Die Hot With A Vengeance: THE PERFUME
A New York time's Best-Smeller!
My friend Sarah (who was previously the founder and creative director of one of my favorite fashion brands KARA) told me that launching a brand is not unlike having a baby, in that you do so much work to prepare, and then once the launch happens, you don’t just rest on your laurels and celebrate — that’s when the real work begins.
This popped into my mind as I was looking up and plugging in every individual U.S. state’s tax percentage into the back end of my commerce site prior to the launch of Die Hot With A Vengeance Eau De Parfum.
In the seven months leading up to its launch1, I scoured the world for all the necessary bits and bobs to make this perfume an official regulatory-passing consumer product: bottles, atomizers, caps, cartons, printers. And all the while the juice itself — the smell — was being concocted. Inventing smells. What a concept!
If you listen to Smell Ya Later I make it casually and abundantly clear that I’ve always wanted to make a perfume. But making perfume is expensive. And hard. And also expensive. But hard as well. Two of the leading obstacles to me doing anything! How did they know??
Well, my perfumer Joey Rosin listened and reached out around last November to offer his skillset to make this perfume manifest! And once I had a perfumer on board, that was like… most of the hard.
As for the expensive, that is what book advances are for. The good thing about a book advance is that it feels like money in the cloud — money contractually promised to you via incremental payments along the publishing journey that I could pin certain project finances to. Projects like making a fragrance.
The juice
I daresay the “juice,” the perfume itself, is the easy part. At least for me, who gets to be the creative director, while someone else does the doing of it. Joey and I had a smell session where I brought in a bunch of scents I liked (mostly in perfume sample form) and talked about what notes and accords envisioned for DHWAV. (Notes I like: iris, violet, leather, saffron, patchouli, musk, amber…)
My informal brief was something like a scent for anti-heroines, morally ambiguous main characters, unreliable narrators, and otherwise villains who discover that they do, in fact, possess a heart after all, but not before nearly being undone by their own glamour. At first, I characterized it as an evil wealthy woman with a stolen Birkin bag filled with smashed lipstick tubes, spilled red wine, cigarette ash, and other TSA-restricted items. But then I reconsidered. I don’t know any of these women. And I’m not sure wealth is aspirational in that kind of way2.
Anyway, Joey concocted about ~20 mods (variations) of this idea over a couple months — some pulling out certain elements of rhubarb, grapefruit, plum, cacao, or leather. During a final smell session, the chosen mod revealed itself after about 10 minutes of marinating on a blotter. I smelled and re-smelled them, at which point I got a hint of stale cigarette ash from one of them. It was a subtle sneer of vulgarity that made me immediately think THIS is the one. Something sweet and rotten at the same time. Dark and soft. Cold steel and velvet.
The Bottle
I’ll preface by saying that there are no good caps in America under 10,000 MOQ (minimum order quantity). That goes for bottles too. Arguably the two required components for a perfume bottle. Bless Alibaba for their vast scades of packaging design suppliers eager for business. But even then, most minimums were at least 500 MOQ for anything. And seeing as I was only springing for a kilo of perfume oil, that would amount to about ~250 50ml bottles. I found a vendor willing to sell me 300pc of an all-black bottle with a simple black orb cap. Normally color-treating glass is expensive, but these were already stock designs, lucky for me.
It took about a month for the bottles to get to the screenprinter in Pittsburgh to get labeled, which brings me to…
The Label Design
In retrospect, sticker labels would’ve been a more cost-efficient choice, but I loved the look of the black lacquered glass bottle so much — why would I want to cover it up with a sticker? Joey found an “affordable3” (compared to bottle screenprinters in NYC) bottle screenprinter in Pittsburgh.
I’d attended a Haute Perfumery exhibit at the Givaudan offices a few weeks prior and was re-introduced to Robert Piguet Fracas and its iconic pink-on-black bottle. Which got me thinking, What if this but different?
I bought a cheap knock-off Apple pencil and went to town on my iPad, scribbling DIE HOT WITH A VENGEANCE a Jack-Nicholson-in-The Shining amount of times into Photoshop to get the right amount of cheeky digits written on a fancy bar napkin kind of cursive.
The Packaging
After receiving a competitive quote from a local packaging supplier for those typical cardboard boxes with corrugated liner inserts that cost more than the bottles and printers combined, I pulled a mmm…nope and went back to Alibaba. An eager packaging vendor offered to take my order of 300 cardboard tubes and even custom print them (normally reserved for orders upwards of 500 MOQ). As soon as I signed the contract, I didn’t hear back from “Tiffany” despite making clear I needed these tubes within six weeks. It seemed that Tiffany’s energies for client acquisition did not extend so much for… doing the order.
I mean, did they do it? Yes, eventually. Eventually was not in my timeframe! I had to (politely) be on their ass about it every step of the way. I hate micro-managing. It’s a job! And I hate jobs!
Anyway, Tiffany didn’t tell me that the initial file I submitted for the design wasn’t approved until I emailed a week later like “soooo what’s up?” which had the ripple effect of pushing the whole art and manufacturing process back four weeks to the point I had to pay for expedited shipping from China (which for a sofa-sized box of 314 cardboard tubes was about the cost of a sofa) that still took 12 days to get here.
Meanwhile in Pittsburgh…
The bottles are at the printers, being printed.
Phenomenal job! Go printers! We love the printers! (I like the part when it rolls :)
All the while…
I am trying to figure out how e-comm sites work. Squarespace, as user-friendly as it purports itself to be must think very highly of its users because I spent so much time muttering what de heck under my breath trying to figure it out. But I succeeded (eventually) because I am a tech wiz.
