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The Scented Webb founder Victoria Campbell Osborne may have forgotten more about scent science than many of us will ever know, but she’s ready to guide you on that journey. She’s bringing the science and experience to help you find that signature scent to feel more confident and connected than you’ve ever been. In today’s marketing tip we’ll stay on the scent train and give you a few statistics about how scent marketing is quickly becoming a more important consideration as we learn more about how our brains work.
Transcript:
Jeff Randolph:
Welcome to the Small Business Miracles Podcast. I’m Jeff Randolph. This small business podcast is brought to you by EAG Advertising and Marketing. We’re going to talk about marketing and we’re also here to celebrate entrepreneurs. We have marketing news and advice that business owners can use to keep moving forward. This week we sit down with Victoria Campbell Osborne. She’s the owner of The Scented Webb. But first we’ve got another small business marketing tip to talk about.
Jeff Randolph:
Imagine you’re selling your home. Do you know what you’re supposed to bake in your oven if you have prospective buyers coming over? Or have you ever heard the name Abercrombie and Fitch? Like just heard it? No. You’ve probably smelled that. Scent marketing can be a powerful tool that can have a big impact on your customer experience, and it can also increase sales. It’s not just about covering up bad smells, that’s obvious. This is about creating a positive, scent-based environment and here’s how you can get started and here’s why it matters.
So first, the why it matters part. Scent marketing projected to be a $10 billion industry by 2025. Studies show that scent can increase sales by up to 11% and enhance customer satisfaction by 20%, and it can do that because scents impact your customer’s mood and experience at a deep level in their brain. Studies show that 75% of the emotions we generate daily are influenced by smell, making us 100 times more likely to remember something we smell over something that we see, hear, or touch. The scent power of your brand and your logo is more powerful than the visual part.
Let’s put it into perspective. A retail store can see shoppers stay 40% longer and visit three times more product categories when exposed to pleasant scents. Even more impressive, customers remember smells with 65% accuracy after a year compared to just 50% for visuals after three months, so people remember scent.
Okay, so how do you get started? First, choose a signature scent that aligns with your brand. For example, a bakery could use vanilla or cinnamon. A spa might go with lavender or eucalyptus. A coffee shop maybe throws a lot of rich coffee aroma out there. While, a boutique storm might opt for a floral fragrance. The right scent can evoke emotions and create a memorable experience for your customers.
Next, strategically place scent diffusers in your store. Focus on those high traffic areas where you want customers to linger just a little bit longer. But remember, be subtle. Subtlety is key here. If you want to enhance the atmosphere, that’s what you’re trying to do. Just give it just a little bit. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitors with a super powerful patchouli smell. So if you’re looking to create unique and inviting atmosphere, consider scent marketing. It’s a small change, but potentially it’s got a big impact.
Jeff Randolph:
Welcome back to the show. We are here with Victoria Campbell Osborne. She is the owner of The Scented Webb. Victoria, welcome to the show.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Thank you so much for having me.
Jeff Randolph:
You were recognized in 2023 and 2024 as a greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Small Business Superstar, so congratulations on that, first off.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Thank you.
Jeff Randolph:
Tell us about The Scented Webb.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
The Scented Webb is a small fragrance company out in Kansas. We have been in business for almost two years now, which is unbelievably hard to believe. We focus on offering affordable scents to people. If you’ve ever bought perfume or cologne, you can know how expensive that can get. And so what we do is we offer travel sizes to people so that way they can try before they buy.
In addition, we are a fragrance house, so we make fragrances in addition to that and we can custom scent body products, which tends to be the thing that people have discovered us for. We make things like body butter and sugar scrubs and we can customize those, and so people come when they want to feel a little different than shopping at the department store.
Jeff Randolph:
That sounds us, and so travel sizes are the thing, right? That’s a beginning.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Travel sizes are the beginning, but when we do the body sizes, people keep pushing us on how much they can get in a bottle or a jar.
Jeff Randolph:
Sure.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Bigger, better, bigger.
