Coty marked its 120th anniversary with a three-day fragrance event in Paris this week. The event, called Coty: A Fragrance Disruptor since 1904, invited the company’s partners, retailers, journalists and investors to explore the company’s past, present and its vision for the future of fragrance.
The multi-sensory installation (combining visual, olfactive and audio cues) was set in a building in the heart of Paris, a stone’s throw from the city’s flagship department stores Galeries Lafayette and Le Printemps. It traced Coty’s journey, from its founding in Paris in 1904 and its impact on perfumery in the early 20th century, to showcasing its well-known bestsellers and its latest brand Infiniment Coty Paris.
“When we started to work on Infiniment Coty Paris [we realized] there were many untold stories about the creation of Coty in 1904 and we had this desire to share the story. However, we didn’t want to frame it only as a retrospective, but we wanted to also reflect on our journey over 120 years and look at how to project this into the future. The experience we want to share is how to engage with the founding spirit in the early 20th century – our stories about the first fragrance, not only how it was crafted, but how it was brought to people and how that founding story is translated today,” Coty Chief Brands Officer, Prestige, Jean Holtzmann told BW Confidential just prior to the event.
“It is a story about past, present and future – how we started, where we are, and how we see the future. It’s not a museum story because the story is still being told,” he continued.
Past, present, future
The installation was organized into different areas. The first area was devoted to Coty’s beginnings in 1904. Here, guests heard about how Coty combined synthetic molecules with natural ingredients to create new types of scents, and how the company pioneered two of the industry’s six major fragrance families: Ambers and chypres.
Coty’s original fragrances La Rose Jacqueminot, created in 1904 and described as the first single-flower fragrance with Centifolia rose; Ambre Antique, created in 1905 and known as the first amber fragrance; and Chypre, created in 1917, are displayed on an exhibition-like wall, showing the bottles and advertising imagery, while the scents could also be tested.
The bottles too were important for founder François Coty, who is thought to have said that a perfume “should be looked at as much as it is smelled; it is an object before it becomes a scent.” After a first collaboration with Baccarat, Coty worked with René Lalique, a jeweler turned glassmaker. Lalique produced all of Coty’s bottles from 1908 to 1920, until Coty decided to design and make his own.
New technology and sustainability
The second area highlighted what Coty calls its icons and scents that marked the spirit of the time. They included Jovan’s Musk for Women, emblematic of the 1970s CkOne, associated with the 1990s, as well as newer creations, such as Boss Bottled, Burberry Goddess and Chloé Eau de Parfum.
Guests were then invited to take part in a smelling session and were told how the company uses different facets of fragrance ingredients. This was followed by a visit to the Innovative Lab, where Eva Viñas, Coty Senior Vice-President of R&D Fragrances, explained various technologies behind the scents. She recounted how the company is making ethanol from recycled industrial carbon emissions for its scents, thanks to its partnership with biotech Lanzatech.
The lab also presented the Molecular Aura and EmoChar technologies. Molecular Aura, used in the Infiniment Coty Paris fragrances, is a delivery technology, which modulates the evaporation of molecules meaning the fragrance lasts up to 30 hours. EmoChar, meanwhile, documents the emotional impact of fragrance by analyzing what the consumer says about the fragrance (verbal data) and how they say it (non-verbal data gathered from studying the voice).
The last area at the event was devoted to the newest fragrance under the Coty brand, Infiniment Coty Paris, which was created by Coty CEO Sue Nabi and Nicolas Vu, and introduced this year. Each of the brand’s 14 fragrances could be smelled by approaching large interactive flower-shaped structures. The company says this new brand, launched almost 120 years after the company was created and including the Coty name, represents the group’s vision of the future of scent and bridges its past to a new era of perfumery.
