Chanel wasn’t willing to risk her fashion business for anything. So, when it came to the perfume, she effectively washed her hands of it. She wanted to keep “her association with the Wertheimers … at arm’s length11,” a friend later suggested. Others who knew the terms of the agreement believed that “her fear of losing control over her fashion house made her sign away the perfume for ten percent of the corporation12.” The Wertheimer brothers, Paul and Pierre, who were to front the costs of producing, marketing, and distributing Chanel No. 5, suggested that she could retain complete control of the couture house by simply agreeing to create a second company, Les Parfums Chanel. Each of the partners would take a share. Coco Chanel told them, “Form a company if you like, but I am not interested in getting involved in your business13. I’ll give you my calling card and will be content with 10% of the stock. For the rest, I expect to be the absolute boss of everything.” That was the bargain, and she had brokered it.
Perfume was their business, and from now on the business side of Chanel No. 5 was their concern, their product. She would give them the right to use her name on it, and in exchange she would get a share of the profits. It was perfectly simple. The contract read14:
Mademoiselle Chanel, dress designer … founder of the company, brings to the company the ownership of all the perfume brands sold at the time under the name of Chanel, as well as the formulas and processes of the perfumery products sold under this name, the manufacturing processes, and designs registered by her, as well as the exclusive right of said Company to manufacture and put on sale, under the name of Chanel, all perfumery products, makeups, soaps, etc.
They agreed that, to protect the status of her name as a designer, they would sell as Chanel “only first-class products” that she deemed sufficiently luxurious15. She kept the right to sell perfumes–which she could have manufactured elsewhere if she wanted–from her fashion houses in Paris, Deauville, Cannes, and Biarritz, but she was otherwise out of the perfume business. Coco Chanel would receive 10 percent of the profits of the company and would put up none of the capital; Théophile Bader was given a 20 percent share in Les Parfums Chanel as a finder’s fee and distribution partner; and the Wertheimers would control the rest of the company. In exchange for developing the brand, they would get 70 percent of the profits–and take all of the risks. That spring of 1924, Coco Chanel had owned Chanel No. 5 for just four years.
It was an extraordinary decision from an emotional perspective. She had been driven to create not just a signature scent but also a fragrance that encapsulated both her sense of loss and the story of her life and loves. She had named it after her lucky number, and she thought of luck as her middle name. She had wanted it to be a success, and she had identified with it deeply. In fact, she would consider it “her” fragrance for decades. With it, she scented her house as well as her body. Despite these intense personal connections to this perfume, however, she licensed it to the partners at Les Parfums Chanel just as it was poised to become a blockbuster.
If the decision was emotionally complicated, as a business move it was clearly brilliant. Here was a product with amazing potential, and anyone who had tracked its meteoric rise in those first few years knew it. For Chanel No. 5 to reach an ever-broader market, however, she would need the help of experts in the fragrance industry, and that was precisely what she now had negotiated. Having worked to develop the fragrance, she naturally had always planned to have it succeed brilliantly.
However, she never imagined what it would become or how hard it would be for her to disentangle herself from it emotionally. After all, her initial fear–that the scent that captured something essential about her style wouldn’t reach a wide enough audience–had proved unfounded. Indeed, it was immediately successful. She should have been thrilled. Instead, there were painful jabs in the society papers like that 1923 caricature to rattle her.
At that moment, it was the public face of her fashion house that she associated with her persona, and her greatest anxiety was that anyone or anything would be able to co-opt it. But she was above all in her own mind a hardheaded businesswoman. In 1924, Chanel No. 5 still seemed like something that could be–with a bit of distance and some expert marketing–turned to account and managed.
In the years to come, the difficulty was that the product would go on to have a life and a legend of its own, one that she couldn’t control. It was also a perfume that would make them all wealthy almost beyond imagining. The money rolling in wouldn’t satisfy Coco Chanel forever, though. Increasingly she would also sense that she was no longer at the center of the Chanel No. 5 story.
