Microperfumes, a Calabasas-based startup fragrance retailer launched in August of last year, is poised to make $1 million in revenue this month selling small samples of brand-name scents.
The online retailer offers customers sample sizes of perfumes and colognes, starting at 99 cents each for less than a milliliter of product, allowing consumers to try the fragrances before committing to full-size bottles that can run upwards of $500. Popular products include scents by Tom Ford, Chanel and Creed.Â
The service is particularly popular in rural areas, such as Montana and Virginia.
“We’re kind of fortunate to live in the San Fernando Valley,” Camron Collard, chief growth officer for Microperfumes, said. “We have a ton of department stores and malls as an option, but a lot of places across the country don’t have that. … Our services are even more valuable to people who live in rural areas and just don’t have access to those kinds of shops where they do get the free samples. … We wanted to fill that void.”
The company, owned by Perfume Ventures Inc., came to fruition during the pandemic as fewer people were shopping in stores. Fashioned as a “tech company that does fragrance” rather than a traditional fragrance company, Microperfumes purchases full-size and occasionally wholesale fragrances. Employees decant the scented liquids and separate them into smaller-size samples for purchase. While customers have the option to purchase full-size bottles from the site, the vast majority of sales are made in sample vials, sample sprays and travel-size bottles of high-end fragrances.
“We’re doing about 1,000 transactions a day. We’re projected to probably be about $1 million a month in revenue,” Collard said. “So it has been a very fast-growing operation and we’re proud of it.”
Microperfumes customers are fairly evenly split among demographics, with women making up 51 percent of purchasers. As the market grows, company has taken on temporary and part-time employees to speed production of the miniature samples, focusing on fast shipping and meeting high standards of authenticity that are expected from consumers.
“Authenticity is something that, in the fragrance community, is questioned a lot. There’s a lot of fake, duplicate fragrances out there and brands that pride themselves as being similar to Chanel No. 5, but not really being Chanel No. 5. The clear distinction of our site is that we only sell 100 percent authentic fragrances. We would never risk tarnishing the brand, or our own, with any kind of knockoffs or imitations,” Collard explained. “We put a lot of time and energy and money in the first year of business into our reputation, brand and reputation.”Â