The Fragrance Retail Market is going to have a MAJOR shift…

[AI generated images made to make a point] This is the possible future we are heading to.

I see ALOT coming to the market and some are gonna be good. Some are going to bad and some are gonna be really ugly.

The definition is pretty loose on what’s going to be good bad and ugly, but let’s start with the good. I think that we’re going to see much more. Indie and smaller brands. Really take precedents in the market people want different people want nostalgia people want places that they’ve been before.

I think that personally speaking I want to see more brands and experience more brands that give the type of nostalgia of living in a big city, so I lived and grew up in New York and spent majority of my younger and adult life there there are sense food and cultural experiences that I’ve been able to gain that also shape my nose and I want to experience fragrances from a period of places, not just Europe.

Most major cities have what’s called a “Chinatown”. We get to have such rich, cultural exchanges between the different continents, and I’d love to experience fragrances that blend some of the sense spices and cultural practices of people are across the globe. I think that Asia is going to have an even bigger share in the fragrance market for that reason and I can also see there’s going to be more African performers as well in the next coming years with fragrances that are going to reach the retail level not just the ultra niche and indie route.

Now, let’s discuss some of the bad. I think that a lot of retail stores are going to close and for those who can’t afford to hold physical retail space i.e. the Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, and Neiman Marcus. Maybe it’s just out of my tax bracket, but I don’t know a single person that actually shops there at any of those stores I know a lot of people who purchased fragrances that you can find at those retailers, but I don’t know how many people actually shop at those stores. Truthfully, I don’t think the brands are gonna have a hard time selling their product. I think that they’re already pivoting to retailers like Ulta, Sephora, Joe shop twisted Lily Blue Mercury, local stores, Twistedlily, Smallflower, MONC XIII, Amazon, FragranceNet, Jomashop, Harrods, Maxaroma, FWD, SSENSE, Venbra Fragrance, buying direct from the brand and many other discounters. There is also TJMaxx and Marshalls but I don’t want to search high and low for the one thing I came for and leave the store empty handed or full of items I didn’t need in the first place.

Color me confused, but I thought it was interesting that when the new Shalimar L’essence was released that it was even at Sephora. Now that might be completely something new to me, but it seemed interesting how a heritage brand would use a retail like Sephora versus maybe some other more higher and brands to market their product and I think that’s it. I think the problem is they need those stores because inherently they know that they can’t survive in more expensive luxury kind of retail stores. And I have a lot of empathy for the people who are going to lose their jobs as these stores closed from upper management all the way down to the sales team. It’s a shame when people have to lose their job and in ever growing market that doesn’t help people to fill roles into other areas it’s a matter of what do you do with all of that knowledge and experience that you had gained across the years you would hope that it’s transferable into another market or at least into another retail store, but the truth is jobs like this are going to be done a dozen, and this is where we go into the ugly.

As retail stores begin to close the ones that remain open are going to lose the human touch and experience. It’s going to be a very AI-ifinication of the retail experience with large screens to help order items. One day it’s gonna be a little robot coming to bring you the box of shoes or the perfume that’s behind the counter. It’s going to be delivery people from the DoorDash the Postmates the Uber eats to bring you the perfumes instead of buying it at a counter and part of that frustration that I have is in some way, I feel some of this could’ve been avoided. I don’t blame the tired and exhausted employees of the stores for this, but I blame the management teams who allow the stores to be poorly stocked who allow the stores to be completely disorganized and people don’t want to come in for an in-store retail experience. Customers feel like the displays are messed up they feel like the sales people are making them feel uncomfortable and more importantly it’s hard to receive help and no one seems to ever have the answers to the questions that you are there to ask, especially when they’re literally being paid to work there.

I think what’s even more ill is more people are going to reach out to social media platforms to find their “sales associates” and these will be people making content for the “love of the game” and unable to capitalize on their audience while the pan is hot. Spending, purchasing, buying as we begin to get poorer as a society people’s desire to buy and spend only goes up from here it doesn’t go down. I know that January seems full of no buys as you go onto social media, but most people don’t live in a social media bubble. Some people follow trends and things based off celebrities and social media advertisements and gossip you know the average person may be buys one perfume a year. TikTok makes you feel like people buy 25 perfumes a day and that’s just not realistic but when you have QVC style videos one every three scrolls trying to get you to buy some of theirs it’s hard not to buy. Personally I’ve blocked a lot of those accounts because it’s not good for my mental health and it’s funny coming from somebody who’s making this part of their career is talking about fragrance and I do see the irony in that. I also understand that and the person(s) I envision my content is made for is for the person that’s in the middle. They’re not buying 25 fragrances a day and they’re not necessarily buying one fragrance a year but there’s someone who is slowly building enjoying and wanting to learn about what else is out there. You know I don’t know who’s watching and who’s paying attention but, I imagine that you’re the one that works really hard for your money and you want something nice to help celebrate an occasion. Maybe you’re buying a gift maybe you’ve got a bonus at your job or something special specialist come up and you wanna buy yourself something nice and I like the idea of that you watch my content and maybe you didn’t buy today. You didn’t buy yesterday and you didn’t buy tomorrow but one day when you’re ready that one video will find you and you will be ready to buy and I get to be a small piece of that.

