Garden Fragrance Co deal opens new channel for Scotts

Scotts & Co, the multi-channel retail group spearheaded by home shopping guru Nigel Swabey, has opened up a new sales channel for cosmetics, toiletries and perfume brands with the acquisition of The Garden Fragrance Company.

The Garden Fragrance Company claims to be the UK’s only multi-brand fragrance retailer using a mail order catalogue as its main channel of distribution, while Scotts & Co mails over 35 million catalogues each year.

It is claimed the acquisition will substantially expand the consumer reach of The Garden Fragrance Company’s own mail order catalogue, giving brands the opportunity to reach millions of stay-at-home shoppers.

The move will open up sampling opportunities through monthly personalised mailings to Scotts & Co’s customer database; the firm insists it has more than 5 million affluent, ABC1 consumers. This will go beyond the traditional approach of including sample sachets of new perfumes with product despatches.

Since 2014, The Garden Fragrance Company has been mailing an 80-page catalogue to several hundred thousand customers six times a year. The catalogue features a broad range of perfumes, room fragrances, soaps, creams, oils, tonics, toiletries and other gifts.

Scotts & Co now aims to upscale this catalogue by rolling it out to millions of its own most affluent customers.
Yardley head of sales Dr Claire Ferguson said: “Yardley and Woods of Windsor have had a very strong partnership with The Garden Fragrance Company for many years. We are delighted that Scotts & Co. will now continue to provide a wonderful catalogue for our customers to browse and shop from in their own homes. We wish the new partnership great success.”

Heathcote & Ivory managing director Denis Aaronson added: “We are delighted to hear of the tie-up between The Garden Fragrance Company and Scotts & Co. We were particularly excited to hear of Scotts’ plans for extending distribution of the catalogue to a large segment of their 5 million-plus customer file.”

The Garden Fragrance Company founder and CEO Graham Martin reckons the demographics of the Scotts customer file is perfectly suited to his firm’s catalogue.

He added: “Now that circulation of the catalogue can be extended to the entire Scotts & Co. customer database, the impact is likely to transform the scale of the business. We’ve now laid plans for a doubling in the size of the business in 2021.

“From the very outset, our catalogue has always presented a curated collection of well-known brands in perfumery, toiletries and beauty products. Scotts & Co. will enable us to expand our range further and search out the more eclectic, hard-to-find brands of fragrance. Many of our customers report that there are no local stockists of the brands they love, so their level of repeat purchase is very high.”

Swabey concluded: “A major industry research report published earlier this year revealed that of the more than £500m spent on advertising by major fragrance and beauty brands, only a tiny fraction is being spent on direct mail. In fact, it’s less than we spend on the smallest of our catalogue brands.

“One of the greatest challenges that fragrance and toiletry manufacturers face is sampling. We plan to go much further than the traditional approach. We would like to feature a new fragrance in each monthly catalogue mailing and, as our circulation will rarely fall below 400,000 mailings per month, we can offer ambitious brands an opportunity to achieve solus sampling of new fragrances on a scale that no consumer magazine can offer.

“The big difference with this sampling mechanism is that the only cost of placing samples into the hands of a huge qualified and interested female audience will be the cost of the sample itself. Unlike beauty magazines, we do not intend to make any charge for insertion.”