SPOTLIGHT: C3 by Cosmo International Fragrances
Building a Foundation for Next Generation Fragrance Brands
By Pia Velasco
It’s prime time for fragrance, and we all know it. The industry is experiencing an unprecedented boom. While fragrance has always been beloved by those attracted to scent, there’s been a palpable shift in the last few years. Now, fragrance isn’t just for those with a sophisticated nose or a signature scent — fragrance has now captivated an enthusiastic and accord-curious audience.
We’ve all seen the stats and the projections, and odds are that if you’re reading this piece you’re more than just a fragrance consumer — you’re an insider as well. It’s clear to those paying attention to numbers that it’s an opportune moment to launch a fragrance brand. However, starting a beauty business is no small feat. And even if you already have one, redirecting and refining it can sometimes feel overwhelming.
Thankfully, Cosmo Fragrance’s new C3 accelerator is there for those who need it. “With the evolution of how beauty brands are created and how the business model has changed in recent years, we had to evolve our way of thinking to address what these brands and businesses are looking for, hence the creation C3 by Cosmo,” Marc Blaison, President – Cosmo International Fragrances.
Developed in spring 2024, C3 is Cosmo’s internal accelerator that takes a 360° approach to fragrance business development. It covers everything from brand ideation and formulation to in-depth consumer analyses and finding a venture capital partner for your brand — and more. Yes, it is that complete. “We can develop everything for you,” says Dulce Almario, Business Accelerator Lead for Fragrance & Beauty at C3. To her and the Cosmo team, developing an in-house accelerator presented a white space opportunity to foster talent and scale emerging brands.
Its goal is to act as a brand’s and/or founder’s strategic fragrance house partner from the start. Its team of experts have identified the common hurdles people face during development, and have created a space to help them get ahead with ease, speed, and future-forward vision.
Apart from working as a fragrance partner, Almario says C3 can provide additional services, such as providing fragrance training for external teams and coordinating consumer testing, to help brands get what they need. She points to their arsenal of contacts and explains that for her team, the most important thing is to help the brands that come to them. “If you come to us and tell us what you’re looking for, you’ll leave [here] with a customized list of who can help you,” she explains. “We really just want you to be successful from the beginning.”
The beauty industry is often lauded for its camaraderie, and C3 takes it to the next level with its personalized approach to business development. To best understand how it works and what clients can get from it, we visited C3’s Manhattan office and got nose-deep in its three Cs: consumer intelligence, creative olfactive profiles, and ready-to-go concepts.
The luminous space colorfully displayed the five macro trends that C3’s “Volume One” presentation covered. The idea is to showcase their market knowledge and creative offerings in a digestible and interactive format that works as an inspiration springboard for clients. “You can come here and begin to conceptualize based on what you see — it’s really a place where we can co-collaborate and be creative,” says Almario.
Perfumer Max Rossa, and C3’s official perfumer-in-charge, liaisons between clients and Cosmo’s other six perfumers to help develop each scent. “We’re very collaborative, which is super helpful from a creative perspective because if there’s a perfumer that has a specialty or something that the client wants, we can deliver faster” says Rossa.
Under each volume there will be five buckets for clients to explore: gourmand, olfactive evolution, multicultural, wellness & sustainability, and consumer insights. Then, within each bucket, consumer insights will be explored, elaborated on, and evolved twice a year. “The idea is to make something that is kind of new but feels familiar in a way. Something not too out-of-the-box, but that has facets that you might not have thought of before,” shares Rossa on the scents developed in each bucket.
The first bucket explores gourmand. Rossa presented Cosmo’s ‘Pistachio Gelato,’ a fragrance sketch containing vanilla, musk, bergamot, and sugared pistachio that resulted in a scent that leans slightly nuttier than what’s currently on the market and can be customized to fit a client’s exact vision.
Market research is a fundamental part of C3’s services. On one hand, the team analyzes what’s readily available and trending amongst your desired target demographic. If you want to go against the trend cycle in a safe way, another service C3 offers is tailored olfactive mappings. Say, for example, your brand wanted to jump on the pistachio fragrance bandwagon, C3 could analyze the market and map out what types of pistachio scents are currently available to help you and your team determine where there’s a white space opportunity to stand out. If there was a saturation of vanilla pistachios, for example, and an emerging opportunity for a nuttier take that was more untapped, C3 would point it out.
For this volume’s olfactive evolution category, Modern Green was the focus where C3 explored the color green and took inspiration from it visually and olfactively. Rossa presented three fragrances, including “Secret Forest,” a delicious woody scent with juniper berries, clove, moss, and spruce. “I wanted [to create] the feeling of walking through a deciduous forest with a soft mossy ground,” he explains of this sketch. The other two examples were inspired by the taste of a zesty green juice and a luscious herb garden — both equally delectable.
