How I Became a Perfumer Podcast

№11 – Who is a Fragrance Marketing Specialist? With Vicki Last from Carvansons

• Tanya Mironova • Season 1 • Episode 11

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Are you curious about the world of fragrance marketing? Ever wonder how real-world experience can trump classroom learning? Join us as we dive into a conversation with Vicki Last, a Fragrance Marketing Specialist at Carvansons, a global perfume and fragrance manufacturer.

Vicki's Career pieces of advice from the episode:

1) Embrace Field Learning: Vicki highlights the value of gaining hands-on experience.
2) Approach any task with creativity: Find new ways to solve problems. And then any project could be creative.
3) Experiment and Trust Your Instincts: Experiment and see what works best. Scary, we know.
4) Maintain a Positive Outlook: Good thing in life.
5) Be a (Learning) Sponge: Vicki shares her approach to continuous learning which she also teaches to her child.

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Ever dreamt about going to space? Connect with Tanya!

• https://www.instagram.com/neparfumer/
• https://www.coachmironova.com/


Ultimately, marketing is just the understanding of people. So the key criteria is having that fascination around people. uh Hi and welcome to How I Became a Perfumer podcast. In each episode, we're exploring the different roles in the flavor and fragrance industry, as well as talk to founders of the independent projects. My name is Tanya Mironova. I'm a career coach dedicated to helping you sniff out the best opportunities on a job market, and inspiring you to create your own businesses. My guest for the today's episode is Vicky Lust. Vicky is a fragrance marketing specialist at Carvansens, a global perfume and fragrance manufacturer. Vicky, you're very welcome. I'm so happy to finally be recording this episode because there is one very big reason. I receive a lot of emails and messages at LinkedIn. with questions from the listeners who wants to work in the fragrance industry, but they think that there is only one possibility actually to work there, to be a perfumer. So they think that no other jobs basically exist on the market. That's why I would like to start with a little bit uncommon question, which probably will help to these listeners and other listeners to have a better understanding of what you actually do. And I would like to ask you the following one. So if you were hiring... a fragrance marketer specialist right now. What would you put, what duties would you put in the job description? gosh, that's very difficult. So I am not necessarily from a fragrance background prior to working at Carvansens. My experience has been mostly business to business marketing. But ultimately marketing is just the understanding of people. So the key criteria is having that fascination around people, what they like, what they don't like, what they want, what they don't want. And that is... Essentially what a marketing person does is tries to understand the psychology behind what we do as people. Beautiful. You know, I would love to see these type of ads more often. It's just understanding people, not this bullshit like certification there, master there, 50 years of experience and yeah, for the starting position. So, well, thank you for that. You've already uh mentioned a little bit about your background. So I would like to ask you how it all began and how did you find yourself in this particular industry? So my interest in marketing, I enjoyed business studies when I went to school, but my first business lecturer teacher had traveled internationally, had gone all over the world and learned about different cultures, different experiences. And his experience, even though it was more finance driven than marketing, gave me a real interest in kind of... how people operate, why people do what they do, et cetera, which is partially why I went into marketing. I've also been a very creative person. So I do art, I've always played instruments, I like my languages and music, et cetera. So I've always had that creative element to my personality, which marketing fits really well with both the interesting people, but also the creative element. And after university, I found myself working in exhibitions and events, but found that I didn't get the buzz of the creative from that experience. And now working in fragrance marketing, it very much kind of hits many, many of my tick boxes for what I enjoy. m You know, you're the first person I am talking to in quite a while who considers marketing to be creative and I think that many in fact many fields are creative because you approach them as those Not because they are creative per se like that. You could go to a street and ask someone well, I do marketing and they know it's not a creative thing. Well, I do I know I'm a professional artist or I assess other artists' works and people say like, oh yeah, it's creative. But I do believe that if you approach your work as being one, it's definitely the one. