Long gone are the days when scented candles and home fragrances would fill a room solely with traditional aromas such as vanilla, lavender, strawberries, and sea breezes.
Back in 2014, the distinct smell of foods, from a few rare instances of bacon to a wide range of baked goods, started taking hold in the industry, with the latter often attached to licenses. Cinnabon partnered with Air Wick, Entenmann’s with The Jay Companies, and The Girl Scouts and their cookies with Yankee Candle. Other scented candles and home fragrances launching at the time included Snuggle and Baby Magic (with Air Wick) and Peeps (Yankee). Many of these examples remain on the market today.
The trend recently has been toward ever more unusual pairings, such as these three introduced in October and November of last year:
- Netflix and TBWA/Chiat/Day developed a range of candles tied to The Gilmore Girls revival, timed to its streaming launch on the network. Each episode had its own candle, with a scent to match the action when burned while binge-watching. The novelties were a limited giveaway for fans, as well as for Hello Giggles and Brit+Co. subscribers.
- Apple and Twelve South, which produces Mac accessories, released a candle that smells like a brand-new Macintosh computer. The product, priced at $24, sold out immediately on the company’s e-commerce site. More were produced and they remain available today on the corporate site and in other e-commerce venues.
- KFC in New Zealand created a limited-edition fried chicken-scented candle as a giveaway, with the items distributed to the winners of a Facebook drawing. (KFC also offered fried chicken-scented sunscreen in the U.S. market earlier in the year; 3,000 units of the free product, available on a dedicated website, were gone in two hours.)
While such ventures are typically meant as a novelty—they are as apt to be created through an ad agency as a licensing department—many have ended up attracting better consumer acceptance and/or longevity than expected.
That fact, combined with improvements in scent technology and the ability to cost-effectively create limited runs, means we will likely see more examples of candles and other products with unusual scents. These initiatives will almost certainly remain more about marketing than sales, but some could end up as traditional licensed merchandise sold through e-commerce or even on physical store shelves.
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