Getting Your Perfume Brand Into Florist Shops
The floral market generated $12.18 billion in 2024 in the United States. Expanding your perfume brand’s retail presence into some of the 11,700 florist shops in the US can be a wonderful opportunity to build awareness and experiment with your perfume merchandising strategies.
For a retail expansion strategy, unless your brand is well-funded with a lot of brand recognition and a robust logistics system in place, you aren’t getting your brand into high-end/high-volume department stores. Finding the low-hanging fruit opportunities is how you gain your initial footing in retail in order to get your products on to better shelves.
Customer Overlap
The most obvious overlap of flower arrangements and perfume is that both products have an olfactory element. Many ingredients in perfumes are derived from flowers. The assumption being that someone interested in buying flowers is also likely interested in buying perfume.
The bigger customer overlap is in the buying habits of these products.
According to the Society of American Florists, flowers are purchased as a gift for someone else in 75-80% of all floral purchases. For reference, most consumer products are gifted at a 5-10% rate.
Estimates suggest that 18-40% of perfume is bought as a gift, also a much higher percentage than other consumer product categories. While the demographic data of perfume and flower shoppers overlap, the most notable characteristic shared between these product categories is the gift-giving buying tendency of shoppers.
For flower buying, a large portion of the customer base is men, aged 25-40, buying flowers for their girlfriend, wife, or mother. This segment of shoppers nicely aligns with the primary consumer of perfume, women aged 25-40 (Millennials & Gen Z). The product synchronicity of perfume and flowers should be emphasized when negotiating with floral shop owners.
Less Competition for Shelf Space
The Health and Beauty category is very crowded. You have large established brands competing with new upcoming brands for every single inch of shelf space in department stores and boutiques. There are many brands with entire sales teams dedicated to finding the best shelf space all across the United States. Every beauty store owner that I have spoken to has ALWAYS mentioned that they are constantly getting bombarded with distribution requests from brands. If you are a fragrance brand that is not yet at this phase of growth, your best use of time might be finding less competitive shelf space in stores that still align with your product.
Independent Stores
The majority of florist shops are independently owned. While there are some private equity companies involved in retail florist shops, the majority of large funds own floral suppliers and the large online flower retailers upstream of the small local shops.
How does this benefit you?
The process of buying shelf space at a store like Sephora is going to be much more arduous than buying shelf space at a flower shop that has 4 employees and the business owner. In many cases, you might be able to call a florist shop and speak directly with the owner who will be making the buying decisions. You won’t be able to directly call Guillaume Motte, the CEO of Sephora, without speaking to hundreds of gatekeepers first.
This directly translates to being able to enter more stores at a faster rate while also not requiring large amounts of capital in order to support large retail distribution of your perfumes.
Concluding Thoughts
The digital landscape for perfume is becoming more crowded as consumers’ attention is being pulled in a million directions. Perfume brands that run ads or compete for search engine visibility can appreciate how competitive the landscape is. Retail expansion can be a great way to side step the crowded online beauty product landscape. While you can’t expect florist shops to be the magic bullet for generating huge amounts of sales, they can be a great place to build brand awareness and gain experience in the logistics of retail distribution.