I think in 2025, and maybe even before that ,because I can’t truly say 2020 to 2025 was more about survival for me than it was about being on social media. I didn’t really start picking up social media again heavily until 2025, maybe going into 2023 to 2025 but I feel like the level of deceptive marketing has really hit an all-time high. You really can’t figure out or be able to tell the difference between who’s getting items for free who’s getting items that they’re supposed to talk about who’s actually buying some of these items and who simply has an addiction and they need mental health help. I know it’s not my job to determine what’s what but having discernment going into 2026 is gonna get even stronger and to be honest I think that’s part of the reason why I even started to make my own reviews on TikTok. I got sick and tired of watching people talking about all these amazing fragrances and I know and they knew that it was absolutely horrible and it wasn’t just about the fragrances themselves being subjective. It was about people allowing cheap products to be made very quickly to be thrown out onto a market of people who eat it up because they’re trying to drown their sorrows in a world that’s constantly caving around them. It’s sucks. It sucks when you’re being lied to because people gotta eat and I wanna eat too but damn I want my meal to be good. I want to add I stand by my belief that there is no such thing as a “bad” fragrance, however, you know when something is made with intention and when something is a cash grab. Most importantly, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FRAGRANCE SMELLS LIKE! I itch deep inside when I watch people do that whole spray it in the air and catch it but with fragrances and tell me how good it is. At least spray your hand, at least pull out a tester, at least make me feel like you tried.

Brands depend on your reviews of their products more than ever and I wanna close out by saying “Y’all gotta stop doing some of the stuff for free”. I also think a big negative that’s going to come into the new year and I really hate to be a Debbie downer, but PR ain’t gonna be like how it used to be. It’s gonna be quite rare that you see people get PR packages it’s gonna be the top 10 and that’s about it. Apply this logic to any and all niches. It’s gonna be counts of what used to be 10K was a sufficent amount of followers but 25K is going to be the starting point and the standard is going to go up and that sucks. I don’t know if TikTok is going to really make it in 2026 and there are a lot of people who are relying on TikTok shop money in order to feed their families I empathize. I empathize a lot for some of the things that I’m seeing and it really hurts my heart. I also I’m going to have to make a part two and be very careful about what I say when it comes to some of my feelings around how the shop itself operates because there are some people who are making tens of thousands of dollars per day and some people who can’t even make $.30 a year and how the algorithm determines whose video gets pushed and who deserves the commissions it really SUCKS.

There’s gonna be a lot more people paying for their PR. I think that’s a new trend that we’re gonna start to see and I know that sounds crazy and ridiculous. The idea of paying for an item that you would normally receive and then try to make money off of sounds foreign but its not and I think it’s a trend that’s going to come into other markets. It probably already has. I think people are willing to buy items and talk about it in the hopes to gain social capital but also to stay in the good graces of some of these brands and you have to remember these are not people they are brands. [Brands] They are a collective of people with one mission and one mission only and that is to sell. And the question is well how will you be able to make money off of your review? Well, I think they’ll maybe pay scale of what sales regenerated based on the item that was received. So basically they’re going to want to know how many sales you actually generate from the item that you purchased and reviewed and then pay based off of that. I know that sounds crazy, but I’m I would not be surprised if these very new models start to be and honestly they’re not that foreign because again it exists in certain places.

I’d like to think that affiliate marketing will save us but not so much. It’s gonna help a great deal, but these are some of my personal frustrations. You really have to educate consumers on how to use your links. The same audience no one taught you how to pivot your content to paying customers. You really have to educate your audience on why it’s important for them to click your button or use your code. I feel like as much as we want to educate our audience it’s hard to pivot an audience that was already taught to look at your content, go to another website on their own time or to go to the store and purchase versus making the effort to go to your storefront to go to your website. It’s like when Youtubers have to constantly keep telling you like, share, comment, and subscribe because we as the audience just consume the videos and we forget to actually engage with the content with which is what the algorithm dislikes. They can’t run ads on things I don’t receive engagement so if you don’t give engagement, they can’t run ads. They can’t determine where to place that advertisement money. And then that advertisement money intern gets split up to the content creators with the best engagement.

I’m gonna make this my last point and this may be a little ugly to some but y’all gotta learn how to beg. I know beg you ask? Actually let me rephrase. You’re going to have to learn how to fight for yourself in a capitalist society. You’re gonna have to learn how to tell these brands I need to get paid. You’re gonna have to learn how to tell these companies that I’m not gonna post five times a day in order for you to boost my content you’re gonna have to start commanding attention. A lot of dialogue thats being had in this article is a bit off putting and I hear that. This was a hard to write article but I needed it. This is me telling myself telling you. This message is not for everybody, but for those who need to hear the message I hope that you receive it you’re gonna have to. You’re gonna have to in order to be successful. You’re gonna have to beg fight in some rooms and others you’re gonna have to command you’re going to have to be humble with some in a little more loud with other others. Don’t let nobody make millions off the back of your hard work without you seeing a single cent of it.

Everything I mentioned is alleged nothing has been confirmed. This is based on speculation and observing trends across various markets. This article is for "Entertainment Purposes Only".