Home fragrance now a $6.4B business
Small, high-powered devices infusing ambient scents are a means of ‘self-expression’
A fragrance called green tea blows through the corridors of Sonesta hotels worldwide courtesy of Air Esscentials, a 10-year-old company in Miami that sells scent-diffusing systems. Green tea lemongrass, another Air Esscentials creation, is the aroma of choice at Morgans Hotels worldwide.
Now, those very same smells are also perfuming the living rooms and bedrooms of many private residences. Hotels, resorts and casinos, as well as retailers such as Victoria’s Secret and Thomas Pink, depend on ambient scents to strengthen brand identity — as well as to get customers to linger and spend.
Piping in those fragrances has long been the principal business of Air Esscentials, Aroma360, ScentAir and their rivals in what is known as the air-care business. But increasingly, these companies are finding a new revenue stream in the home market.
“Our company grew rapidly because when we would put a scent into a Sonesta hotel or a Ritz-Carlton or a Melia resort, guests would go up to the front desk and ask how they could get it,” said Spence Levy, president of Air Esscentials. “The home market has grown 35 per cent a year for us every year since we started in 2007.”
Drugstores and other retailers are fully stocked with low-cost home fragrances, from room sprays to candles and wall plug-ins. Now, thanks to Air Esscentials and other such firms, there are options on the higher end: compact yet high-powered diffusers that will infuse scent throughout a room for hours or days at a time.
Examples include Aera, a $200 device the size of a paperback book that its parent company, Prolitec, says can perfume a room of up to 2,000 square feet, with fragrance levels adjustable through an app. Each fragrance capsule costs $50 and, ac- cording to Aera’s website, will last about 60 days if it is placed in “a 450-square-foot room, on an average setting running for 24 hours per day.”
Jeanette Wolfe, a holistic health educator, is a big fan of such devices and a big believer in the power of scent to increase energy and “drop you into a calm place,” as she put it.
Each floor of her New Jersey house has its own fragrance dispersed by an AroMini, one of several styles of cold-air diffusers for the home made by AromaTech. According to the company, AroMini, a12-inch-tall cylinder that costs $279, is strong enough to imbue fragrance in a 1,000-square-foot room. The essential oil or aroma oil refills cost $16 to $180 and last about a month.
The home fragrance market is a $6.4 billion business at the retail level, according to a 2016 study by Kline, a market research and consulting firm in Parsippany, N.J. Using data from a Simmons national consumer survey, the online research company Statista calculated that 73 per cent of Americans used room deodorizers and air freshener sprays last year; the figure is poised to hit 77 per cent by 2020.
More than just a way of eliminating odour (we’re talking about you, Fido and Frisky), home fragrance has lately become a means of self-expression.
“It’s an element of design, like the colours on the wall or the furniture — it’s a way for people to communicate who they are,” said Richard Weening, chief executive of Prolitec, the Milwaukee-based commercial air care company that recently introduced Aera.
“I do not think I’ve met an individual who doesn’t respond to scents,” Wolfe said.