Drake’s Better World Fragrance House Heads to Retail
Better World Fragrance House, the Drake-founded fragrance brand, is making its first retail play.
The brand, currently comprising five home fragrances ranging in price from $48 to $80, is heading to Harrods in the U.K. It will bow online on Monday, with an ensuing in-store rollout.
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It is also the brand’s first big move since signing a licensing deal with Parlux late last year. The brand initially launched two years ago on its website.
“We wanted to start building a brand with no pressure, and once we felt settled in terms of the brand and its identity, we needed a partner,” said Matte Babel, chief brand officer of DreamCrew and a member of Drake’s management team. “It’s a super complex business with different compliance issues and distribution.”
It also marks the opening of Parlux’ lifestyle division, which oversees home fragrance and other scent-adjacent categories. “Drake’s inspiring vision for Better World, to create a luxury lifestyle fragrance house for all and create a better lifestyle for all, 100 percent aligns with what we do at Parlux,” said Lori Singer, the company’s president. “It did lead us to create this new division, which was designed to showcase our brands that are not necessarily all purely fragrance. The vision is to grow and champion brands that offer all aspects of beauty and fragrance.”
Babel added that the brand has been years in the making. “We’ve all known it was going to happen sooner or later over the past 10 years. We were always looking at starting a fragrance company,” he said.
It’s also an area where Drake has some familiarity. One of the scents, Carby Musk, the rapper created for personal use with Givaudan perfumer Michael Carby. “He’s been wearing that for probably three years before we ever even thought of bringing that to market,” Babel continued.
Better World Fragrance House is just the latest in a string of buzzy licensors for Parlux. The company also holds the license for Billie Eilish’s eponymous fragrance line, as well as Paris Hilton, among others.
“We leverage our bespoke development process,” Singer continued. “It’s all about meeting the needs of individual brands, it’s not a cookie cutter approach.”
To that end, Drake typically works directly with Carby when developing new fragrances. “In this case, Drake has an open line to Carby; they have a relationship that makes this very authentic,” Singer said.
After kicking off the partnership, both Parlux and the brand are eyeing new categories and geographies for expansion. The brand is “about improving our immediate space,” Babel said. “How can we improve our space through scent, whether that be a personal space, a studio space or a foreign space. That will create ripple effects into other things we do as a brand. We look at how many different places someone can interact with scent and product.”
The priority is to bring the brand onto shelves and counters in other key markets, including North America. It started with Harrods because “London feels like a second home to us,” Babel said. “Harrods is a place we frequent every time we’re there. It’s significant to have a product in a place we’ve been going for years, and an aspirational place we’ve been shopping for years.”
As Singer put it, “Harrods are fantastic partners, and they know how to bring a brand to life and launch a brand in an amazing way. Knowing the relationship that Drake and Matte have with Harrods and the affinity there, it was the perfect retailer to showcase this brand.”
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