Multichannel retail group Scotts & Co. acquired The Garden Fragrance company to create a new sales channel for beauty.
WHO: The Garden Fragrance Company is the UK’s only multi-brand fragrance retailer using direct mail as its main distribution channel. Since 2014, The Garden Fragrance Company has been mailing an 80-page catalog featuring a range of perfumes, room fragrances, soaps, creams, oils, tonics, toiletries, and other gifts to several hundred thousand customers six times a year.
Founded in 1991, Scotts & Co. is a family-run independent multichannel retail group led by home shopping guru Nigel Swabey that mails over 35 million catalogues each year and is the UK’s most prolific publisher in this sector.
WHY: According to Scotts & Co., the acquisition will substantially expand the consumer reach of The Garden Fragrance Company’s own mail order catalogue, providing cosmetics, toiletries and perfume suppliers an exceptional opportunity to reach millions of shoppers.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS: 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!”
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