Jeff Randolph:
Interesting and for just a one-time purchase or is this a subscription?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
We have subscriptions available. We have found that people tend to like to change out what they do, which is why they focus on the subscriptions. On the body products, they tend to be creatures of habit. They discover what they like and they lean into it hard.
Jeff Randolph:
There are so many interesting categories for brand loyalty, and it’s things that we will never switch on and things that we are happy to switch on.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
And fragrance tends to be a 50/50 split. There are people who have been wearing the same cologne since they graduated high school, and there are people who change their perfume every day.
Jeff Randolph:
Can you tell my Drakkar Noir from here? Is that, “No.” Or is that-
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I could not.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s important. I’m still holding strong to that one.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I will tell you that one of the things that we have that we don’t talk about a lot is we have scent memory. And we have very strong and evocative feelings about what things smell like and what things smell good to us, and I find that as much as people would like to think that they drift from those scent memories, they really don’t. If I said the word grass to you, you and I have a feeling of what that is, but we’re not smelling it the same. So for me, I love the smell of fresh cut grass, and there are other people who are literally cringing at thinking about the smell of grass. We really do move in fragrances the same way we move in life. It kind of sticks with us and kind of goes with us throughout it.
Jeff Randolph:
I’m sure there’s a group of people out there who are just super scent type people who are, “Fresh cut gas now. Do you mean fescue or do you mean bluegrass? Zoysia is one of my favorites, fresh cut scents.”
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I will tell you that one of the things that is almost overwhelming to me even being in the fragrance industry is the sourcing for all of these different things. Roses was the one that still to this day, when you start talking about, “Oh, it’s a rose scent.” Similarly to you mentioning the types of grass, there’s hundreds of types of roses that can combine and make up a fragrance. And so I’m grateful that most people when they buy fragrances will take rose and leave it at that. But there are some who are like, “Well, where? Are they Turkish roses or are they Damascus? What part of the county, what part of the world are they from?” Oh, my goodness. Sometimes I have an answer.
Jeff Randolph:
This rose was an outdoor grow versus a greenhouse grow.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
It was picked on a Thursday.
Jeff Randolph:
It was sunny that day. All of the… That’s how I choose wine, so I get it.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Oh, yeah. Being a fragrance sommelier is a totally different thing than being a wine sommelier.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, you spend a lot of time talking to people about their own personal preferences for scent. Describe that process. How do you start having that conversation with somebody?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I think one of the reasons, and it’s one of the reasons we got into business, is that when people would go and shop for fragrances, they felt overwhelmed by the process and there was no one to help them. People who are in fragrances tend to talk about fragrances on this very high level, and for most people they’re just like, “I know what I like. I know what it smells like.” And so we start with the conversation, “What do you wear now that you like? Tell me a little bit about why you like it? Don’t describe it to me and all the things you’ve heard about notes and tops and bottoms. Literally, just tell me what you like about it.” And someone will say, “I like this one because it smells sweet all day, and that’s what I like about it.”
And then from that conversation, we start discovering what scents fall into the profiles of the things that you like and the things that you don’t like. People tend, again, to be very much creatures of habit. I think the other thing that we do that is a little bit different is because we do consultations a lot, we have conversations with people about what feeling they like to evoke when they wear the fragrance.
So it’s not just, “Does it smell good to you and did someone give you a compliment today?” People often use fragrances to amplify things like, “Hey, I’m having a kind of down day, but when I wear this fragrance, it kind of cheers me up.” Or, “Hey, I was thinking about it’s Mother’s Day, I was thinking about my grandma, but I don’t want to smell like my grandma, but I want to smell something that reminds me of my grandma.” And so those kinds of help us decide and determine what scents will work for you.
I think that for a lot of people, the things that work best are the things that make them happy. So it’s one of the reasons that we don’t code our tables male or female. Men are quite surprised at the fact that they often will pick things from the other side of the aisle when it’s not in a pink bottle in front of them. We also find that people tend to like certain lanes of scent, meaning that if they like oceanic or if they gourmand scents, scents that smell like food, then they tend to pick fragrances that are mostly in that lane.
