Scotts & Co. Acquires Garden Fragrance, Expands to Catalogue

A new sales channel for cosmetics, toiletries and perfume brands has been created following the acquisition of The Garden Fragrance Company by retail group Scotts & Co.

Related: Amyris to Acquire EcoFabulous Clean Beauty Brand

The acquisition will substantially expand the consumer reach of The Garden Fragrance Company’s own mail order catalogue giving cosmetics, toiletries and perfume (CTP) suppliers an opportunity to reach stay-at-home shoppers.

The move will also lead to sampling innovations for fragrance and other CTP products via monthly personalized mailings to Scotts & Co.’s customer database of more than five million consumers.

Scotts & Co.’s new low-cost sampling mechanisms hopes to go beyond the traditional approach of including sample sachets of new perfumes with product dispatches.

Graham Martin, founder and CEO of The Garden Fragrance Company, said: “Scotts has the largest database of affluent mail order customers in the country and the demographics of their customer file seems perfectly suited to our catalogue. 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.”

Nigel Swabey, CEO of Scotts & Co., said: “A major industry research report published earlier this year revealed that of the more than £500 million 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.”

Swabey added: “One of the greatest challenges that CTP 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!”