6464 l l ENTREPRENEURENTREPRENEUR l l JJUULY 2019LY 2019her company—something she knew enough to say no to.
Finally, a mutual friend connected her to Melina Polly, a brand-
ing expert who once served as global managing director at Media
Arts Lab, which drove Apple’s U.S. and international marketing and
advertising strategy. “It wasn’t like I always wanted to launch a fra-
grance,” Polly says. “But I always wanted to be part of building com-
panies that had a strong point of view, that did something out of
conviction that there was a void in the market, and that believed
consumers deserve a better option.”
So she signed on as CEO, and, for the first time in this 20-year journey,
Pfeiffer had a genuine partner. Now they had a company to build.
CONSIDER THE PARADOXof a socially conscious brand. It is motivated
by mission. It creates a product in accordance with that mission. It
believes deeply in impacting the world. And yet, missions don’t sell
products. In fact, they sometimes do the opposite. A mission can
sound preachy, like a brand saying, Buy from us, or you’re a bad per-
son. So Pfeiffer and Polly began with a fundamental question: How
much of its mission actually shows up on its product?
“You don’t want to be educated by your fragrance brand,” says Polly.
“It’s not ‘Let me tell you about all the bad stuff that’s in your fragrance
bottle.’ Because we don’t want to be, you know, Debbie Downer.”
Instead, they wanted a fine-fragrance brand that was cool and sexy,
and that people liked first and foremost because of its scents and sensi-
bility. They named the company Henry Rose—Pfeiffer’s two children’s
middle names—and decided to minimize the mission as much as pos-
sible, to make it a bonus instead of the reason to buy. “I want to recruit
those people who have never read a label,” Pfeiffer says, “who really fall
in love with the product and then as a side note happen to discover
Environmental Working Group and Cradle to Cradle transparency.”
This is a hard balance to strike. They hired RedAntler, the brand-
ing firm that’s helped shape the likes of Casper, Foursquare, and
Birchbox, and then kept refining. Early designs were spare and
white—too innocent- looking, Polly thought. The women wanted to
avoid using cliché buzzwords like clean and organic on the product,
and had to be on high alert for them. “People we’ve worked with for a
year will use the word natural,” says Pfeiffer, “and we’re like, ‘No, we’re
not natural! Stop using that word!’ ”
They also decided the box
and the bottle would not con-
tain Pfeiffer’s name or face. She’ll
be a big part of the marketing at
launch, sure, but they agreed that
Henry Rose couldn’t be anchored
to her celebrity. It had to stand
on its own. “If we’ve succeeded,”
Pfeiffer says, “I can recede more
and more into the background,
and they can just roll me out and
dust me off when they need me.”
From all this, a strategy emerged.
Henry Rose's marketing language
plays off the concept of transpar-
ent ingredients, but with an evoca-
tive twist: Come closer; we’ll tell you
everything. The product comes
in an elegant gray box; open it
and you’ll first find a small book-
let that contains the fragrance’s
ingredients and some information
on the certifications. Underneath
is the product itself—in a simple,
clear, dome-shaped bottle (made from recycled glass), with nary
a mention of a mission statement.
To start, Henry Rose will be sold online only, and the company
plans to explore retail partnerships as the brand grows and finds its
own community and customer base. There are other lessons to be
learned, too: Buzzy startups like Phlur, Pinrose, and Commodity have
already proven that direct-to-consumer fragrances can work—with
the right sampling method. Henry Rose will sell a sample pack of its
five scents for $20; if a customer decides to buy a full bottle at its $120
price within 30 days, that initial $20 will be applied to the purchase.
The company argues that this is a better way to sample scents. A fra-
grance evolves as it sits on your skin, so how it smells in the store is
not how it’ll smell an hour later. (That’s why, Pfeiffer says, her home
contains a vanity full of fragrances she adored in a department store,
then came to hate shortly after.)
Twenty years of work, and this is what has finally come of it: a prod-
uct, a brand, and a sales strategy. Now, of course, comes the truly hard
challenge of making people care, learning from their reactions, and
growing the brand into something sustainable.
“I’m a little numb at this point,” Pfeiffer says, “and not sleeping a
lot.” She’s talking in late March, when the launch of her product is two
weeks away. She and Polly are hunkered down in their office, a sparse
little startup place in Los Angeles with a green carpet, a small table
with a phone on it, and boxes of product everywhere. They’ve hung
a whiteboard on the wall and filled it with a quote from the cartoon-
ist Stephen McCranie: “The master has failed more times than the
beginner has even tried.” It is, they say, a helpful reminder.
To Pfeiffer, this is all backward from the world she’d come from.
On a movie shoot, she says, the beginning is the most chaotic—fit-
tings and rehearsals and rewrites, but then the groundwork is laid
and everyone gets on with the business of making a finished product.
Entrepreneurship flips that on its head. The launch of a company is
just the beginning. The refining and rewriting never stops. “It’s exhila-
rating,” she says. And by now, she knows she’s in it for the long haul.Jason Feifer is Entrepreneur’s editor in chief. To hear part of
his conversation with Pfeiffer, look for our podcast Problem Solvers
wherever you get your podcasts.→SMELL THE ROSES
Henry Rose’s packaging
puts the product first,
mission second.
CONSIDERTHEPARADOX