Higher World Fragrance House, the Drake-founded fragrance brand, is making its first retail play.
The brand, currently comprising five home fragrances ranging in price from $48 to $80, is heading to Harrods within the U.K. It’ll bow online on Monday, with an ensuing in-store rollout.
It is usually the brand’s first big move since signing a licensing cope with Parlux late last 12 months. The brand initially launched two years ago on its website.
“We wanted to start out constructing a brand with no pressure, and once we felt settled when it comes to the brand and its identity, we wanted a partner,” said Matte Babel, chief brand officer of DreamCrew and a member of Drake’s management team. “It’s a brilliant complex business with different compliance issues and distribution.”
It also marks the opening of Parlux’ lifestyle division, which oversees home fragrance and other scent-adjacent categories. “Drake’s inspiring vision for Higher World, to create a luxury lifestyle fragrance house for all and create a greater lifestyle for all, one hundred pc aligns with what we do at Parlux,” said Lori Singer, the corporate’s president. “It did lead us to create this latest division, which was designed to showcase our brands that will not be necessarily all purely fragrance. The vision is to grow and champion brands that provide all elements of beauty and fragrance.”
Babel added that the brand has been years within the making. “We’ve all known it was going to occur in the end over the past 10 years. We were all the time starting a fragrance company,” he said.
It’s also an area where Drake has some familiarity. Certainly one of the scents, Carby Musk, the rapper created for private use with Givaudan perfumer Michael Carby. “He’s been wearing that for probably three years before we ever even considered bringing that to market,” Babel continued.
Higher World Fragrance Home is just the most recent in a string of buzzy licensors for Parlux. The corporate also holds the license for Billie Eilish’s eponymous fragrance line, in addition to Paris Hilton, amongst others.
“We leverage our bespoke development process,” Singer continued. “It’s all about meeting the needs of individual brands, it’s not a cookie cutter approach.”
To that end, Drake typically works directly with Carby when developing latest fragrances. “On this case, Drake has an open line to Carby; they’ve a relationship that makes this very authentic,” Singer said.
After kicking off the partnership, each Parlux and the brand are eyeing latest categories and geographies for expansion. The brand is “about improving our immediate space,” Babel said. “How can we improve our space through scent, whether that be a private space, a studio space or a foreign space. That can create ripple effects into other things we do as a brand. We take a look at how many various places someone can interact with scent and product.”
The priority is to bring the brand onto shelves and counters in other key markets, including North America. It began with Harrods because “London seems like a second home to us,” Babel said. “Harrods is a spot we frequent each time we’re there. It’s significant to have a product in a spot we’ve been going for years, and an aspirational place we’ve been purchasing for years.”
As Singer put it, “Harrods are improbable partners, and so they know tips on how to bring a brand to life and launch a brand in a tremendous way. Knowing the connection that Drake and Matte have with Harrods and the affinity there, it was the right retailer to showcase this brand.”
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