NEW YORK — Authors Michael Edwards and Jan Moran, whose work has focused principally on fragrance, have teamed up to bring a new tool called Scentsa to Nordstrom’s fragrance department.
The device, a flat-panel, touch-screen monitor, contains a fragrance database of 6,000 individual scents — content that has been compiled by Edwards and Moran. Scentsa’s content has appeared in books such as Edwards’ “Fragrances of the World” and “Perfume Legends,” as well as Moran’s “Fabulous Fragrances.”
Here’s how it works: Nordstrom sales associates enter particular scent descriptions, such as key olfactory accords, ingredients, countries of origin, years of launch, gender and designers (i.e. brands). The system then returns the closest matches from the Scentsa database.
So, conceivably, if a customer is looking for a particular scent that’s no longer on the market or doesn’t know the name of the scent, Scentsa will find the best matching fragrances — based on their aromatic structure — in Nordstrom’s inventory. Comprehensive information on individual fragrances comes up when scents appear on screen.
“The idea was to take [Edwards’ and Moran’s] collective work — a massive database — and put it in an electronic medium and make it more accessible to consumers and the public,” said Frederick Linsk, managing director of Crescent House Publishing, which created the Scentsa concept. “It puts their knowledge base at [one’s] fingertips.”
Moran is president and chief executive officer of Crescent House Publishing, which developed Scentsa beginning around September 2005. (The software is by Apunix and the hardware is by IBM.) Scentsa first started rolling out to Nordstrom stores last October. A similar system, also based on Edwards’ work, can be found online at sephora.com’s “fragrance finder.”
Scentsa initially will be tailored for use by sales associates, but Edwards and Moran see the possibility of opening it up for use by consumers, perhaps in other retail chains that implement the system. Edwards compared Scentsa to the album locators found in the Virgin Megastore music chain, which enable one to search by criteria such as artist and album title.
Scentsa uses the Linux operating system and one plus, according to Moran, is speed in getting search results. “When you’re on the floor standing in high heels, you don’t want to wait,” she remarked, adding, “It’s there to support the retailer.”
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Edwards estimates there are nearly 500 fragrances set to be launched globally in the mass, prestige and niche markets in 2007. Last year, he said, there were 693 new entries.
“It’s the first time in an era of such confusion there was such a tool,” he said of Scentsa.