Jeff Randolph:
Interesting.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
And so a lot of it is just having the conversation. I find that the consultations, when we first started this business, we didn’t think consultations would be the thing we’d spend a lot of time on, and we spend a lot of time talking about fragrances.
Jeff Randolph:
I think you mentioned a scent sommelier kind of term earlier. I don’t know that there’s a better term for that. You are someone’s guide, you are a scent sherpa taking them on this journey.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I think the thing that I love the most about it is just getting people to try things that maybe they hadn’t experienced before. Another component of our business is we do bring in a lot of indie and niche brands that are not things you would find at Dillard’s or Macy’s. And so people get to discover brands from different parts of the world, from different companies that they never thought of.
One of the complaints that people often have about fragrances is, “It gives me a headache.” And so a lot of that has to do with the alcohol that’s based in fragrances. And so now there are fragrances that are water-based, so that they don’t get headaches from wearing scent. A lot of people walk away from scent because they’re like, “It’s just too strong for me.” Rather than wearing an atomized scent, which is like a perfume or cologne spray, there’s fragrance oils that you can put on that you get to kind of temper how much of that you want to put on, but you still get the scent. And so a lot of it is just the discovery, and I like that part of it.
Jeff Randolph:
I love that. A personal signature scent, that thing that makes me feel good, is the equivalent of putting on a presentation jacket or wearing a certain outfit that you want to be confident in. Do you have just one scent or do you have several scents and it’s based on mood?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
For me, even before I got into this business and backstory, the reason that this business came to be is that during COVID, you couldn’t just go into a store and try a fragrance out.
Jeff Randolph:
True, true.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
And so it just struck me as bananas that someone wanted me to send them $400 for three ounces of fragrance and say, “Hey, I hope you like that.”
Jeff Randolph:
That you’ve never smelled, right?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
That you’ve never smelled before.
Jeff Randolph:
“I don’t know what this smells like”
Victoria Campell Osborne:
“Hey, trust us, it smells great on you.”
Jeff Randolph:
And also COVID, so I don’t know if I’m really getting the right smell that I should be getting, or if this smells like soap or what.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Yeah, so one of the things that, for me, as a person who definitely wanted to smell my scent not blind buy, I also was at this place of, “Am I really experiencing as much of this as I possibly can? Is what you tell me and what you market to me is everything that’s out here or is there other things that I’ve not discovered?” And what I realized as a scent wearer is I was wearing scent every day, but I wasn’t calling it, so if you think about how you woke up this morning, you probably used a soap that had a scent, you probably put on a lotion that had a scent, maybe you put on some kind of aftershave, if you’re a guy, or maybe you used some kind of deodorant that had a scent.
And so literally before you even got to perfume, you probably put on three or four things that already had a scent. So technically we’re all layering all the time. We call it layering when you wear more than one scent at a time. And so we’re all layering all the time, and so we just really don’t think of it that way.
In the case of fragrances, I layer every day. I have tried to just walk out in one scent, it doesn’t ever work out that way. It’ll be something as simple as I’ll walk out in one scent, it’ll be 2:00 in the afternoon, I’m going out for the night, I want something that amplifies a little bit more, so I’ll put on another scent on top of that. But for the most part people, when they buy their scents, even if you take the soap and the deodorant and all of that out of it, they like one scent that creates a image for them, whether it be for themselves or for others. So putting on that presentation jacket, those are the people who want to scent trail. They want people to come into a room and say, “Who was just here?”
Jeff Randolph:
“I notice you.”
Victoria Campell Osborne:
“I noticed you.” And then there are some people who are like, “No, it’s just for me. I want to just sit at my desk and be like, ‘Gosh, I smell good today.'” In the same way that you would be like, “This dress really looks nice on me.” Right? And so I think it’s really personal and that I think is the part that marketing leaves out a fragrance.