What I am not a wiz at, though, is understanding any sort of regulatory mail FAQ page. It’s almost as though they’re cosplaying as the IRS, the way they make it excessively convoluted to understand how to mail hazardous materials. Perfume is considered hazardous if it’s alcohol-based. You cannot send perfume on a plane4, apparently, in case it blows up or something. It must be shipped ground. They’re not as opposed to a mail truck potentially igniting, I suppose. This means international shipping is out of the question, womp womp.
The Bottling Process
Joey and his business partner at Hoax Parfums offered to help with manufacturing, which is great because I had no idea what that was. Once we nailed the formula, Joey sent the recipe to the embiggener (my word for manufacturer) to make it big, AKA concoct a kilo of the perfume oil concentrate (the “mother” as my friend Dara calls it). And then he diluted it to 10% with ethanol to make it into an eau de parfum. And then that dilution sits in a dark closet for a few weeks and thinks about what it wants to be when it grows up (which some call maceration). (I think at one point, Joey put the vat into a warm bath for a bit, so it can really cook.)
Once the bottles were screenprinted and delivered, they were ready to be filled, stamped with an atomizer, capped, and packed. It went a bit like this:
The cartons didn’t arrive until mid-July, hence the pre-order setup, but in the meanwhile, I had to buy mailers, packaging supplies, and figure out where to put it all in my apartment. Currently, my closet/office room is now also a stock room and shipping center.
The Photoshoot
I dusted off my old DSLR camera (which I hadn’t really used since my xoVain days), realized the lens mount was cracked, replaced it, and then put it to task for the big shoot. And in scrappy xoVain fashion, I used various fabric bits for a backdrop for the bottle, including one black vinyl tube dress from one of those Necessary Clothing stores in Soho, and my crystal KARA purse.
The reception
While I was waiting for the manufacturer and all that, I had one little 2ml vial of the Chosen Mod, which I wore anytime I went out to a social or beauty event. It was my own version of crowdsourcing, namely noting how many compliments I got when I wore it out. And it was Every. Damn. Time. This also provided a very smug opportunity to self-market my own merch. I mean, what better way to promote a perfume than by wearing it?
My friend Alex, who is the beauty editor at High Snobiety graciously offered to cover the perfume in a feature, which caused a writer at Fast Company to reach out for an interview, which led to a few little mentions here and there around the internet. A local perfume shop even offered to host a launch party and carry the scent!
Making a perfume to go along with my book was something I was going to do anyway. Regardless! Not the less! Never the lesses! The context, the prompt, the tax write-off-ability… I know a business opportunity when I see it. Publishing marketing budgets don’t really extend to unproven merch5 like a fragrance (or even t-shirts anymore, so I was told) so I wasn’t expecting my publisher to help fund it. But from what I’m also told, the Harper Collins execs are just chuffed at the media attention it’s getting, so hopefully they’ll extend those budgets for more experimental book marketing in the future!
Part of me felt slightly Hmm about the lack of swaggy material marketing around my book, compared to peers and colleagues with beauty adjacent books who had these diesel giveaway swag boxes from various beauty/lifestyle brands. All the connects I have in beauty who were previously very vocal about supporting my endeavors with “anything you need just let me know!” wouldn’t return a single email when I reached out to try and arrange some sort of mutually beneficial (well probably a bit more beneficial for me) partnership/collab/giveaway/anything. And like… fine. I had been feeling slightly conflicted about promoting a book about critically thinking about beauty by being like, “Here’s a whole bunch of beauty swag if you pre-order my book or something, HE HE!” You know?
I love to be absolved of difficult choices by not having them.
As a self-identified “ideas person,” and with my brain at -500 pts, no one is more impressed with me than me that I pulled this off (making a perfume into a Perfume™). Do I want to do it again? Probably not! But ask me again in a couple of months and that will probably change. I mean, it is fun and creative, but the operations of it all? I never want to be a girlboss! I’m simply not cut out for it. This whole process would’ve gone faster if it weren’t for me procrastinating! Don’t get me wrong — seven months is a goddamn BLIP in time in terms of having a product ideated, made, sourced, and produced. But probably could’ve had it in the bag in 4-5 if I was motivated in a way that suggested literally anything was at stake.
But am I pleased with the outcome? YES! I have in my hot little hands (and in boxes upon boxes in my apartment) a truly invigorating, lush, playfully wicked, cheeky chic, perfume that smells like the introductory montage of a sexy spy thriller. It smells like a sexy stranger winking at you across the bar. It smells like red wine and cigarettes on a hotel balcony. It smells like the alternate ending of Thelma & Louise where they live! It smells like shoulders served cold and vengeance served hot.
If you know anything about launching products, let alone fragrances, it takes a year or more to nail the juice alone for many brands.
As I’ve always said, if I ever attain a kind of terminal wealth, you simply will never hear from me again (you being the general Internet).
The printing was more expensive than the bottles themselves
Mildly alarming to know since you can pack perfume in your luggage on a plane, so… what is the truth?
Although, Raven Leilani’s debut novel Luster did a custom nail polish shade, which I remember getting from the publisher, and that was dope.
catching up on substack and adding another vote for shipping to Canada pls!
also that last bit about ppl offering to help them ghosting is so annoying but so common. trust no bitch
this is extremely cool, and going to fuel a lot of my daydreams for a while! how incredible!