Les Parfums Chanel was established on April 4, 1924, and–despite the conclusive evidence that Chanel No. 5 was based on a Rallet perfume–there are no records of any formal arrangement with the perfume house of A. Rallet, still at that time a subsidiary of Chiris. People in the perfume industry in Grasse remembered later how the firm had offered Coco Chanel the formula for Rallet No. 1 when she had first approached Ernest Beaux, and perhaps they had all negotiated the rights free and clear from the outset. Perhaps they had not, and the company now balked. Certainly, in 1920, Ernest Beaux had been looking for new career opportunities, knowing that the legendary perfumer Joseph Robert already occupied the position of chief “nose” at Chiris, and there is a chance that Ernest took it on as a private commission. In any event, by 1922 he had broken ties with the company and moved to Charabot, a company specializing in perfume materials16. When he left, he quite understandably took his work with him.
Even if Coco Chanel and the partners at Les Parfums Chanel didn’t make a formal arrangement with Chiris to use the formula for Chanel No. 5, it would hardly have mattered. Ernest Beaux had invented the perfume, and he knew the formula. Perfume formulas even today, like other recipes, aren’t protected as intellectual property. That has always been part of the reason for the urgent secrecy of the fragrance industry. The loss of the formula would have been the occasion for considerable consternation and teeth gnashing in the Rallet division, where the perfume had been invented, but there was nothing anyone could do.
Ernest Beaux had created Chanel No. 5 and unlocked the secret of its innovations, and he was well paid for it. Alone among the key players, however, he had no share in the business or in the vast riches that were on the horizon. Poised to take on a greater role in the perfume’s success, in 1924 Ernest was hired as the technical director and perfumer for fragrances at Bourjois and Les Parfums Chanel.
Chanel No. 5, created at the height of Coco Chanel’s first celebrity, was poised for great things, and this was clear almost from the first moment. For the first four years of its existence, the scent had been available only to clientele in her fashion boutiques, and it had been wildly successful even then. Soon there would be international distribution. All that was left was to make customers aware of the perfume and to generate desire in them. The job fell not to Coco Chanel but to the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, who had–Coco put it best–made the perfume their business now.
NINE
MARKETING MINIMALISM
With the creation of Les Parfums Chanel in 1924, the Wertheimer brothers, with Théophile Bader and Coco Chanel as minority partners, set out to make Chanel No. 5 a perfume with a global distribution and, by doing so, to gain worldwide fame for the product. These efforts were the first serious attempts to market the fragrance traditionally–a fragrance that had become a favorite among the fashionable women who shopped in Paris, despite Coco Chanel’s strategic refusal to pay for any advertising. Indeed, it had become a sensation among these social elite–women who could afford to have their clothing made for them by the famous Coco Chanel–based on word of mouth alone. Those who bought their clothing off the rack at the world’s great department stores couldn’t yet pick up a bottle of Chanel No. 5 at the beauty counter, unless they happened to be shopping at the Galeries Lafayette after 1923.
This would all quickly change. The transformation of Chanel No. 5 into the world’s most
famous perfume would happen with the opening of the vast American market. By the 1920s, American women had, in the words of one historian, “the greatest value of surplus [money] ever given to women to spend in all of history.”1 The postwar years saw the rise of a new kind of luxury market that included the middle-class consumer. The goal at Les Parfums Chanel, where Ernest Beaux had now been hired as the head of fragrance, was to bring Chanel No. 5 to the cultural mainstream, where it could reach the women who read fashion magazines like Vogue and patterned their hemlines after news from Paris.
Ironically, Coco Chanel imagined her minimalist perfume in opposition to the world of salesmanship, and, even after the partners at Les Parfums Chanel took over the marketing and distribution of Chanel No. 5, the advertising was determinedly understated–not just for the first few years but for most of the next two decades. The persistent idea, then, that Chanel No. 5's original success was the result of heavy advertising and cunning marketing campaigns could not be further from the truth. In fact, the real surprise is that the early marketing didn’t manage to undermine it completely. Those first advertisements are baffling.