Yes, we all buy similar scents and we go at Mother’s Day and buy mom stuff and Father’s Day is coming, y’all, don’t forget. We buy fathers these things, and I think we think that it’s just, “Hey, everybody wears this thing.” But no, it’s really a very personal decision, and so the thing that makes you feel great may not have any effect on someone else, but when we do signature scent consultations, we want people to walk out feeling like I am having the absolute best experience I can have in this scent.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, man. You are also in the Centurions class of 2026.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I am.
Jeff Randolph:
Tell us about that journey and what it’s doing for you as a person, as a business owner.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
For people who are in Kansas City who don’t know about the Centurions program, please learn more about it.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, yes. 100%.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I encourage people to find out about it and as a person in the class now, I think what I thought about it from the outside is totally different from the inside. One of our key and core missions as a part of our messaging of learning and serving and leading is that we get to know this city in ways that deepen our understanding and interaction, not only as citizens, but as people who are in positions of leadership.
I have the fortunate position of being one of the few small business owners in our class. Many people work for different businesses and organizations around town. I think as a small business owner, I have a bigger appreciation for what I get to see because I get to see how, when we think about our communities, we have to think about all aspects of it. It’s not just the government makes sure the streets are clear. It’s a thing of until the government gets there, some small business owner is probably cleaning the walkway so that you don’t fall or notifying the government to come and fix the thing that needs to be fixed.
We get the opportunity to learn more about not only the business aspects of the city, but the social aspects, when we do volunteer projects. I think we, as a collective, are a cohort of 80 people who have this shared and like-mindedness of, “We just want to see Kansas City excel.” And so we walk away into our individual lanes of whatever we do in life, taking that message with us.
I think that one of the things that people are often just, “What do you mean I have to volunteer?” You would be surprised how much we just volunteer naturally. How many times have you gone to a kid’s class and talked about what you do for work? That’s volunteering. It’s us giving back to Kansas City and as a person not from Kansas City, I think it’s another way to give back to a city that I’m here now and I want to make a difference while I’m here.
Jeff Randolph:
I have no data to back this up at all. I want to say that volunteer hours are probably even higher in Kansas City than they are on average. I think we give back in a lot of different ways.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
We do, and I think that it’s different when someone tells you count them, because I think people do it all the time, and so people sometimes get thrown off and they’re like, “Oh my God, how do you manage to do that on top of your job and your family?” And I’m like, “You’re probably doing it now. No one ever just asked you to write it down.” I think the other thing I love in the way that it has impacted my business is we often kind of move in our own silos. You move in the 50 or 60 people-
Jeff Randolph:
Your circle of people, yeah.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Yeah, you move in your circle of people. And one of the things that’s amazing is I get to meet, over the course of the two years, 80 different people who are out doing different things in Kansas City who, yes, we may have been walking side by side, but I never knew what they were doing. It just increases your empathy for what it takes to make the city move.
Jeff Randolph:
And let’s be honest, if you’re just walking side by side with them, you’re not going to talk to them. I mean, you’ll say hi, you’ll be polite, but you’re not going to engage in a conversation with that person.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
And the thing that I find that I love the most about it is how many people we share in periphery. It’s a thing of, “Oh, I know that person too, but we’ve never met.” I think one of the other things that’s awesome about what it does for small business owners is, I will say, as a citizen, you know how often you’ll complain about a pothole or say, “Why can’t this work better?” Or, “Why didn’t you just do that instead?” I think it takes a lot to open yourself up to the possibility of what those answers are. And I think that’s one of the best things about the program that you get to spend a lot of time learning about why things are going the way they’re doing, and then think about ways to change it. Just don’t sit and complain, find a different way.
Jeff Randolph:
Great, great. Yes. If you don’t know about the Centurions program, do find out. Let me jump back into The Scented Webb really quick before we get into the lightning round.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Yes.
Jeff Randolph:
What is next for The Scented Webb? Where do you go from here? What’s on your radar?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I think one of the biggest things is we planned a lot, getting ready for this business. And as any entrepreneur will tell you, we learned a lot, a lot of things you didn’t plan for, broken bottles, inventory not showing up, customer shift, as people think about what luxury purchases they want to make and what purchases they don’t.
