Maison Margiela Fragrances Kicks Off First Stand-alone Pop-up in New York
Maison Margiela Fragrances is doubling down on experiential marketing — and using its latest launch to do so.
The brand is opening a stand-alone pop-up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Friday to ring in the launch of Afternoon Delight, the brand’s latest fragrance in the Replica collection. The pop-up will run for three days and entail interactive displays, complimentary madeleines, café offerings and memory sketching opportunities for attendees, in addition to samplings of both new and existing scents in the brand’s portfolio.
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“We have a very strong group of core fragrances, and this latest launch, Afternoon Delight, has brought an enormous amount of growth to the brand,” said Tory Diamond, general manager of fragrances of L’Oréal’s Luxe division in the U.S., Margiela’s fragrance licensee. “We’re already looking at Afternoon Delight becoming the number-three fragrance in the entire collection.”
Diamond attributes the product’s success to the right mix of juice quality and timing, given that the notes dovetail with larger olfactive trends in the market. “It’s the right olfactive territory for the moment — that highly coveted, vanilla gourmand juice that we didn’t have and was a hole in the portfolio,” she said. “The fragrance community and the Sephora community specifically are engaged with this launch.”
Cues for the fragrance came from Marcel Proust’s “à la recherche du temps perdu,” master perfumer Carlos Bena?m said in a statement, hence the Parisian café inspiration behind the pop-up.
“Margiela is based on memories, and so we look at the geography of where these fragrances are coming from. This one is a Parisian café,” Diamond said. To that end, spray-painted madeleines on the sidewalk direct attendees to Sephora Williamsburg — the pop-up’s closest point of sale.
Diamond expects both the pop-up and the fragrance to resonate with both existing and new customers. “The Margiela customer is unisex, they’re fashion forward, and they use fragrance to complement their style and their mood. It’s an urban customer and majority Millennial,” she said. “With this launch, we’re recruiting a younger and more female customer.”
Prior to the product’s launch, 6,000 people had signed up to be notified when it hit the market on Sephora.com, Diamond said. “We leaned a lot into creators that can speak to the storytelling aspect of the brand,” she said. “We also tapped into the baking community with this launch, and we’ve had a lot of success with that.”
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