The lifecycle of a Scentsy Bar, all the way from our heads (and hearts) to your home
Have you ever wondered what it takes to bring a new Scentsy Bar fragrance to life? From product development and design to manufacturing and marketing, each Scentsy Bar takes a winding, elaborate, exciting journey to find its new home – in your home.
Take a look:
Step 1: Analysis
Give the people what they want!
More than a year before a Scentsy Bar is available for purchase, our fragrance team considers many factors in deciding what kind of scents to offer. We look at what’s trending and up-and-coming in the industry. We consider seasonal preferences, because not many customers want Very Snowy Spruce in July. And we analyze our current fragrance offerings to find any gaps that need filling.
The right fragrance hits every note, so that it’s on-trend, seasonal and yet something totally fresh.
Step 2: Design
Use the perfect mix of art and science, head and heart.
- Scent
Each Scentsy Bar is composed of a high-quality paraffin wax blend, dye and fragrance oil. Our fragrances are layered and delightfully complex, so each oil blend contains 30 to 60 natural and synthetic ingredients to create a fragrance scent pyramid. Often, the ingredients are totally unexpected – you don’t necessarily need strawberry to create a strawberry scent experience for example – and some fragrances need several rounds of testing and tweaking to get them just right.
- Color
Before you even open a Scentsy Bar, there are clues to what you’ll experience when the wax warms in your home. We don’t just enjoy a fragrance with our nose, we also smell “in color!” Scentsy Bars wax is dyed to elevate the fragrance experience, and choosing the perfect Pantone color is part of the design process.
- Pattern
Each Scentsy Bar label features a unique pattern and wax-coordinating color to hint at the fragrance waiting inside the clamshell. The fragrance pattern isn’t necessarily a direct interpretation of the scent’s notes, but rather its overall character.
- Name
Each fragrance also needs an evocative name and description that includes the most prominent scent notes to use on packaging, in catalog and online to help express the character of a fragrance – especially when you’re unable to shop in person and try before you buy!
Step 3: Manufacturing
High-tech, proven processes lead to high quality results.
This process is actually several steps, but we’ll simplify them a bit here. Once a fragrance is designed, named and assigned a color, it needs to be manufactured! All Scentsy Bars are made in the USA, at our home office in Meridian, Idaho.
Here’s the making process, in a nutshell:
- Color creation: Our fragrance team sends the Pantone color for each new fragrance to our manufacturing team, so they can begin making samples. It’s not as easy as it sounds – sometimes the dye reacts with the fragrance oil ingredients and the character of the color changes, so it often takes a bit of back and forth. (If you ever meet Scentsy co-CEO Orville Thompson, ask him to tell you the Cinnamon Bear story.)
- Color testing: The final color sample is UV-tested for 10 days to ensure the color doesn’t fade.
- The recipe: Our manufacturing team adapts the Scentsy Bar recipe for mass production. Wax arrives by railcar and is pumped into large storage tanks. Fragrance oil, dye and wax are mixed to create the Scentsy Bar product en masse.
- Filling and cooling: Once we have the perfect mixture, it’s run through a high-speed machine using auto-shot systems. Wax fills the Scentsy Bar clamshells on a track-system, then proceeds to two stages of cooling.
- Final stage: Scentsy Bars are quality checked, labeled, boxed and sent to the warehouse to await delivery.
Step 4: Falling for fragrance
We offer dozens of Scentsy Bar fragrances each season, so everyone can find something to love.
Once our newly designed, freshly made Scentsy Bars are ready, we add them to our catalog and website, then provide our Consultants with testers and other marketing tools to share with their customers.
This is when the real magic happens! A customer attends a Scentsy party and experiences new fragrances, falls in love with a handful of scents and places and order through their Consultant. Once the order is picked, packed and shipped from the home office, the Scentsy Consultant delivers new Scentsy Bars to a very happy customer.
From there, the Scentsy Bar is added, cube by cube, to a stylish Scentsy Warmer, filling our homes and lives with thoughtful, beautiful, long-lasting fragrance.
Scentsy Bars are simply the best
We love fragrance, especially because we understand its power to bring people together, enliven ordinary moments and make us smile. So, for all the fragrance oil we pack into each Scentsy Bar to make it last, you can trust that there is even more thought, expertise and a whole lotta love in every single bar.
The new Fall/Winter 2019 Catalog launches on Sept. 1, and it features 10 new Scentsy Bar fragrances (plus dozens of returning favorites). Reach out to your Consultant to experience each and every one. If you don’t have a Consultant, find one (and shop what’s new) at scentsy.com
