As indie beauty brands work to grow their businesses and broaden their communities, it’s only natural that they’d expand into new product categories. Fine fragrance, in particular, is one that’s proving to be quite popular at the moment.
Glossier, for instance, saw so much success with its inaugural perfume, You — which it first debuted in 2017 — that it rolled out two additional iterations in 2024, with a third in the works for this spring. Last month, skin-care brand U Beauty unveiled its first fine fragrance, Proem. Body-care brands like Sidia and Cyklar are also delving into the personal scent space.
Indie skin-care brand Jordan Samuel Skin, which has built a following for its beloved cleanser and antioxidant formulas, is another recent example. Jordan Samuel Pacitti, the company’s founder and CEO, has been eyeing fragrance for years, inspired by a personal passion for the category. “Fragrance was, in a way, my first love… before skincare was a love,” he tells Fashionista. “I don’t think that’s extremely unique. I think we all remember our mother’s perfume, our father’s cologne or aftershave.”
But Pacitti knew that when he did finally launch a fragrance, he had to get it right. “It needed to be huge: It needed to be with a professional perfumer; I needed to have the ‘T’s crossed, the ‘I’s dotted, the ribbon on the package.” So for years, he focused solely on the skin-care portion of his business, waiting for the right moment to get into perfume.
“It was just about considering: When is the time going to be right?” Pacitti says. “I felt like we needed to settle into the skin-care market, really establish our name there, since that’s our bread and butter and that’s what we are.”
The founder initially partnered with a perfumer back in 2018 to bring his scent dreams to reality, but the project stalled due to “wishy-washy” production minimums that ended up being far higher and more costly than Pacitti had expected. “It was just something that for our size at the time, we could not take on,” he recalls. “A little disheartened,” he decided to put fragrance expansion on the back burner for the next few years.
But in December 2024, Jordan Samuel Skincare officially launched Cortile Dolce, Pacitti’s “love letter to Sicily,” a perfume meant to evoke “sun-ripened lime leaf, earthy cedarwood, and a breeze of jasmine shimmering through turquoise coves.” It was a moment the founder had been dreaming of — and working toward — for years. But the journey to get there wasn’t exactly seamless or simple.
Ahead, Pacitti shares what he learned throughout the rollercoaster process of expanding his brand into a new category and launching its first fragrance.
You’d been wanting to launch fragrance for years — how did it finally come about?
“A serendipitous stream of things happened: In 2022, my husband and I worked satellite from Italy for roughly 12 weeks. When we came home, we had a bunch of little half-ounce vials of fragrance [we’d collected there], all of which were new perfumes to us… I realized that one specific man, perfumer Luca Maffei, was the common denominator behind them all. So I just reached out to him on Instagram. I just wanted to be like, ‘Hey, would you ever consider making a fragrance for a small brand? Can you do small runs?’ But I never heard from him — he says he never saw the message.
“Not being one to have rain on my parade. I messaged my friend, who is a well-known barber in Rome and somehow knows everybody, asking if he knew any perfumers who work with small brands. He said, ‘My friend owns one of the biggest manufacturing fragrance manufacturing facilities in Italy. They have a small business program. Let me put you in touch with him.’ So he put me in touch, and, having learned my lessons from back in the day, the first thing I said was, ‘What are your minimums?’ I didn’t want to go through the whole process again, have the disappointment all over again.
“They confirmed they worked within what I requested for minimums; of course, the price is going to be higher per unit, that’s how it works. I understand that. I knew it would be a perfect stepping stone for being able to build out this idea. So then we just started.”
Where did you start when it came to developing the scent itself?
“My idea was to sort of have a tour through Italy with fragrances, starting in the south and working up north, starting with Sicily, going to Naples, Rome, Florence, et cetera. I gave the blueprint to this company and said, ‘Here’s my idea…These are the notes I want to bring into it.’ A lot of it was abstract. I wanted lime, done right. I wanted the lime wood and zest and leaf, but then I needed all these other components to really make me feel that I was truly embracing the Sicilian culture and bringing the customer along for that ride.
