Known as a ‘cult-branding specialist’, Michelle Feeney has spent 30 years building brands such as Bumble & Bumble, MAC and Crème de La Mer. Throughout her illustrious career, she not only honed her nose for fragrance, but also her nose for brands that have the potential to gain cult status.
After a small break from the industry, Feeney soon realised that there was a huge gap in the fragrance market that wasn’t being served. The idea for floral street was to create a modern British fragrance brand that was more similar to ‘bunches of flowers’ than bouquets.
Feeney wanted to create an approachable fragrance brand at a lower price point, one that allowed people to experiment with scent, and had sustainability at its core. She took the inspiration for the brand name from a fateful stroll in ‘Floral Street’ in Covent Garden and the rest was history.
Throughout every level of her business, Michelle Feeney had always questioned the status quo and was never afraid to do things differently. Because of this, she refers to Floral Street as an ‘upstart’ brand rather than a ‘start-up’. Soon, her increasingly not so little upstart brand would make waves in an industry populated with glamorous luxury fragrances.
A year and a half down the line, Feeney is on the verge of a global expansion. Floral Street has just launched into travel retail with a store in Heathrow, an airport store in Brisbane, and with plans to open more European doors with Gebr Heinemann. She is also refining her proposition to create the right assortment and exclusives for the channel.
Despite the challenges brought about by an already crowded fragrance category, Feeney is confident that the brand will succeed in travel retail. She knows that her competitors have more space and larger advertising budgets — but this doesn’t dampen her resolve. Because she knows that being a true ‘up-start’ means overcoming David vs Goliath odds; and with a such a compelling story to tell, cult status is already in her sights.
How would you describe floral street? What differentiates you from other fragrance houses today?
I set it up to be a modern British brand. We always refer to ourselves as ‘bunches of flowers’ not bouquets, and that’s very much what we are about. I wanted us to be much more informal, especially in the way we are speaking to our customers about fragrance. We are approachable and informal. We open the doors to the brand and invite customers in and help them learn more about fragrances so they can make their choices wisely. That informality seemed to be a huge gap in the market for me.
Everybody was selling a feeling to the customer, but no-one asked how the customer was feeling. We deliver beautiful fragrances at the right price point and with heart, not just the nose.
Where did the name Floral Street come from? What inspired it?
The name came from Floral Street itself. I was in Covent Garden and looked up and thought that it’d be a great name for a fragrance — literally. I registered the name and that’s how it started.
I think a lot of fragrance consumers are a bit scared of taking risks. Not just because they don’t understand fragrance, but also because, if you’re spending £150 on a fragrance, you don’t want to get it wrong. That was the other thing I wanted to change was to create a lower price point — so people could experiment with scent.
Before Floral Street you had held several executive level positions with The Estée Lauder Companies, including at MAC Cosmetics. What made you decide to leave the corporate world and start your own business?
I describe myself as a ‘cult branding’ person. All my life I’ve worked on creating brands; whether that’s Bumble & Bumble, or Crème de La Mer. After working 30 years in the industry, I took a gap year, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to come back. There was just so many products and packaging, but then I realised that I saw an opportunity to do something a little differently in the industry — and so I came back with Floral Street. I often say that I pour 30 years of branding experience into the bottles here.
Tell us about your first travel retail store in Heathrow Airport Terminal 3. What spurred your decision to enter travel retail and why now?
I’ve travelled a lot in my career, in fact, I was in the team that launched MAC in 40 countries. Personally, I’ve always looked forward to going to the airport slightly early so I can shop. Now I if I want my brand to get known and seeded to new markets, there is no better place to start than the airport. Some airports have a bigger impact than others – Heathrow is amazing and it’s a great place for us to start.
How important is the travel retail channel to your business today? Do you see a lot of opportunities for a fragrance business like yours to expand into the sector?
We’ve only just launched into travel retail and we definitely have plans to go wider in the channel. Obviously, we’re still in the learning phase too, as we’re only 18 months old. We’ve partnered with Caroline South, who has really helped us enter the channel.
To me entering travel retail makes a lot of strategic sense, but I wouldn’t have entered the channel had we not partnered with Caroline South. She has almost become the travel retail arm of our entire company. So we’re listening and learning right now with Caroline – and trying to make changes as quickly as possible so that when we expand, we’ll have the right offering.
