Fragrances mean big business

Australians are smelling lovelier year on year suggests a recent survey on fragrance sales conducted by Roy Morgan.

Between the start of January 2013 and end of December 2015, the number of Australians aged 14+ who bought women’s perfume in an average four weeks increased from 1,140,000 to 1,509,000 people, almost a third more than two years previous (32%).

Men, meanwhile, are into aftershave and cologne more and more, with some 1,345,000 people in 2015 purchasing male fragrances – up from 1,192,000 in 2013.

Even if the purchases were one bottle per person, this means a whopping 37,102,000 bottles of perfume at least were shifted within 24 months – almost 19 million a year.

And just when you thought fragrance was mostly a tool for initial attraction, the study found that married couples are more likely than their single/unmarried counterparts to buy fragrance as a gift for the opposite gender.

In fact, married and de facto men are more than twice as likely as their single/unmarried counterparts to buy women’s perfume in an average four weeks, and married/de facto women are three times as likely as single/unmarried women to buy men’s aftershave/cologne. And let’s not forget the gay community, who buy perfume in droves – gift with purchase, yes thanks.

Fragrance sales online have shown great growth over the past five years, primarily due to the increasing uptake of online shopping by Australians. Consumers are becoming more comfortable with online shopping – even for products with olfactory selling factors, and particularly as online shopping platforms become more secure and user-friendly.

Perfume and cosmetics are well suited to online shopping as they are pre-packaged goods that consumers generally know and trust.

Industry revenue is forecast to rise by 14.2% by the end of this financial year, to reach $280 million.

In sum, it’s nice to know us Aussies are becoming a far more fragrant lot.  Antonino Tati