The partners at Les Parfums Chanel outlined their strategy succinctly in the first sales catalog, sent to retailers in France immediately after the creation of the partnership in 1924. It was a remarkably simple affair in black and white, with a plain brown paper cover, black edging, and a white ribbon: the signature Chanel colors. It tells us everything we need to know about how Coco Chanel imagined her signature scent–or how the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, more precisely, imagined it for her–and it cuts to the heart of why there was, in the beginning, so little marketing. “Luxury perfume,” the brochure reads,2
this term has lost much of its value because of how it is abused. Modern advertising touches everything, but that is only a matter of an attractive bottle or fine packaging. The Chanel perfumes, created exclusively for connoisseurs, occupy a unique and unparalleled place in the kingdom of perfume. Committed to the creation of an original perfume, different from anything else obtainable, Mademoiselle Chanel succeeded in finding some extracts of an exceptional quality and so evocative of the Chanel style that they take their place among her earlier creations … the perfection of the product forbids dressing it in the customary artifices. Why rely on the art of the glassmaker or the manufacturer of cartons! This so often brings an air of prestige to a dubious product and brings mercenary cheers from the press to sway a naïve public. Mademoiselle Chanel is proud to present simple bottles adorned only by their whiteness, precious teardrops of perfume of incomparable quality, unique in composition, revealing the artistic personality of their creator. Sold at the beginning only by Mademoiselle Chanel in her stores in Paris, Deauville, Cannes and Biarritz, these perfumes became highly prized in elegant circles in France and abroad. The great demand convinced Mademoiselle Chanel to consent to sell her products in different countries around the world, at a few renowned and chosen houses.
In rejecting the idea of fussy advertising, it was the quality of her fragrance that they wanted to showcase, and the clear message to the consumer was that, in the world of luxury, flashy marketing was part of the problem. Unlike the ornate and florid perfume bottles being famously created by the luxury glass firm of Cristal Baccarat in the 1920s, Les Parfums Chanel would make a simple, pharmaceutical bottle its signature.
Immediately after that meeting with Ernest Beaux in 1920, in which she selected his famous fifth sample, Coco Chanel had started planning for the Paris launch of her new fragrance. She had picked out the bottle, however, much earlier. The decision about the bottle had been a long and fascinating one. “Elegance,” she once said, “is refusal,” and the bottle for Chanel No. 5 was an act of both memory and defiance.
What the bottle would not look like was one important consideration. Most perfume bottles before Coco Chanel were as ornate and as flowery as the fragrances within them, decorated with swirling, gaudy flourishes of color and design. She wanted something with cleaner lines, something that would be distinct and simple. It would have lines as clean as those notes of the aldehydes in the fragrance.
Like the perfume, it would also have to be sensual. Selecting her signature perfume had always been wrapped up intimately with Boy Capel, and the bottle–this simple glass shape–was nothing if not an intimate memory. The story usually told about her inspiration, however, isn’t accurate. Boy had carried with him in his traveling case a set of matching toiletry bottles, and leather cases with flacons and brushes were common. Boy’s set came, some say, from the shop of his shirtmaker, Sulka; others say it came from the tailors at Charvet, already in the 1920s the most exclusive couture house for men’s fashion, where nearly all the men of Coco Chanel’s acquaintance bought their shirts hand-tailored. Coco Chanel shopped there herself on occasion3: the company also produced the gorgeously patterned silks that even she couldn’t find anywhere else.
Both toiletry bottles shared the same economy of lines that she admired in the Romanesque architecture of Aubazine and in the fall of a dress, and, when asked years later where the design had come from, Chanel’s artistic director, the late Jacques Helleu, remembered hearing from his father, Jean, that the Charvet bottle was behind it. But that wasn’t where Coco found her inspiration at all. Her real model was one of Boy Capel’s whisky decanters4.