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. How did you find Carvansons? I mean, you go apply and maybe you saw some ads in newspaper and you decided like, oh, fragrance industry, I want to try this one. So this is going to come as a bit of a shock. I am not a fragrance person at all. Before joining Carvansers, I had maybe two perfumes that I actually owned. I was very much one of these people that finds one that they like and sticks with it and doesn't move from it at all and doesn't try any new ones. So when I first applied for Carvansers, I was asked to do a presentation about Baccarat Rouge. And I honestly, I honestly had to go. research what that perfume was because I'd never heard of it before. So I had to go out and I nearly went into the shops and went and bought a bottle so that I could experience it. And then I realized the price tag of it and went, I'll see if I can get a sample. I'll see if I can get a sample. But yeah, I had no idea about fragrance before applying for the role. So I do lean on quite heavily on a lot of the perfumers and evaluators at Carve Anson's. But coupled with their kind of input and my input, we come up with something quite unique, which is quite good. And because we are talking to other people, other businesses that use fragrance, we're not talking to an end customer. We're not talking to somebody who's buying it in a shop. I still managed to merge that with the much more logical side of my brain. So there's the creative element, but there's also... Is this going to create sales? Is this going to create opportunities for whoever's buying that fragrance? And I wanted to still keep those two fragrances as your favorite, so you've enlarged your palette as we are saying in the... My palette, my husband is now, wishes he never suggested going for this job because my fragrance cabinet has gone poof and more expensive as well. Yeah, I mean, like after Bakar, I wish you said like, okay, if my employer uh is asking about this perfume, maybe I should have one. Maybe my salary would allow it as well. Yeah, good imagine. You've mentioned that you have a very uh diverse team in Carvenson's and like you match very well together. oh Maybe you could just in a nutshell tell what your typical day, typical day, I mean like from vacuum. looks like, how many interactions do you have with your team or with the customers and what are those about? My role is incredibly diverse, incredibly so. My day can look like, it changes every single week. so sometimes we'll be preparing for an exhibition. So we'll be getting all the stuff together for an exhibition. Sometimes I'll be working on a particular project brief that we've been given by a customer because we've been asked to provide X number of samples that relate to either a specific trend or a specific application. Um, I then when work on my fragrance trends and, uh, other collections that are our examples of fragrances that we think are going to be big or things that we think are going to be good, uh, moving forwards. Well, you've already mentioned trends and trend books. To be honest, I really loved those. I've already had a chance to see two, but um we are recording in the end of June and you've already mentioned that you have to plan ahead. And I was surprised to see at LinkedIn recently a book for the Christmas smells. Yes, yeah, we will. Well, I mean, like you definitely have a lot uh of things happening in your head, like, but how many months in advance do work usually? So, oh I'll give you an insight. We are currently finalising the trends for next year. So, we are looking at the spring-summer for next year already. So, that gives you an indication. We're nearly finished with that. But it's, yeah, it makes sense because clients want to launch in the new, well, in the years or maybe somebody in a few years, they need to know what they're Totally. Do you have any like signature collections you offer all the time or they're mostly like the collections you have dependent trends? Our collections, often they're a bit of a combination really. Sometimes they're because we go, right, Christmas is coming, people are going to request certain fragrances. And then sometimes they're very much driven by the market as well. So we recently released a K-Beauty collection, which is all about the big trend in skincare for K-Beauty. So we developed a collection related to that, which has been really, really popular. For those who don't know what's... Sorry, Korean beauty, Korean skincare. Yeah, there's, I don't know who knows, but massive, massive big thing about the fact that you seven different products and it's glass skin and yeah, there's a lot of talk about Korean beauty being the thing at the moment. So we launched our collection to kind of compliment that. So we've had a number of different skincare companies that have come to us and are really interested in the different fragrances that we think fit that bill. And you mentioned, because you mentioned K-Beauty, it does mean that you have very different applications which you work for. Maybe you could also touch upon this We create fragrances that go into absolutely anything. We've got from the very high value all the way through to very, very low cost in terms of what it's going to be used for. Our fragrances go into niche perfumery, but they also go into mass market products that get used on a daily basis for cleaning or industrial processes. We've got some the strangest ones that we've ever done. And it's always a good question. People always ask us what the strangest things we've made fragrances for. The strangest ones are things like haunted houses. So we create the smell that goes through the air conditioning units or through diffusers to make the smell. So we've done haunted houses. We've done museums to make it smell like, you know, ancient times. We've also done the smell of fake sick. or uh whoopee cushions, of like farts, rays. There's all sorts of very, very obscure things that we've made fragrance for. Geographically, it also seems like you're working on any market or there are any specific markets