By the time you purchase a Fresh Scents sachet, it’s been worked, reworked, vetted, and mastered to meet the quality standards you’ve come to expect. Meaning, a sachet is not just powerfully scented, versatile fragrance – it’s a lot of love and labor. But how exactly do we create our award-winning sachets and scents? With the help of Senior Perfumer, Emily Arce, and Fresh Scents Manager of Quality and Product Development, Rachel Knauff, I learned about the process of how a sachet goes from an idea to a full-fledged fragrance.
By the time you purchase a Fresh Scents sachet, it’s been worked, reworked, vetted, and mastered to meet the quality standards you’ve come to expect. Meaning, a sachet is not just powerfully scented, versatile fragrance – it’s a lot of love and labor. But how exactly do we create our award-winning sachets and scents? With the help of Senior Perfumer, Emily Arce, and Fresh Scents Manager of Quality and Product Development, Rachel Knauff, I learned about the process of how a sachet goes from an idea to a full-fledged fragrance.
At Fresh Scents, all fragrance is created in-house by our talented team of perfumers – like Emily! With the help of our brand creatives, the teams collaborate and brainstorm on sachet concepts. They draw inspiration from everything you could imagine, and some you might not. Whether it's trending flavors, nature, childhood memories, or a gap in our current offering. The teams come together twice a year to develop fragrance briefs.
These briefs contain different colors, images, and potential fragrance notes to create a “mood board” of sorts for a potential future sachet. Together, the creative team and the perfumers work to narrow down the briefs to a few concepts they want to refine. This kicks off the holistic process. Each perfumer then takes the opportunity to create a fragrance formula based on the decided briefs. The fun part: how several perfumers see the same brief but create totally unique fragrances.
“We have been working on building diversity into our teams because I feel like so much about fragrance is what you’re passionate about. Like you can’t have one cookie-cutter interpretation because fragrance is art. We all have the same medium, but we create a different masterpiece,” states Arce.
She went on to tell me that certain perfumers are better suited for certain projects not only because of the way they create their art, but because of their lived experiences. For instance, a perfumer creating a sweet tea scent would likely excel based on their geographic background. From the south? You’ve probably got a great vision.
They continue to refine these fragrances for – get this – up to two years! Included in that time frame is also our random panel. A team of outsiders weigh in their thoughts. Without the “mood board” briefs present, does the fragrance evoke what we hoped to portray? Once the group begins to feel confident with design and fragrance decisions (it can take several rounds), it’s time to go to mass production!
The packaging design can receive many rounds of renditions as well and is courtesy of our in-house artist. Depending on feedback from our internal team of creatives and perfumers, as well as feedback from the panel, the artist makes subtle packaging changes to reflect the group’s consensus.
“Then they take that fragrance oil and put it into the vermiculite medium so they’re able to make sure that it's hitting all of our predetermined shelf-life markers and that includes different types of conditions: humidity, heat, freeze, thaw,” explains Knauff
All of our products are tested for safety both internally and externally to ensure the optimal sachet experience. So, you can rest assured that the sachet you get is not only safely scented, but is also going to stand the test of time!
With that, it’s time for you to enjoy! We know, there’s a lot involved. Although they don’t always end up our best-selling scent, every sachet we launch is a proud step in our fragrance journey. Because it’s true – #youneedasachet.
Arce’s go-to Fresh Scents fragrance is Bee Happy, what’s yours?
