Word: scentair
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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After interviewing Belich and her staff with questions like "If your consumer was going on vacation, where would she go?" and "What color floor tiles might she pick?" ScentAir's mixologists researched their inventory of 1,500 aromatic oils to find the ones that would produce the right blend to capture the essence of the stores. Over the next six months, about 30 concoctions were FedExed from ScentAir's lab in Charlotte, N.C., to the Sony offices in New York City; a steady stream of comments and suggestions flowed the other way, until a final pool of five candidates emerged...
...male exec had suggested a drop of bourbon, but it was decided that cedarwood would provide a similar yet subtler tone.) Then, sitting around a conference table strewn with perfumer's blotter paper, the execs had a final request: Could the orange be snazzier, more of a blood orange? ScentAir dug into its library of about 40 orangey smells, weeding out the tangerine-tinged and the clementine-clad before hitting the jackpot with a robustly bloody red orange...
...that carry apt connotations for particular products they want to sell, a technique called billboarding. Bloomingdale's, for instance, billboards the smell of baby powder in its infant-clothing department, while hints of lilac and coconut waft around the department store's intimate-apparel and swimsuit displays. One of ScentAir's most popular aromas, freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, has been adopted widely by sellers of model houses and real estate agents in North Carolina to make prospective buyers feel at home the instant they walk in. Upscale ice cream chain Emack & Bolio's recently adopted a waffle-cone smell...
...depending on how complicated they are to design. Companies also pay monthly subscription fees to rent fan machines that disperse the scents into the air. Smaller retailers can buy simple smells--sage and pomegranate, rosemary eucalyptus, white ginger--off the rack for $100 a month, including fan rental. And ScentAir is expanding its repertoire by cooking up smells that are meant not to charm but to repel: last month it re-created the smell of burning electrical wire for a military simulation; earlier, it had dreamed up dinosaur dung for a children's museum...
...firm is taking its smell sense even closer to consumers and hoping to cash in on the $8.3 billion Americans already spend annually on air fresheners, candles and scented plug-ins. In August, ScentAir began offering a small home version of its smell machine for $30 a month. It comes with scent choices like eucalyptus mint, citrus musk and lavender with ylang-ylang, a derivative of a south Asian evergreen tree said to have aromatherapeutic benefits. "By comparison," says Van Epps, "plug-ins scream Grandma's bathroom aerosol...