Our competitors are spending lots of advertising money on how they look in the airport, and most of them are already quite mature in the market. We’ve actually gone into the channel very early, almost simultaneous with the launch of our brand, and we’re just about to launch in Sephora in the US and Canada.
https://youtu.be/jIdgswe2C-4
What are your big geographical priorities within travel retail? How important is the UK market today — and where are you planning to go next?
We’re looking to enter travel retail in markets we’re already distributed in and also seed into new markets like the Middle East. We also want to attract the Chinese consumer, which means we have to get our offering just right. That might mean doing some specialised sizing and travel retail exclusives.
Now people are really responding to the fact that we are vegan and sustainable. The response we’ve had in America has been fantastic. Retailers see our packaging and want to sell us, because they want to service that eco-conscious consumer. We were approached by Heinemann directly about launching in Copenhagen and Germany. We are expanding into five new travel retail doors in six months.
We are confident that we will be very successful in travel retail. Our price point is accessible, we’ve got a great sustainability story, and we’re offering something completely new.
How important is sustainability to the ethos of Floral Street? In what way are you incorporating sustainable practices throughout your operations?
I think we are an upstart company and not a startup. We started working on sustainability since the beginning and I hope that we are inspiring the industry to make changes a little bit faster. We can do a lot of exciting things with our packaging that tracks back to our sustainability story.
Our box manufacturer has more green credentials than anybody else, because they operate in a protected area in the Lake District. We are doing everything we can with our suppliers to make our product as sustainable, recyclable, and compostable as.
Tell us more about that ‘upstart’ instead of start-up status.
I think we are forcing the industry to look at themselves in a different way. Theoretically, Floral Street doesn’t seem to be a good business proposition. Price point, the sizing of the packaging, and then putting a beautiful bottle in a pulp carton — its all unique.
This is why I consider us an upstart rather than a startup. I push back at the industry and say that we’re not going to make our products fit into the status quo. We are unique and hopefully we can fit our uniqueness into the way the industry does business.
I also think that traditional brands in the fragrance industry have taken the market for granted, believing that putting half-naked people on ads will sell fragrances forever. I took a risk that the younger generation would be smarter than that.
With so much competition in the fragrance category in this channel — how are you engaging with the travelling beauty customer? What are your priorities in terms of lifting conversion rates, and how do you ensure that the Floral Street messaging comes across via your in-store front line staff?
I don’t think I could have launched into travel retail five years ago, especially with a newly launched brand. Today we have digital platforms like Instagram that means I can tell our story without having to tell it in situ in the airport.
PR is still very important, training is crucial, in fact it was one of the biggest challenges we’ve had to face going into travel retail. How do we train people to sell our products as we do with the ‘floralistas’ in the store? We’re launching in America and we’re putting a big media push there. We’re telling our story more and more and that’s how I want to support our travel retail business. I want to know what our partners and customers are saying — because we’re at a point where we’re small enough to make changes that matter.
What are the biggest challenges for your band in entering and building in the travel retail channel?
The opportunity arose following the momentum we had with our Covent Garden store. We’ve had 18 months to gauge customer reactions from all over the world, and realised there was an appetite for our brand.
Travel retail is a really competitive landscape, all condensed into the airport. Because of that we’ve had to adapt and tell our story in a different way. The biggest challenge is that we haven’t got our own store that can put our message across the same way it does in Covent Garden.
We’re making changes to better promote our vegan and sustainable credentials. I also think that our pricing can be seen as a challenge. I wanted to create an affordable brand — once we entered duty free we had to think about whether we would launch our larger sizes into travel retail first, and create a unique offering that would work for duty free.
We’re also working on a few travel retail exclusive combinations of different sizes. If we’re going to cut through our competition in the travel retail arena — we have to do things differently. I think that’s a blessing and also a challenge.
How would you like to see retailers encourage newness in this space?
It has a lot to do with the merchandising limitations in travel retail. For a new brand like us, we can’t afford to take huge advertising spaces within the airport. I would like to have more space, but we have to earn it by selling more — which is a Catch 22 situation. I think it would be interesting for retailers to think about how they can introduce brands in a new way that’s not just about volume.
What are your big priorities for the year ahead?
Our focus is North America and also Asian travel retail. We want to invest in growing our digital footprint so we can touch more people. We launched into Australia and have a store in Brisbane Airport. Australia and New Zealand have been very receptive to our sustainable packaging. One of the biggest surprises is that Middle Eastern customers love us as well, and I think that’s a testament to the quality of the fragrances. In the future, I’d like to develop more tools for us to communicate beyond shelf.
https://youtu.be/_50Lc-FPWBU