And so as we move forward in the business, I think one of the things that we’ve loved and have leaned into is those conversations. People have enjoyed having conversations about their own personal fragrances, introducing other people to fragrances and sharing that. We’ve begun doing things like bridal showers and date nights and people just enjoying scent together. And so I think one of the things that as we go into year three that we’re going to be focusing on is creating new ways to do that.
But more importantly, as a person who is offering access to people that they wouldn’t normally have, because the brands that I offer are not sold in Kansas City, I’m finding that there is a special responsibility that I now feel to amplifying these smaller brands. Getting distribution on a national level is really hard for a small business, and this is a way that we both get to grow, that I get to amplify and bring something to my customers that they may not have discovered. And I get to show off these artisans of scent. “Hey, have you ever heard of this brand, the Elemental Fragrances, out of New York that actually does scents that have very erotic names.”
He is a bit of a bad boy, but the thing that I do love is that it’s a brand by a self-taught fragrance person that he has spent the last 15 years learning how to make these scents and they are amazing. But you wouldn’t discover him if not for a brand like me. And so I think we’re going to be spending a lot of year three amplifying those smaller brands because rising tides lift all boats.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s right and partnership marketing abounds in that one.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Yes.
Jeff Randolph:
Victoria, are you ready for the lightning round? Do you want to do this?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I am ready for the lightning round here.
Jeff Randolph:
Here we go. You have no way to know what kind of things we may ask about in here. My first question is really, it’s The Scented Webb, but there are two Bs in Webb.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
There are.
Jeff Randolph:
Why? What is that?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
One of our investors, when we were first starting out, was we were thinking about names for the businesses and we wanted people caught up in fragrances and his last name happens to be Webb.
Jeff Randolph:
And caught up is… I see where you’re going. I see where you’re going.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
That’s where it went. And so it was a very unique take and a way to show honor to an investor.
Jeff Randolph:
There are water-based scents, there are the alcohol-based scents, there’s the oil as well.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Yes.
Jeff Randolph:
If I make you choose one and say, “This is my favorite, I am going to lean toward this one.” Can you choose that one?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Choose a particular scent or just?
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. If you had to have one base for it.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
One delivery, one delivery system.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, one delivery system.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
If I had to have one delivery system, I would always choose atomized scent. I would always choose the spray because I can always spray on more. I think that the thing that people don’t know about the oil is because the oil is missing the alcohol, all of the types of scent are all on the open. It graduates as it develops on your skin, but it’s all right there. I love watching the evolution of that atomized scent as the alcohol starts to burn off, so there’s just more intrigue on this side.
Jeff Randolph:
The intrigue of the scent is amazing. We were scouring your Facebook page and caught a quote that we liked and you said “Leadership sometimes look…” I’m sorry, let me start that over, “Leadership sometimes looks like making sure no one is left behind.”
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Yes.
Jeff Randolph:
Tell me what that means to you.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I think that we often feel that leadership is this thing where you have to be perfect, that you are this paragon of leadership and you’re doing all the things right, and ultimately people will look up to you in example. I think that sometimes in doing that, we get lost in the fact that there was a journey that got you to that position of leadership no matter where you are. And we often forget that sometimes people need help getting shepherded through that process.
There’s a vulnerability in leadership that we don’t amplify very often, and there’s a selflessness that I believe that it should come with. I am grateful for everyone who kind of pulled me aside and said, “Oh my God, don’t do it like that. Please don’t, do it different.” Or, “Hey, did you ever consider that?” And so I think that as we think about how we grow our businesses, we should think about, “What can I do that leaves a legacy that benefits more than just me?” And that’s the part of not leaving people behind. I think that part where I said, “We want to amplify these smaller fragrances so that they can get these national brands so that they can be seen outside of their own region so that women and people of color and people who are not traditional industry people can be seen in a way that doesn’t feel performative.” Someone has to do that work, and we can’t all sit around waiting for someone else to do it, so that’s what leadership looks like to me.
