quality Archive

Best & Worst Fragrances of 2011

Now that this year has come to a close, it’s time to share our somewhat subjective view of the Best & Worst Fragrances of 2011. We’ve broken this down into a few categories for fun: Worst waste of money: Creed Royal Service. While it’s nice, even the description for the composition’s notes make it sound [...]
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Duty-Free fragrances: Buy at your own risk.

Duty-Free fragrances: Buy at your own risk. After a couple of trips recently through airports and seeing some questions bantered back and forth on public blogs, I felt it was time to give my own take on the pitfalls of duty-free shopping, and why not to shop duty-free for fragrances. Everyone who has traveled internationally [...]
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Why niche? The focus on covering niche fragrances.

Given that our readers have most likely noticed that a high percentage of our content focuses on niche fragrances that aren’t common or don’t receive wide coverage in the mainstream, I wanted to examine the topic and attempt to answer the question: Why niche? Let’s start from the background. If you’re reading this site, you fall into [...]
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Clive Christian’s “C” and “X”: If price were no option…

Let’s start with one over-arching statement: This is an article about a perfumer who touts unabashedly that one of his creations is “The Most Expensive Perfume in the World“. Let’s step backward from here to the real beginning of this story to understand the background that led to the Clive Christian line. Prior to the [...]
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I’m not rich enough to afford cheap things.

I made a recent comment using the above quotation, and in it I requested people to provide comment: Mostly, people understood the concept when I related it back to things they could understand. It was the hallmark of a quote that an uncle of mine used constantly: ”Buy cheap, buy twice.” All of us [...]
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Retail 101 (Part Five): Why quality matters.

(The conclusion of a series on how retailing misses the customer message) In the last installment, I mentioned some key differentiators between the low-end and high-end of the retail markets, and why that difference can be meaningful to the customer. During this recession, savvy retailers have figured out where they can compete, and it hasn’t [...]
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