Beyond straight-forward scents presented as eau de parfum, C3 also showcases how scents can be formatted into different textures. After all, we know that EDP isn’t the only way consumers integrate scents into their lives so in this ideation space, C3 showcased scents that can be adapted into a plethora of formats by partnering with contract manufacturers and raw materials suppliers.
The next bucket is the multicultural one. For this volume, C3 focused on creating fragrances that would resonate with Black and Hispanic consumers. Considering 140 million multicultural consumers representing 40% of the US population, there’s never been a more opportune time to dive into the ingredients and fragrance notes that resonate with this diverse audience. Apart from that, we’d be remiss to mention that multicultural buying power is worth more than $5 trillion and has been a leading driver of market growth this past decade. With Cosmo’s headquarters in close proximity to Latin America, this gives them a unique capability to deliver authentic products and marketing strategies.
“Nourishing Shea” was one of the five fragrances developed for this category. Inspired by its prominence in personal care products and the nourishment it has provided for generations of people, the fragrance includes notes of grounding sandalwood, soft jasmine Sambac, and Cosmo’s exclusive Peruvian ginger.
For its wellness and sustainability section, “Mother Earth” felt like the most related to volume one’s overarching theme. We know that sustainability in beauty isn’t just about packaging, but rather it’s also linked to wellbeing and big-picture environmental responsibility. In fact, according to recent McKinsey research, 79% of fragrance consumers consider wellness to be an important factor when shopping for a product.
With this in mind, C3 leveraged Cosmo’s proprietary upcycled ingredients in this bucket’s sketches. In its “Golden Berry” scent, for example, Rossa used their exclusive Golden Berry CO2 ingredient, where the oil is extracted from the calyx of the fruit. Then, it is weaved in with a medley of upcycled bergamot, ginger, mate, and orris for a bright scent that tantalizes the senses.
Beyond tangible sustainability efforts, the wellness storytelling also fits in within C3’s read-to-go concepts. In this bucket, adaptogens served as a point of inspiration. Angelica root was used for a sketch, and while its adaptogenic properties don’t have any concrete benefits when blended into an eau de parfum, it’s part of the product story. Rossa speaks to the power of the subconscious mind and marketing material. For a consumer, simply knowing an adaptogen is included can alter their perception and relation to the fragrance which is a positive sign for business as Mintel research projects the adaptogens market will grow to $54B by 2027.
Lastly, the metaverse is the focus of the consumer insights bucket. As consumers catch up to tech and digital advancements, the metaverse increasingly becomes an important space for beauty brands to be relevant in. For fragrance, this presents a unique challenge. Whereas categories such as color cosmetics can be visually observed on a screen, scent isn’t something consumers can connect with olfactively. However, a handful of brands have concocted “ingredients” that represent emotions and allow for that digital connection.
For perfumers, the opportunities are endless when it comes to thinking about scents that bridge the tactile world to the digital realm. Rossa imagined teleporting consumers to a virtual garden and having their avatars surrounded by mandarin trees and black currant bushes when creating ‘Electric Rhubarb.’
“Rhubarb innately has a metallic kind of sour bitterness to it, so highlighting that to make [the fragrance] feel more electrical made sense to us,” he says of the creation. It’s balanced with notes of mandarin, magnolia, and musk, and in the digital space, the fragrance would include a holographic apple as well—further enhancing the augmented world.
In the tactile world, Cosmos’s ingredient and fragrance technologies are also put front-and-center at C3. Products presented throughout Volume One creatively integrate these advancements to showcase to clients how they can be used. For example, Craftivity® is Cosmo’s exclusive process of selective extraction of raw materials using only bio-sourced and biodegradable solvents, and Scentsilent® its proprietary malodor technology that neutralizes molecules and is both plant-based and biodegradable.
From the get-go, Cosmo ensures that all formulas are Sephora-, Ulta-, Target-, and Walmart-compliant to reduce unnecessary back and forth with manufacturers. Almario and her team understand the desire for speed, and they’re here to deliver. The results are not just high-quality, but the process itself is also fun.
Blue Mercury’s Director of Product Development, Kristina Cappuccitti, says that the C3 team has such a deep understanding of the BM brand that it feels like they themselves are extensions of it. C3 has provided them with curated options and scent extensions for Blue Mercury to incorporate in its portfolio, and has called the team true partners. “The fragrance training provided by them was invaluable and helped create a deeper understanding of fragrance,” Cappuccitti says. “I am excited to bring to life what they have created for us.”
As evidenced above, C3 can be tailored to all types of businesses. Anyone from a founder with an idea to a best-selling brand looking for in-depth market research and launch proposals can benefit from partnering with this team. The results speak to the value of this accelerator, but understanding that they’re newly-launched, partnering with them has more incentives than you may initially expect. Namely, short production lead times, flexible credit terms, and lower MOQs.
If C3 sounds almost too good to be true, that’s because it’s a true diamond in the rough. With a team of passionate and experienced experts and top-in-class perfumers, partnering with C3 takes fragrance development and launching a brand into the marketplace to a new level.