What should your space smell like?

Almost nobody asks. Almost everybody should.

By Hugo, Creative & Marketing Director, Bel-Air Aroma

I still remember walking into the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Milan. (I think it was Milan. Memory is generous with the details it keeps.) Low light. Electro on the speakers. Sales assistants who looked cast rather than hired. And over all of it, that smell.

I didn’t think “clever branding”. I thought: I’m comfortable here. I wandered around far longer than any shirt deserved. Nobody had sold me anything. The room had simply made me feel welcome.

It took me years, and a fair few other shops, to understand what had happened. When a space is scented with intelligence, it puts at ease whoever walks through the door. I now think it’s one of the most underrated tools in retail, and one of the least discussed.

I’m not a perfumer. I look at rooms for a living.

I should say who’s talking. I’m an art director and photographer. I trained art in Paris, spent two years in a communications agency, and for the past six years I’ve worked for myself, mostly photographing and filming hospitality venues. Looking at a room through a lens teaches you what it’s made of : light, materials, layout, the angle of a chair. The one thing a camera can’t capture is how the place smells.

My nose has always been more opinionated than I expected. My mother’s kitchen on a pastry day. The charcoal and paint of the studio where I learnt to draw as a kid. Neither is a “fragrance”. Both are rooms I could walk into with my eyes closed.

Today I look after the brand at Bel-Air Aroma, where we design scent for commercial spaces. The trade calls it scent marketing. I prefer to think of it as atmosphere, because that’s what the visitor experiences. Nobody walks out of a shop saying “what lovely scent marketing”.

The question nobody asks

Not long ago I walked into a car showroom. There, I looked at a Porsche, a Range Rover, a Lamborghini, a Lotus: cars well into six figures. The showroom was spotless, beautifully lit, every vehicle placed with care. And it smelled of new tyres. That chemical, unmistakable smell of fresh rubber.

I remember thinking: you’re selling prestige to people with money, and your showroom smells like a tyre shop. It spoiled the moment.

A friend of mine mentioned it to the manager. His answer: “Yeah, it smells new. People like it.”

I don’t think he was being defensive. I suspect nobody had ever asked him. Think about what a shop owner checks before opening: the windows are clean, the shelves are stocked and tidy, the team is smiling. Everything is visible. Smell is the one thing in the room that nobody inspects. A bad odour gets noticed. A neutral one (a shop that just smells faintly of textile, say) disappears. But neutral isn’t the absence of a choice. It’s a choice nobody made.

When we put the question to a business owner (what should your space smell like?), they usually smile. Some laugh, a little caught off guard. Most say a version of “I’ve never thought about it. Good question.” Occasionally someone answers by asking us whether their shop smells good.

That pause is where it gets interesting. A shop that smells right builds something solid with its customers. Come back a few times and you start to link the scent with the place, and by extension with what you bought there. Meet that scent somewhere else and it tends to bring the shop back, before you’ve had time to think. Most of us know this from experience. It’s my grandmother’s kitchen again.

Smelling good isn’t the same as smelling right

I have a weakness for gourmand fragrances, the ones that smell good enough to eat. I love them. I would still never put one in a bank or a law firm. There I’d reach for woods or amber.

That’s the whole difference. Smelling good is personal : what I like, what you like, what reminds you of someone. Smelling right is a fragrance that fits the atmosphere of the place and the people in it.

I had a barber in Paris, a proper traditional one: wood-panelled salon, exposed beam, thick leather chairs, serious grooming products. The owner had scented the shop with a woody note, so that the smell seemed to come from the woodwork itself. People walked in and said “that smells good”, “it’s woody”, “it’s fresh”. The conversation was under way before the haircut was, and it often started with the décor. The scent didn’t announce itself. It made the room feel more like itself.

So why do so many owners get it wrong ? Mostly because they choose by instinct, and instinct follows taste. You might adore a heavy oud. It doesn’t follow that your customers want to walk into one. We tend to pick a scent for what it reminds us of, not for what the room needs to say. Perfume is emotional, and that’s exactly why it deserves a method.

Back to Milan

Here’s the other half of the story. The cologne that made me linger in that store was sprayed with enthusiasm, and not everyone shared my enjoyment. In 2014 the brand was reported to be cutting its in-store scenting by about a quarter, after years of complaints. Around the same time, researchers at Concordia University tested scents in simulated shops and found that in a crowded store, shoppers were most at ease with scents suggesting open space, such as green apple or the seashore. One of the researchers suggested this might help explain why a heavy, musky cologne bothered some visitors.

So the scent that made me stay made other people want to leave. Both reactions are real. What’s right depends on who walks in, how busy the room is, and how much of it is in the air.

That’s why I come down on the side of a light touch. A fragrance should drift through a space, pleasant and never insistent. And there’s a trap for the people who work there: after a few hours in the same air, the nose stops reporting. You get used to it, to the point where you no longer notice it. If you work in the space, you’re the worst judge of whether it’s too strong. Ask someone who has just walked in.

How you actually answer the question

At Bel-Air Aroma we start with questions, not fragrances. What do you sell? How much weight do you give to the in-store experience? What do you want people to feel when they come through the door? Then we add the one thing an owner can’t give themselves: an outside eye, fresh and informed, that suggests fragrances you’d never have considered, either because you didn’t know them or because they felt too bold.

Three things shape the answer, in this order.

1. Your customers. What do they aspire to? What do they like, what do they wear? Everything starts here. A very chic clientele in a luxury boutique wears elaborate fragrances; a sweet, edible one would feel out of place.

2. Your brand. Built well, it can be the starting point too. Two businesses in the same sector can end up with completely different scents, depending on whether they lean on their history, their position in the market or their clientele.

3. The architecture. It matters, but less than the first two.

To make that concrete: in luxury, where the materials are noble and dense, we tend to translate that into precious woods such as sandalwood or oud, amber and leather. In a beauty salon, where the point is comfort and trust, we look to powdery notes, white musk and vanilla. A fragrance is right when visitors feel “at home”, or when it brings back something pleasant.

A word on rarity

When owners start looking for something distinctive, many head straight to niche perfumery. Some of it is sublime: small creators, real conviction, years of work. Some of it is a handsome bottle with a limited-edition sticker. The label won’t tell you which is which, and rarity isn’t proof of quality. What should set the price of a fragrance, and your choice of it, is the research behind it and the artistic point of view.

A fragrance should be distinctive because it’s right for your space, not because it’s hard to get. Before you buy anything, ask who composed it, how long it took, and why it suits your space. If you can’t get a straight answer, that is an answer.

Try it in your own space

The most useful thing you can do is smell it in the place itself. Not on a card, not from a catalogue. Our Discovery Box lets you do exactly that, and here’s how I’d use it.

1. Start with your answer. Before opening anything, write down in three words what you want your space to feel like.

2. Test it in the room, not on a desk. Try it first thing in the morning and again at your busiest hour. A room changes how a fragrance behaves.

3. Ask someone who doesn’t work there. Your nose has adapted. Theirs hasn’t.

And if you’d rather have someone walk the space with you, we can come to you.

So, what should your space smell like ?

If your honest answer is “I’ve never thought about it”, you’re in good company. Almost everyone starts there. But your space is going to smell of something. The only question is whether somebody chose it.

Scent your space.