Dive Brief:
- DTC fragrance brand Snif on Sunday launched at Ulta Beauty, marking its first entry into brick and mortar.
- The brand’s products are available in 525 of the 1,355 Ulta Beauty stores, as well as the retailer’s online site, according to details shared with Retail Dive.
- Snif products available at Ulta Beauty include three one-ounce scents consisting of Sweet Ash, Golden Ticket and Tart Deco, all priced at $65. A mini bundle Eau de Toilette, also priced at $65, features the same three scents in 0.33-ounce bottles.
Dive Insight:
The partnership between Snif and Ulta Beauty is reflective of a growing trend in the DTC space of brands testing out new sales channels in order to reach more consumers and meet existing customers where they are shopping.
“We’ve had significant demand from our community for a long time to have a retail presence,” Bryan Edwards, co-founder and co-CEO of Snif, said in an email to Retail Dive. “With their incredible team and sales associates, distribution and brand, Ulta Beauty was the perfect partner for us to meet current and new Snif customers where they are.”
Although the idea for Snif came in 2018, the brand wasn’t officially founded until 2020. Edwards and co-founder Phil Riportella built a brand of genderless fragrances around a try-before-you-buy model and strategy of releasing new launches first to a waitlist audience, resulting in fragrances regularly selling out, per the company.
“When the pandemic happened, we were even more driven to help people find scents they love as easily as possible — which supported the creation of our try-before-you-buy model (the first of its kind in the fragrance industry),” Edwards said. “Scent is an extremely personal experience, and to this day we want everyone to find joy in a new fragrance they absolutely love whether they are spending the night in or able to show it off in public.”
Ulta Beauty has been partnering with more DTC brands in recent years. Last month, it expanded its partnership with Bubble to bring products to all of its stores. Beauty brand Odele earlier this year formed a partnership with the retailer to be sold in stores and online. These partnerships followed an initiative Ulta launched in 2019, dubbed Sparked at Ulta Beauty, to help showcase up-and-coming DTC brands.
In addition to selling on its website and with Ulta Beauty, Snif sells select products through Amazon’s online marketplace.
Fragrance revenues in the U.S. generated $7.7 billion in 2021 and are expected to hit $8.7 billion this year, according to Statista. Over the next five years, the market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 1.69%.
