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Fairmont Hotels & Resorts
Fairmont Hotels & Resorts plans to launch its custom amenity line, Rose 31, next month.
Love those in-room hotel freebies? You’re in luck. There is a growing trend of high-end hotels partnering with luxury beauty lines. (We mean beauty lines so good you’ll find yourself shamelessly raiding the maid’s cart.) W Hotels and Bliss are credited with trailblazing this trend, launching a partnership in 2004.
Most recently, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts has partnered with New York based fragrance line Le Labo to create a custom amenity line available in-room by December. Other brands steering away from the usual amenity partners include Hilton, which recently launched a Peter Thomas Roth line developed specifically for the brand, and now Mondrian offers their guests Malin + Goetz products. Marriot is partnered with Bath & Body Works for their orange ginger collection, and Hyatt has teamed with eco-friendly line, Portico.
Dollars and scents
Mike Indursky, Bliss president, said he’s “thrilled to be the first of its kind. We always knew Bliss brought a differentiated spa experience and W Hotels helped us bring that experience to spa-goers across the globe.” Explaining how this type of collaboration was born, he recalled that “Starwood was looking to put the best spa brand (Bliss) under the W Hotel roof, as well as to launch in-room amenities.” Proving to be good sinkfellows as well as good bedfellows through this partnership, Bliss had captured a burly new demographic: “In addition to our loyal female customer base, Bliss has seen an increase in male clients across all treatment categories in response to W’s large male clientele.”
Having a cross-gender appeal is important to Fairmont Hotels & Resorts as well. Brian Richardson, vice president for marketing and communications for the luxury hotel chain, explained that the signature scent, Rose 31, set to launch next month “is designed to appeal to both men and women with warm, spicy floral and woodsy notes, and once it's in every hotel room by December, we expect to continue to hear good things.” Fairmont wanted to convey to guests that “classic doesn't have to mean boring.” Fairmont, boasting a collection of more than 60 distinctive hotels across the globe, “felt the in-room line should echo that uniqueness.”
“Le Labo Fragrances offered just that, as a New York-based perfume house known for its collection of hand-made scents," Richardson said. "We loved their notion of being 'Great' instead of 'Big.' "
Embodying that sentiment, Le Labo followed its heart, and nose, to make the decision to partner with Fairmont. “At Le Labo we are not keen on market research and industry trends and we favor human relationships and connections with people we meet. Fairmont has a strong international presence and iconic properties around the world — rich with stories. That was enough to get us talking to them, and the people we met convinced us thereafter…” said Eddie Roschi, a representative for the brand. He’s hopeful they made a good decision. “It might too early to say … yet we already have a lot of very positive feedback — numerous emails to our stores inquiring about our Rose 31 scent, and an increase in our online orders.”
Does it matter? The smell test
Seasoned traveler and attorney Chad Wolfe, 29, is aware of this trend, and “in fact, chose the Liberty Hotel [in Boston] as the location for our wedding in large part because they provide Molton Brown products in the rooms, and perhaps most importantly, in the public restrooms.” He joked, “This way, we knew all our guests would be uniformly scented.”
But, are we gaining uniform luxury at the cost of diversity? Wolfe suspects so. “I did always enjoy noting the cultural differences between products in different cultures. The Berns in Stockholm always had product that smelled like pine; the Jumeirah Emirates Tower always provided product steeped in Oud. And the heavily perfumed product at the Ararat Park Hyatt in Moscow was guaranteed to attract the unwanted attention of the four or five blonde ladies waiting in the lounge at all hours.”
We wonder if Portico will have the same effect at the Hyatt.
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Leave a Comment:
Like I care. Just give me a room that is bedbug-free!
Are these people simple or just plain stupid? If it is in the hotel room then a premium price has been paid for it. Give me a great room at a great price and eliminate this crap!
Like I could afford a hotel room....or most people for that matter, but we all know the rich is who they target anyway (the ones they know have money)
So you can't afford most people for that matter? That's too bad -- I just bought myself 4 more friends.
And I'm so glad to hear that it is the rich that have the money! All this time I thought it was the poor.
You really should learn how to write.
It's really important now more than ever that resort owners utilize current technologies to save money, increase revenue streams, and create more overall operation efficiencies. Hotelogix is a company doing a good job with cloud technology and I've heard it's offering an affordable, simple solution for managing hotels. More on them at What other possibilities do you think exist for technology helping resort owners turn a profit?
I still love my clove scented soap from the Waldorf Collection. You can buy it online in a box with 6 bars and I just received some for the holidays as a gift. I would stay at the Waldorf NYC any day just to smell that clove soap. It ROCKS!!!!!