Jeff Randolph:
God, that’s an amazing answer. I love it. I love it. Oftentimes as entrepreneurs, we get into business and we did it because we’re really good at X, whatever X is. We have a lot of passion around X and as entrepreneurs, we have to get that out of our brain and we have to say, “Okay, I need to do this.” But that comes along with some baggage where we didn’t realize that all of these other things have to happen too, have to be doing bookkeeping and marketing and accounting and everything else. What part of the business do you wish you knew more about?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I think, still to this day, sourcing has been the biggest challenge. I think one of the things that I was pretty well aware of was where to go to get things. But as a small business owner, when capital is limited, I can’t buy 500 bottles at a time. I just can’t stomach the inventory for it, I can’t wait for 500 people to buy it, and so it’s one of those things where proportionally, we don’t think about our businesses at scale. We kind of think of our businesses as this ready, free-formed adult that’s just going to walk into the world and know the things that they’re supposed to do. And the training wheels are sometimes realizing, yes, you want to buy from that supplier because they are the best supplier, but they want you to do something you can’t really do so did you find another supplier? Those are the kinds of things that when you start out, “All the best stuff, I want it all. I want all the best stuff. Yes, I don’t care that it’s expensive.” Yes, you do care that it’s expensive.
Jeff Randolph:
You do, you will.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
If you don’t, you will. And I think those are the kinds of things that even to this day, I have to counsel myself. And it’s okay if it has to wait, it’s okay if it takes a little more time. It’s okay if you have to start out small. I think we don’t give enough credit to how often we really don’t honor the process as small business owners. We just want it to be right and 100% right away. And so yeah, that’s the part I wish I had known more about or at least had enough respect to say, “Maybe you should learn a little bit more about that.”
Jeff Randolph:
The entrepreneurs that we’ve had on the show that concept of get used to saying not yet, or it’s a good idea, but not yet. Oh, that’s right. Every time a chime rings from the phone, an angel, I don’t know, gets a new personal scent. That’s got to be the way this works. It’s the new personal scent. Scent memory, tremendously powerful. Marketing research is continually telling us about how that is so connected to memory. Do you have a powerful scent memory that is buried in your brain that is the one that every time it comes up, you’re like, “Yes, that’s it, that’s the one.”?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I do, when starting this business. So we carry over 300 scents. You have to make decisions about what to smell, what to buy, what to get. When starting this business, I didn’t think that I had any scent memories. I knew things that I liked, but I didn’t think that there was this one scent that kind of spoke to me. And about 2:00 in the morning, because that’s what entrepreneurs do, I was in the process of testing scents like, “I’m going to test this one. Am I going to pick it or am I not?” And I sprayed a scent that I was very well familiar with, and I was honestly just spraying it for the sake of, “Hey, let me remind myself what this smells like.” And I sprayed it and became instantly emotional and couldn’t figure out why until I thought about it.
“Well, where would that come from? What was that?” And it was a scent that my grandmother used to wear. She wore a lot of scents. She’s one of the reasons that I love scents so much. But it didn’t strike me that I would have that kind of reaction to just the smell of it. It wasn’t in context, it wasn’t because I was thinking about her and yeah, it was buried deep in my brain.
Jeff Randolph:
It brings you right back.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
And it brings me right back.
Jeff Randolph:
Every single time.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Every single time. And then the other is the scent I wore to my first job. I will never forget, the marketing always tells you, “If you want to be a boss, if you want to smell like you’re a really fancy person, this is the thing you should buy.” And I was like, “Yes, it’s my first big job. I’m going to buy the scent.” I hated that scent, but I remember buying it thinking, “I’m going to put this on and people are going to take me more seriously when I put it on.” I will never wear that scent again and I won’t mention it as a result, but I will say to you that the reaction and just the secondhand embarrassment I get thinking about what I thought that scent would do for me, it did not do for me. Just want to throw that out there.
