BUSINESS ABROAD: King of Perfume

In a paneled Paris office overlooking the Etoile last week sat a grey-haired, lean and elegant Frenchman, chain-smoking Havana cigars. In his buttonhole, Pierre Wertheimer, 65, wore the emblem of the Legion of Honor; on his glass-topped desk stood row after row of perfume bottles and boxes of cosmetics. They, too, were emblems of achievement. For Pierre Wertheimer, a man so shy that few have ever heard of him (he permits no photographs), is the world’s perfume king. He owns the Bourjois and Chanel companies, bosses 3,000 employees in plants from Rochester, N.Y. to London, sells more bottles of quality perfume than anyone else in the business.

Trouble in Grasse. Last week not everything in the $30 million-a-year French perfume industry smelled sweet to Wertheimer. Italian perfume makers were challenging French supremacy in the U.S. market, and, as always, the Paris market was flooded with cheap, tourist-bait concoctions mixed in some 1,200 Parisian “cellars.” Tariff barriers and import restrictions have virtually shut off the big Latin American markets. Things were even worse in the quiet town of Grasse, near the Mediterranean, whose 18 distilling plants supply the French perfume industry with most of its flower essences. Grasse was harvesting a bumper crop of 1,320,000 lbs. of jasmine blossoms. This could only cause trouble because: 1) there was already a surplus left over from last year; 2) cut-rate jasmine essences from Italy, Spain and Holland have been cutting into the Grasse market; and 3) some natural essences (violet, lilac, lily of the valley) have been driven from the market by cheaper and better synthetic scents made in Germany and Switzerland.

But these troubles scarcely ruffled Chanel No. 5’s No. 1 man. Along with other Paris perfumers last month, he agreed to underwrite the Grasse industry by paying “fair prices” for the essential oils. Keeping prices up is a habit in the industry. When the Laniel government issued a decree forbidding price-fixing last month, the Syndicat de la Parfumerie intervened with the authorities and got themselves exempted.*

Evening in Paris. Pierre Wertheimer, who for all his personal shyness is a supersalesman, thinks that there is nothing wrong with the perfume business that hard-hitting promotion will not cure.

He was among the first perfumers to take to the radio in the U.S., as early as 1923 plugged face powder on his Evening in Paris program. He then brought out a perfume by the same name, sold it first in the U.S., later introduced it in Paris. Today, at $3 an ounce in Paris and $12.50 in the U.S., it is his biggest seller.

Though Wertheimer works only three days a week, spends a good deal of time at the tracks racing prize horses from his famed stable, he never lets his business slip for lack of publicity and promotion. He sometimes flies 100 or more salesmen to his Paris headquarters for champagne dinners and pep talks, keeps a sharp ear cocked for feminine comments on the quality of his products. Says he: “A woman knows more about perfume than the best technician.”

Top Smeller. His quality control is achieved by the grand nez (great nose), who sniffs and tests all the ingredients that go into the top-secret formulas. Wertheimer’s grand nez is 72-year-old Ernest Beaux, who created Chanel No. 5 for Designer Gabrielle Chanel 33 years ago, when she wanted a new perfume for a style show. Beaux turned up with two series of scents, one numbered from i to 5, the other from 20 to 24. Highly superstitious, Mile. Chanel picked No. 5, because her collection was to be shown on the fifth day of the fifth month. Later she went into the perfume business, and in 1924 Wertheimer bought her out.

In testing the 30-odd ingredients of a perfume such as Chanel No. 5, not all the smells that waft up to the Great Nose are pleasant. To “fix” the perfume by uniting other ingredients, perfumers use such sour or fetid-smelling substances as musk, castoreum (made from beavers’ testicles), ambergris (a secretion in the sperm whale intestine), and civet glands. Explains Beaux: “Pepper and salt don’t taste pleasantly when taken alone, but they enhance the taste of a dish.” Beaux gives each essence the nose test because some scents will last after a week of exposure, while others, for some unknown reason, will last only a few7 hours. When he is creating a new perfume he does no sniffing, simply jots down a formula, claims he knows exactly what the final result will smell like. Says Beaux: “It is like writing music. Each component has a definite tonal value … I can compose a waltz or a funeral march.”

Wertheimer has no present plans for Beaux to create any new perfumes, since it takes years of work and $100,000 in promotion to establish a brand. All the major perfumers rely on one famous brand for 75% to 80% of their business. Says Wertheimer: “If you have one excellent perfume, you’ve got all you could possibly want.” Two are enough for him.

-For a bottle of perfume retailing at 1,000 francs in Paris, the ingredients cost only about 150 francs. Other cost items: the bottle itself, 100 francs; taxes, 270; advertising, 50; retailer’s profit, 330; manufacturer’s profit, 100.