Amid The Hubbub Of Sephora, Fragrance Brand Abbott Is Out To Transport Shoppers To Nature

Last year, when hot girl summer turned into catatonic girl seasons don’t matter anymore due to the Delta variant, a TikToker going by the handle tamillionaire4eva salvaged a bit of hot girl energy at a bar in New York.

“After we made friends with everyone there for our sick dance moves and good vibes, people were like, ‘I was dancing next to you because you were the best-smelling person here,’” she recounted in a 46-second TikTok video that’s drawn 83,300 likes. “So, let me tell you the fragrance combo. The main base is Abbott’s Big Sky. This is like a rich bitch citrusy, but comforting soft floral citrus nature scent. It’s incredible…You need the Abbott one because all my friends wore it. They were like, ‘Please let me borrow this. It is so good.’”

Apparently, Sephora was picking up the rich bitch scent Abbott was putting down. The retailer spotted the post, reached out to the brand and decided to carry it. Abbott is going live on Sephora’s website on April 19 with six fragrances—of course, Big Sky, The Cape, Mojave, Montecito, Crescent Beach and Sequoia, its bestseller—before rolling out to 183 doors in May. The chain has the exclusive on the brand’s major beauty retail distribution in North America for two years, with an option for a third year.

“One of the reasons we were so excited about Sephora is they are the only beauty retailer that is global, and we are already talking with Sephoras in other countries to see if we can expand with them internationally,” says Jose Alvarez, who founded Abbott with his friend Michael Pass. “It’s going to be big growth for us to add another country.”

Generally, based on Alvarez’s and Pass’s telling, the feel of Abbott is escapist rather than rich bitch. Previously an M&A lawyer, Pass and Alvarez, a former finance guy, forged a bond over their desire to occasionally flee the grind and confines of New York for less stressful, less confined environs. They took road trips together and launched Abbott in 2016 with four fragrances (The Cape, Mojave, Telluride and Sequoia) that are odes to places they’d gone.

“For me, it was kind of coming back to where I grew up. I’m originally from Nicaragua, and I’m from a family of fourth-generation coffee growers. I spent a lot of time in Nicaragua on farms. From a young age, I really had a connection to nature. I was always interested in how I would be thousands of miles away from Nicaragua, and I would smell something, and it brought me back there. I would feel it in a very emotional way,” says Alvarez, a high schooler upon relocating to the United States in 1998. “As we traveled across the country, we hashed out a plan of making a perfume brand that transports you to nature no matter where you live or are.”

“One of the reasons we were so excited about Sephora is they are the only beauty retailer that is global.”

Sequoia, for example, allows people to imagine themselves surrounded by dense trees. “It appeals to both men and women. It’s woodsy and smoky. It has sandalwood and cedarwood. It’s the kind of fragrance that people tell us all the time they love to wear, but they also want their home to be filled with it as well because it reminds you of being out in a beautiful forest,” says Pass. “That cuts across geographical and gender lines.”

Alvarez and Pass invested $400,000 cobbled together from their own money and money from friends and family members to start Abbott. The brand is situated in the clean, transparent, sustainable part of the fragrance industry. At Sephora, it adheres to Clean + Planet Positive criteria. There’s no single-use plastic in Abbott’s packaging. Its fragrances are housed in recyclable glass. In a fragrance industry legally permitted to keep ingredients concealed for trade-secret reasons, the brand discloses entire ingredient lists that contain natural ingredients and what it describes as safe synthetics.

“We really feel like educating our customers is important and are completely transparent with them so they can make their decisions,” says Alvarez. “We obviously feel that the consumer is knowledgeable and wants to know what they are using.”

Abbott began in online distribution, and sampling has been an integral aspect of its business. It debuted with a $5 sample set of four fragrances. Today, Abbott offers a $29 Exploration Box Set with eight 2-ml. sizes of its eight fragrances. Customers purchasing the set receive a discount code for $23 off a full-size fragrance. Full-size 50-ml. fragrances are priced at $78.

In 2019, Abbott entered Credo. In total, Pass approximates it’s in 50 to 60 small retailers and e-tailers, a network it hopes to increase even as it extends to Sephora. About half of Abbott’s sales are from its wholesale operations and half from DTC. Unusual in the beauty space, about half of its customers are men. “Jose and I are two men, so I think we are a brand that is more comfortable for a lot of men than maybe is typical for Sephora,” says Pass.

Abbott has slowly built its fragrance assortment, but plans to accelerate fragrance launches to at least once a quarter. The concept of fragrances tied to natural destinations will continue. The brand has candles and a collaboration with Pura on four of its fragrances (two more collaborations with Pura are slated for release this year), and expects to push into body wash, body lotion and hand wash.

“As we traveled across the country, we hashed out a plan of making a perfume brand that transports you to nature no matter where you live or are.”

“What’s going to be exciting for our next couple of launches is choosing ingredients that are not only green and sustainable, but have a real connection to that specific location that inspires the fragrance,” says Pass. “So, it’s using ingredients that are native to the area that are sustainable and upcycled.”

For the first few years of Abbott, it’s sales doubled annually. Those were the glory days of customer acquisition through Instagram, a channel that hasn’t been as productive for the brand of late. It’s leaned into email and unpaid influencer marketing recently, and has experienced success with whitelisting influencer content.

In 2020, Abbott’s sales jumped 25%, a rate it roughly repeated last year. Besides the initial friends and family funding, the brand hasn’t depended on external capital, which has enabled Pass and Alvarez the freedom to direct it as they please. In 2021, Abbott hit a “high six-figure mark” in sales, according to Pass, and projects sales will double this year.

Leading up to this year, he says, “We totally cut back the amount of spending we were doing on digital ads and that meant less topline revenue growth, but it also meant a lot less expenses. The cost of acquiring new customers had gotten too expensive. We were happy in 2021 to have a little bit of deceleration in our growth path, but to have less expenses. We knew that the Sephora partnership was on the horizon, and we were preparing for that.”

Alvarez says, “We have a lot of customers online from all over the county where we don’t have any brick-and-mortar locations, and now they can go down to Sephora a mile from their house.”