When I first saw the Tom Ford Private Blend coffret for sale online, I immediately thought to myself, “Wow — that is sheer holiday marketing genius!”
Tom Ford’s Private Blend line of fragrances is not exactly on the Common Household Brand awareness list, and the price tag for a bottle of one of his perfumes can be daunting for someone who doesn’t really know what they smell like or even have that much of an idea of who Tom Ford is. Now, problem solved.
The Private Blend fragrances are offered here in a single, long, gold foil stamped coffret (i.e. box set) containing twelve individual 2ml rollerball applicators. The box itself isn’t anything special — brown cardboard with gold stamped name and description, and the vials are simple glass vials with inexpensive labels slapped onto their sides sitting in a fake-velvet trimmed interior, but it’s the inclusion of the entire line in small sample sizes, and just in time for the holidays, that makes this such a brilliant product concept.
A 1.7oz (50ml) bottle of a Tom Ford Private Blend perfume runs (at this moment in time) $180.00, while his larger sized 8.3oz (245ml) heavy glass bottle runs $450.00 — not chump change, and certainly not an amount that most consumers are willing to throw down for a fragrance gift they know nothing about, which makes the twelve fragrance box set somewhat of a steal in comparison, and with the bonus pleasure of being able to experience the entire line without having to deal with a bunch of potentially messy, generic spray vials without caps or a box to store them in.
Yeah, it would have been great if, as one commenter suggested on a perfume blog, the coffret had been a genuine wooden cigar box with top quality glass spray vials nestled in thick plush velvet, but then it would have cost about ten times more and no one but a Tom Ford fanatic, who probably already owns full bottles of over half the collection anyway, would have purchased it — and that, my friends,would defeat the entire purpose of this box set: a relatively inexpensive gateway to the world of Ford’s Private Blends. Get ‘em hooked and comin’ back for more!
I also like the rollerball vials, though they’re not a favorite with a lot of perfume purists — but they’re easy to transport, won’t leak and are simple to apply in situations where whipping out a spray vial might get you booted right out of the room (or off the bus, or banished from the office break room, etc.).
A couple of photos of the cardboard coffret below — fa la la:
Seriously, even if you don’t think much of the inexpensive presentation, you have to give the man credit for knowing how to promote his brand. The plethora of lesser known niche fragrance companies should be taking notes.