you are mostly targeting. No, so we've recently just come back from an exhibition in Thailand. We're also going to be going out to Malaysia in the near future. We've got a couple of our people currently out in Poland, Bulgaria. And in the last year, we've started looking at South America as well. But we are in many, many different countries. We have offices in Dubai, Africa, Indonesia. There's too many to mention. uh Yeah, but the production site is in the All of it. Yeah, well, it's good to know. Do you have someone in Scandinavia? Oh, no we don't. Okay, just wondering Not yet, not yet. But you mentioned uh different projects you work for and I would like also to ask you about the project you made with Mike O'Shaughnessy. Because it really was, by the way, if someone hasn't heard the episode we've had with Mike O'Shaughnessy about workshops in the UK prisons, I was really pleasantly surprised that the manufacturer supported this project. Because quite often manufacturers make it look like we don't know what people do in this realm, like any educational initiatives which don't bring us money are not really interesting to us. And to me, it sets Carvansons apart from many other companies. Could tell how did you approach this project and how did you find out? So Michael actually approached us, I think he approached a few places and we were fascinated by it. We've always been fascinated by the idea that fragrance is bigger than just something that smells nice. know, we've looked at a number of different things whereby fragrance has a direct effect on your well-being, your thought process, how you feel inside. But it was a bit of an unusual one to be asked to go into a prison to deliver the sessions. So the project involved Michael O'Shaughnessy looking at how fragrance could have an impact and how learning in a prison through fragrance could have an impact on learners' And we had the opportunity last year, myself and our evaluator, Anthony, to go into the prison. and actually deliver one of these fragrance sessions where they talk about fragrance, they talk about what it makes them feel, how they feel, what it reminds them of. I think one of things to remember is that people that are in prison have a very much em filtered version of the world. They don't smell anywhere near as diverse things as we will smell or see or feel, mainly because obviously they are rehabilitating, hopefully. But the idea of bringing fragrance into a prison and giving them an opportunity to kind of experience something and talk about their emotions was a really interesting concept for us and we were happy to support it. That's super cool. I mean, I'm also happy that you're doing that and I want more companies to pay attention to these kind of projects as well. You mentioned that prisoners, of course, have a more limited picture of like sensorial experiences, I would say. But for those who are luckily going to be having more experiences in their lives, what are maybe the trends for the next? year or so, because I know you're finalizing it, but maybe you could give us a small glimpse at what's gonna be our main sensorial points, because I'm pretty um tired from Umberwoods. Maybe you're gonna help us out and tell me what to hope for. So we're seeing a heck of a lot of things around milk and honey fragrance notes at the moment. There's some really, really good examples of fine fragrances out there that are going for those kind of fragrances. The interesting thing about those notes, however, is some of those notes are really difficult to create in a nice way. uh Milk can obviously often have this kind of sourish kind of note and it feel like it's kind of going off. So that it's a... It's an interesting fragrance trend to of be kind of operating in. Obviously we're still seeing lots around the idea of uh healing and emotional wellbeing through fragrance as well. So that's another uh key trend that we're seeing. And one of the ones that I think it will be, and this is already big, but is going to continue to grow, is the solar fragrances. So these are the ones that... remind you of sunny holidays. They impart lots of glowing and emotions around warmth and light. We're seeing lots and lots of requests for that sort of fragrance. I love those three you mentioned. Please continue launching fragrances based on these trends. But do feel like your clients are mostly basing their ideas on the smells they want to have in their products, again, based on your trends and your piece of advice? Or they usually come with the ideas they have already or what was trendy previously or right now, so they're not looking forward too much. So it's a really interesting one. We get a lot of people that come to us saying, I really like apetercular fragrance. Can you make something that's similar to that? So we do get some inquiries like that. But a lot of our customers do want us to come to them with ideas. They want us to come with, this is what we think is going to be right. The challenge is that more often than not, we're trying to gain information from not from our customer effectively. We're trying to understand our customer's customer. Does that make sense? Because obviously by selling to a business to business, we're not selling to our customer necessarily. We're selling to their customer because we need to understand their mentality. So that makes it a bit of a challenge. That can be a bit difficult. yeah, they want us to be kind of the ones that are... leading the way in terms of our inspiration and which is why we spend so much time doing trend