Why Fragrance Is Fashion’s Newest Digital Frontier
About this episode
The episode discusses how the fragrance industry is adapting to digital sales and changing consumer behaviors.
Fragrance is booming, but the way consumers discover and buy scent is changing fast. While scent has traditionally relied on in-person testing, more than half of fragrance purchases in the US now take place online. As department stores decline, brands are leveraging new technologies and creative storytelling to reframe perfume less as a single signature scent and more as an accessory, a collectible and part of a wider personal style. On the episode of The Debrief, BoF beauty correspondents Daniela Morosini and Rachael Griffiths unpack how short-form video, AI tools, layering trends and packaging are reshaping the category. Key Insights: Morosini argues that fragrance’s online shift reflects both the broader movement of beauty sales online and the weakening dominance of department stores, which historically anchored prestige fragrance. What has changed more recently is that digital content has become better at translating scent into something consumers feel they can understand. “Fragrance has historically been a difficult category to sell because so much of the marketing around it… how do you explain to somebody at home what a fragrance really smells like?” she…
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