Her friend Misia Sert described the original design for the Eau Chanel bottle–as she insisted on calling Chanel No. 5–as “solemn, ultra-simple, quasi-pharmaceutical,”5 and Coco ordered copies of just such a bottle–adapted in “the Chanel taste"–made in delicate and expensive glass and sometimes, for special clients, in crystal from the elite manufacturers at the firm of Brosse. Everything about it was pure transparency. What Coco Chanel wanted was an invisible bottle–an invisible bottle that, ironically, would one day become one of the world’s most recognizable icons.
Ernest Beaux had created an abstract floral perfume in the scent of Chanel No. 5, a fragrance that Coco Chanel would celebrate as a composition not unlike a dress. The bottle would be its complement: the abstraction of a bottle, from which everything was erased except the essentials of line.
It was a surprising decision, maybe even a daring one. In some ways, though, the bottle wasn’t nearly as radical as it appears. The history of early twentieth-century perfume bottles reveals something entirely unexpected: this style of bottle was already being used in the fragrance industry. The mainstream might have preferred those overwrought crystal creations, but by the early 1920s there was a fledgling movement in design toward a new kind of artistry in perfume bottles. It’s the elaborate designs of René Lalique that everyone remembers–and collects today–of course. Already “the art of the bottle tend[ing] … to simplicity of line and decoration”6 was gaining momentum, however. Even Lalique was producing elegant, streamlined modernist flacons.
Some of them strongly resemble that first Chanel No. 5 design. The 1907 Lalique bottle for François Coty’s La Rose Jacqueminot (1903)–7a perfume that was a huge commercial success–is strikingly similar. It’s the same delicate pharmaceutical style, with a discreet label and a square stopper. The only notable differences are some extraneous art nouveau flourishes. Coty himself had been introduced to the world of perfume-making in a friend’s pharmacy, where he had seen dozens of understated, elegant glass bottles–bottles, it’s worth noting, not entirely unlike the one Coco Chanel designed for her signature scent.
Throughout most of the first part of the century, Coty was the world’s largest fragrance house, but one of the other international powerhouses was Bourjois, the parent perfume company that had first made the Wertheimer brothers’ fortunes. At least as early as 1920, Bourjois’s bottle for its Ashes of Roses (1909)8 also used a flask whose lines are a close echo of the Chanel No. 5 bottle: simple, clear, square, with just a small maroon paper label.
Coco was a careful businesswoman, and she made her name by paying attention to details. When she began her study of fragrance in 1919, she
assessed her would-be competitors, and, with her gift for timing, she selected a bottle that reflected a new, chic direction in the industry. From the marketing perspective, the achievement of Chanel No. 5 has not been that its packaging has been entirely revolutionary but that it has always pushed what some have called the soft edge of the avant garde. This is precisely the case with the famous bottle.
Or, rather, with the bottle that would become famous as it evolved over the years. Because the first bottle used for Chanel No. 5 isn’t quite the same as the one that today is among the world of luxury’s most recognized icons. In the beginning, the flask wasn’t sold in the now-ubiquitous square-cut bottle, with its sharp and beveled shoulders. The original bottle–the one shown in that 1921 tribute to Chanel No. 5 by Sem–was gently curved at the edges. Its shape was sleek, the tiniest bit masculine, and spectacularly understated.
The innovations that directly led to the bottle we know today happened in 19249, when the original rounded and ethereally thin glassware was proving too delicate for distribution and the partners at Les Parfums Chanel ordered a new design, produced at the celebrated Cristalleries de Saint Louis, in glass and only rarely in crystal. Later, in the course of nearly a century now, there has been only one substantial modification to the shape of the bottle. In 1924, the corners of the bottle were first faceted and squared.
The Secret of Chanel No. 5 Page 10