presentations and coming up with different collection ideas. You know, really feel like, because maybe some of our listeners would like to launch a business, et cetera. I do believe that it's very important to have someone like you in a company, like a first entrance point who, like you might come to the idea that you want to have a, I don't know, Amberwood. I've already mentioned it. So I will stick to that in your niche fragrance. Again, let's stick to the simplest example, but talking to you. Seems like people might start considering it in some high notes here and there, some like tonic notes, like milky notes for the listeners. um But yeah, I really love this approach, to be honest. um It's like we all have limited resources and we want them to be used in the best possible way. My last question about trance will be about colors. uh How do you match those? Because I, like, I will be honest with you, when I see all these Pantone thing for the next year or something, et cetera, I feel like, guys, where is the conference where you all meet and you all agree that this is going to be the color and like Chanel takes it as a color, Dior takes it as a color, then everyone takes it as a color, like the main one. And then in the Devil Wears Prada, it's also mentioned about the blue one. So like... How do you match those? Or is it your idea of how it should be? You go to the secret conferences. What happens? Well, it's a very good question. And I won't lie, I don't necessarily have the answer for you. We obviously do look at the Pantone colours of the year. We sometimes do match those to some of the fragrance trends that we're seeing and some of the popular fragrances obviously kind of take some of those colours uh into them as well. I think the thing is, that... often it's more the fact that it feels a certain way. It just feels like it lends itself to a particular colour or a colour lends itself well to a trend. they both inspire each other more often than not. But yeah, we do use colour quite a bit in our fragrance trends presentations and things like that because it does, it helps us to kind of identify where we're going with a particular thought process. Yeah, but in reason why they choose certain fragrance colors, I don't know. I think it's your artistic background, the reason why it comes to you so easily. I feel like it should be this color. For me it was helpful when I saw the trend book to um just pick a color and the perfumes and they are really good associated. This synesthesia kind of thing worked very well. Now our listeners have the idea of what you do, so actually you're doing everything. except for probably uh buying the raw materials. Okay. One thing, uh Vicky doesn't do, but if uh somebody got inspired and thinks like, wow, I need to find a similar position in my region, my country, my something. ah What would you recommend doing and how maybe you would recommend presenting yourself and your skills to an employer? Gosh, I think there's two parts to this. A lot of the stuff we do with Infragrance is often, to be fair, I'll be completely honest, there's a lot of guesswork. There's a lot of trying things out and giving it a go and hoping that it's right. We can never be absolutely certain that a particular trend is going to come to fruition. So some of it is... having a hunch, having a bit of making sure you've done your research and you've done kind of all the kind of background. But sometimes you've just got to go for it and pin your decisions to something and go for it. So having kind of courage of your convictions, I think would be one thing that I would say, being positive about going for it. In terms of somebody wanting a specific job in perfumery. Um, the best thing you can do is go out there and smell as many things as you possibly can and gain your learning up, your kind of experience of learning within fragrance. I've learned a huge amount from spending time with our evaluators and perfumers who I had no concept about any of the fragrances that I, I, I couldn't have told you what I don't like previously. Now I can tell you absolutely. I can't stand patchouli. It for me, just isn't a... isn't a scent that does anything for me. But I would not have known that before spending some time with the perfumer, understanding some of those raw materials, understanding the essential oils and things like that, and gaining that insight. I really love your approach and you know, I sometimes feel that it's better not to know too many things in the start and just have a supportive partner, quote unquote. Yeah, but it's really, sometimes it's more important to just be trying, you know? And then there is a good thing comes that when you actually find yourself in a specific industry, and you're that curious as Vicky is, you just could go and like learn a ton. And your days will be really interesting at work because you're learning. And not because you've studied all that already in your school or something, but because you just were right in a way you approach customer relations. And now you could learn something particularly new. don't think that without any previous... very, very specific education and very close connection to fragrances. You couldn't just find yourself in the industry and enjoy it as one. One of my things I always tell my daughter is to be a sponge. Be a sponge. Pick up as much information as you possibly can because only through that will you learn what you want and what you don't want. But you've got to go there and you've got to soak up that information in order to be able to decide