“They initially sent me back, I think, five iterations… I gave them notes. But at that point, it was coinciding with the trip [I had planned] to Italy. So I said, ‘Let me stop by.’ We go to the offices of Torino, and the owner of the company says, ‘We have one of the most famed Italian perfumers working on your project, he’s won a ton of awards.’ And it was Luca Maffei.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so exciting.’ So then we wound up with five different directions to go… I slept on it; I wore all of them. I had my husband wear all of them. I had another employee wear all of them. Once I started wearing it and smelling it on myself and someone else, it became really clear which one it was going to be. But I really needed that time to have it settled because just smelling it on a strip and the room wasn’t enough.”
Photo: Courtesy of Jordan Samuel
Why did you turn to Italy as a source of inspiration?
“Being Italian American, I always find myself talking about Italy to customers. I love [Italian] culture, the way their pace of life is. It’s how I believe people should treat their skin care, should treat their beauty. It’s not overly cluttered. It’s not frantic, it’s not dissimilar to that sort of ‘French-girl chic.'”
How would you describe the scent you finally landed on?
“The one that we went with was just like, ‘Oh, yes, this is giving a nod to Sicily being the dessert capital of Italy with that sweet spun sugar note; you have the freshness of the citrus, you have that light aquatic note giving a nod to it being an island right on the sea. And then the beautiful night blooming jasmine that you smell in any café or restaurant you’re in. And that warmth of that spun sugar note also brings that [feeling], and a little bit of amber and a little bit of cedar brings in that Sicilian hospitality and passion without overwhelming the balance.”
What came next? How soon after that could you launch the scent?
“In December 2023, we finally put the finishing touches on [the scent], and then immediately started going through the process of EU regulations and U.K. regulations, since that’s one of our biggest markets. And going through the manufacturing process and going through the packaging process and all of that was extremely similar — basically identical — to skin care.
“But then we got to what was the hugest learning curve for me. Now looking back, it’s like, ‘How did I not know this?’ I just assumed that there was this very structured way to handle shipping what is considered ‘dangerous goods’ or ‘hazardous material,’ because of the alcohol content, internationally to the U.S. [from Italy]. And apparently there’s not, and regulations change constantly. That is something I learned even throughout this process. There was different regulations day to day — that sounds way more dramatic than it is, but it just happened that one day I asked about something and was told, ‘Oh, this actually just changed last week. We’re still trying to figure out what paperwork we need.’
“That would be my advice: Double check, confirm, reconfirm — not micromanage — but reconfirm again and make sure [your partners know the process]. Something that I should have done was get the shipper involved earlier.”
What issues did that pose?
“Because of our timeline, we did have to ship it via air. We obviously now will know to give ourselves enough time to ship it via boat next time, because that process should be a little bit easier.
“We had to move [back the launch]. What we ideally thought was going to happen was we we would get it at the beginning of October 2024 at the latest, and we could start doing a press and influencer seeding [then]. We thought that as early as November 1 we could start shipping samples with every order for a launch around Black Friday, which was our initial timing. But we didn’t end up getting any product in the warehouse until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, so obviously things were changed drastically.”
How did you navigate that change of plans with the roll out?
“We started putting a sample in every single order the second it was in. And thank God we had never questioned having the samples — it was a bigger cost than we wanted to take on, but it was worth every single cent.
“We’re mainly direct-to-consumer for fragrance, but not skin care. People need to smell it, need to see it. And being able, at our busiest time, Black Friday weekend, to get all of those U.S. orders a fragrance sample, it was amazing, because once people experienced it, so many returned to purchase the full size, and then also purchased numerous samples to pass out to friends and family who liked the way they smell. That was a move that I hadn’t put enough energy into, but now we will never do a launch without doing something like that.
“And then we just had to immediately send out to press and influencers the second we heard back from any of them wanting it. So unfortunately, we did lose that amount of time [for strategic marketing]. It was just truly a very big learning experience and we spent every hour of the day dealing with it until we launched, basically. But thankfully, people are loving it.”
What lessons did you learn from the process that you’ll implement going forward as you continue to work on other fragrances?
“I’m not going to take any chances and I’m going to make sure that everybody is on the same page. But I tell you, sometimes not knowing what’s in front of you is the best advice, actually. Ignorance can be a little bit of bliss.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Please note: Occasionally, we use affiliate links on our site. In no way does this affect our editorial decision-making.
Source: Fashionista.com