Jeff Randolph:
As I walked down the hall with my Vicks VapoRub coming out, it’s just-
Victoria Campell Osborne:
It was so awful. And I think that’s the other thing we really, like with all things, whether it be makeup or clothes or fragrances, my encouragement to people is always wear and do what makes you feel good. I cannot stress that enough because honestly, that scent was just all wrong for me because it was all wrong for me. I’m sure it works out for thousands and hundreds of thousands of other people, but it wasn’t for me.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s very personalized. I’m going to take it from the very personalized into a very generalized kind of thing. The research would show that men tend to prefer food-based scents. You were calling it gourmand scents, right?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Yes.
Jeff Randolph:
Because apparently the way to a man’s heart is through his nose or his stomach, yeah, it’s food-based kind of things. Is there an equivalent for women or are women just so much more complex and men are simple and we’re easy?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Okay, so to answer your question directly, there is a thing for women, but to be fair to both sexes, so I don’t get hate mail later, think back to whenever you were a teen and discovering who you wanted to date. Think about the scents we wore then and think about the embedding of the memory of what you think the member of the sex that you’re attracted to should wear, and that scent carries through.
So for a man who likes young women around the age of 13, we we’re wearing things that smell like cherry and strawberry, and you’re just looking at this young lady and you’re just getting this evocative picture of, “I’m going to take her to the school dance and it’s going to be great.” And that memory tends to track. It gets more sophisticated. You would not put your wife in Bonne Bell lip gloss and think that, but for the most part, those tend to be those Embedded memories of what people like. And as a result, women tend to like men in very clean, very, I’ll call it potent, very evocative things that project, that really smell manly.
It’s not the things that men tend to buy though. They tend to buy things that smell like fire and leather and grass, because that is what some man in their life, I’m looking directly at you, Old Spice. Men were told that they needed these scents that were manly and literally you could smell them through concrete. But those are not the scents that women prefer on men. Similarly, most women do not going around smelling like cookies, but those are the-
Jeff Randolph:
If you walk in smelling like tacos, let me tell you, I am paying attention.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
And so the thing that is often, as people graduate and they get more sophisticated in how they pick scents, they tend to start moving away from those things. But yes, men do tend to buy very sweet, not necessarily always food-based, but they tend to buy very sweet scents for women, whether it be their mom or their girlfriend. And yes, that doesn’t seem to be changing no matter how many times we track and do the research and women tend to things that are more clean and fresh and powerful smelling for men.
Jeff Randolph:
Victoria, you have survived the lightning round. I’m taking you out of the lightning round because there comes a point in a lightning round like this where I start to think, “You’re just doing this so you can ask science questions. That’s all. You just want to get deep into the nerdy stuff.”
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I love the nerdy stuff.
Jeff Randolph:
I love the nerdy stuff. Well, congratulations, you’re out of the lightning round.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Thank you.
Jeff Randolph:
Where can people find you if they want to know more about you? If they want to start in on some of the smaller tester kind of things so that they can get a smaller quantity and really understand the entire scope of everything that they have available to them in the scent world, where do they go?
Victoria Campell Osborne:
I will tell them if they want to meet us in person, because some people like to meet us in person before they meet us privately, we have a show next Saturday, June 15th, in Prairie Village, and they can find out more about that from our Instagram. Instagram is always the best place to find us, and we’re on Instagram @thescentedwebb with two Bs. And if they want to just buy direct because they are adventurous and they trust us, they can go to www.thescentedweb with two Bs dot com.
Jeff Randolph:
Perfect. Yeah, check out their website and check out Instagram for all the local listings on where you can find them in the community. Victoria Campbell Osborne, owner of The Scented Webb, thanks for being with us today.
Victoria Campell Osborne:
Thank you so much for having me. This is fun.
MUSIC:
Get into your business.
Jeff Randolph:
And that is our show. Thanks to our guest, Victoria Campbell Osborne. And thank you for listening to this Small Business Miracles Podcast. Remember to subscribe, leave us a five star rating and review, drop us a line on the website at eagadv.com if you have any thoughts. Until then, we’re out here helping entrepreneurs with another Small Business Miracle.