that it's either something you want or don't want. Sometimes we have to try things to find out which work we don't know previously. Right, so on this philosophical note I will have a few blitz questions to you, Vicky. Favorite fragrance note that you never get tired of. I don't know. think anything in too much is too much. I do like Rose. I won't lie. I am quite traditional. There's been some really, really great launches recently that are focused on Rose specifically. So things like the Anasiso Rodriguez for her Musk Noir, which has got Rose notes. And there's also Van Arpel's Double uh Rose, which is also a Rose Gourmand. So I'm very much a Rose Gourmand person at the moment. I'm very much addicted to those. And also in the UK I guess rose soap is so traditional. It is, but I think that's the interesting thing about these ones that coming out is that they are different because they do have that kind of Gourmand vanilla note and kind of fruit and other florals that are kind of complementing it, which as I say, that Gourmand rose is delightful. The thing is that I'm currently looking for a rosarium in Denmark. And there are no big rosariums or big even rose gardens or anything like what you could find in the UK just near any castle or I don't know, you go to Oxford and you just have a lot of roses blooming all the time. And in Denmark I couldn't find anything like that. And it's a big struggle for me as well because I love rose sands and they're so different. You just mentioned, yeah, there is a whole range. And in the Netherlands where I previously lived we did have a very big Rosarium in The Hague, just an amazing one. And I found one in Sweden, but I haven't been there yet. But the rose thing is also very close to me, so I could feel it. It's my daughter, when my daughter was born, my mum bought me a rose and it's called Olivia, which is my daughter's name. And it still flowers every year on her birthday. So I've probably got a little bit of a, a little bit of an emotional kind of connection there as well. So if you could only wear one fragrance for the rest of your life, what would that be? So back in the day it would have been Hugo Deep Red, which was my first fragrance love, but I won't lie, um I might go for the Van Arpels that I've just previously mentioned, that Double Rose, because that is delightful. So one freelance myth you wish more people knew the truth about. that natural perfumery is not necessarily the best possible fragrances. People believe, the amount of people that believe that essential oils are good for your skin. And they believe that they're better for the planet. They're better for, there's so many myths around this kind of, that these, these natural oils, these essential oils are somehow better, obviously. Um, there's a whole range of things, especially with the allergen rules that are now. out there. There's a whole range of things that we now no longer can put into or we have to declare the allergens. So there's a whole range of very, very complicated elements, which means that we have to formulate appropriately for whatever they produce is. The difficulty is that people still believe that putting all natural or all essential oils is a really, really positive thing. isn't necessarily, I'm not saying that it's not a good idea, but it's not necessarily as clear cut as people believe. Yeah, if you take any, I don't know, think in a vacuum, might, I mean, like you need to see how it is applicable for a specific situation and hearing fragrances for a specific application at least. If you could create a fragrance inspired by any place in the world, where would it be? that's tricky. So I, it's going to be really difficult to decide because I've got probably three different places. Let's just game them. go for that. So my first place is in the UK, uh is an area in Devon, which is on the beach and it is beautiful white sands in a place called Wollockham and they're surfing and the sun shines pretty much most of the time when you're down there. Well, if you're lucky most of the time. So that'd be my first place. I don't know what I would, what the fragrance, I'd probably go for something salty, seaweedy, fresh, Cyprus type fragrance if I was going to go for that one. The second one would be Switzerland. I had some fantastic childhood holidays in Switzerland. So I'm guessing maybe, oh, I don't know, would you go milky maybe? Milky and chocolatey? I don't know. Oh, yeah. And the final one is Thailand. I had my honeymoon in Thailand and it was just such an amazing sensory experience. lots of different foods and cultural experiences. So I'd go something insensy and calming ritual spa type, a spa type fragrance. Well, also trendy one, mean like the wellness one. And your answers really show how personally we are connected to the smells, even though we... Well, you might have started thinking about somewhere you have never been or like something you've seen just pictures about, but no, all of them are from your experience. I love those. And my last question, if you could collaborate with any celebrity on the fragrance project, who would it be? I see. I'm going to be one of those people that I don't really follow celebrity. I think I'd collaborate maybe with somebody from history as opposed to the modern culture. Somebody like a queen or a princess or something like that maybe. Yeah, don't, I'm not a big celeb hunter. likely probably. Yeah, well thank you Vicky, it was really a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much.

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