THE MANHATTAN LABORATORY OF INTERNATIONAL FLAVORS & FRAGRANCES, A FACILITY THAT SPANS THE BETTER PART OF A MIDTOWN OFFICE FLOOR, HAS MORE BOTTLES LYING AROUND THAN A FRAT HOUSE ON SUNDAY.
There are about 84,000 of them, each filled with a potent oil, divided up
among the lab’s 28 bays. Every time some rich banker prowls around town
wearing Calvin Klein’s Eternity or a debutante trails Oscar de la Renta’s
Live in Love across an Upper East Side penthouse party, they are rewarding the labors of IFF’s team of perfumers. Both scents were made here.
“But yesterday was a big Axe day, I can tell you,” Veronique Ferval,
IFF’s creative center manager, tells me. “You could walk around and
could smell . . .”
. . . a high-school locker room? But she’s cut off by Ann Gottlieb, the
woman who oversees all Axe scents. IFF is currently trying to win the
contract for Axe’s 2014 scent (it releases at least one a year), competing
against other fragrance houses. No detail should be spilled. “It paid off,”
Gottlieb tells Ferval. “Your submissions were really good.”
Ferval’s face warms in relief. “Oh, good! Thank you.”
Fragrance can be a rarefied business, but inside IFF, a place whose
lobby displays a high-end-perfume hall of fame, the façade quickly evapo-
rates. For here, at this very lab, the same scientists, with the same equip-
ment, often with the same ingredients, are designing elegant $200 colognes
and $3.99 bottles of Axe body spray. And if Axe conjures anything in the
mind of someone old enough to drink (legally), it’s that of a dive-bar meat
market and a backward-hatted jock bathed in a fog of musk. And Ann
Gottlieb? She’s a consultant who worked on Eternity and Live in Love, too.
So what’s the difference? You could say it’s molecular: A fine fragrance
is designed with differently weighted molecules, some evaporating faster
than others, so that a scent evolves as it’s worn. Axe doesn’t bother with
these subtleties; its pants come right off. Boom. In your face. “It’s an instant-
delivery kind of product,” Gottlieb explains. “It’s because of the way Axe
is sold. Guys don’t stand in Walmart hanging out testing fragrances.”
Then again, you could say the contrast between Axe and those classy
scents really has little to do with composition—that, in truth, the biggest
difference is in the marketing. Axe may seem frivolous, a brand defined
by a decade of ads showing large-chested women lusting over the men
who wear it. And yet, if this were just a case of “sex sells,” Axe’s siren call
would be easy to replicate. It isn’t. Axe, which is owned by Unilever, is a
$2.5 billion global brand with relentless growth (retail sales rose 13.6%
from 2010 to 2011). Its success is largely the result of a sophisticated,
cutting-edge marketing machine that constantly monitors youth culture’s
subtle shifts so as to stay hot on the hormone trail. The Unilever product
came to dominate the now $5 billion U.S. men’s body-spray market in
2007, only five years after entering it. It currently owns a 72% share of
the body-spray category, 58 points higher than its nearest competitor,
Old Spice. Procter & Gamble tried to keep up but couldn’t; one copycat,
Tag, folded in 2010. And this is why a dignified institution like IFF is
eager to devote space to the preferred brand of bros in heat: Each Axe
scent—there are 13 for sale now—will sell about three times the volume
of an average fine fragrance.
We leave the laboratory and cross the hall, and Gottlieb spots Eric
Lorello, a well-dressed 27-year-old IFF employee working on some aerosol cans. “You’re looking at some of my most valuable skin,” Gottlieb says.
When she comes to IFF for visits, the company rounds up men like Lorello
so she can smell Axe prototypes on him. She did so this morning.
