A recent piece in Washington Post notes:
“The fast growth of
specialized scents in fabric softeners, household cleaners and body sprays has
helped make America, and the typical American, smell sweeter and cleaner than
ever. Even storefronts and airlines are rigging up scent machines to bathe customers
in the companies’ trademarked aromas.
It’s good news for
our noses but terrible news for a once-bountiful business: The nation’s perfume
and cologne industry. Sales in the United States of mass fragrances, those
non-designer scents bottled for a middle-class clientele, have dropped by half
since 2000, to about $600 million last year, data from market researcher
Euromonitor International show.
…
“The explosion in
the use of scents … has led fragrances to be more commoditised. As a result,
fragrances have lost their mystique and have become less ‘special,'”
Euromonitor analysts wrote in an industry report last year. “The saturated
environment in fragrances has arguably contributed to consumer confusion and
apathy, making it very difficult to make a brand stand out.””