is a powerhouse, whatever the [perfume] price, the retail channel.”
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