Anonymous Distributor

Didn’t find a flying lawnmower under your Christmas tree? Watch one fly for real here: http://www.maniacworld.com/flying-lawnmower.html

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Goodbye 2007. And good riddance!

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Does an oil company have an outstanding management team if profits soar when oil prices go up?

Would I be a visionary business leader with a brilliant strategy if sales and profits boomed when actually it rained regularly all spring and summer, and “the season” lasted until November 1?

Would I be a business leader with poor vision and a flawed strategy who miserably failed when sales and profits “tanked” when actually the season got off to a poor start, there was a season-long drought, and the leaves didn’t fall until December?

I didn’t change at all, my leadership and vision didn’t change, and my strategy remained mostly the same in both instances, yet the results in each scenario were dramatically different.

So what kind of business leader does that make me: good, bad or lucky?
In this industry, I’ll always take all the luck I can get, and hope I’m smart enough to recognize it and enhance it.

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There was an interesting article in the Christmas Eve edition of the Wall Street Journal titled “Why the Perfume Business is Beginning to Stink.” After seeing that headline, I couldn’t resist reading the article.

Apparently, there are too many perfumes and even more celebrity scents and fashion-house fragrances being introduced every year. One perfume maker said, “The (fragrance) offer is so enormous, you get lost going into a perfume shop. It’s like eating off a plate with too much food and you lose your appetite.”

In 2006, more than 200 new so-called prestige perfumes — those sold in department stores and cosmetics shops, rather than lower-end drugstores or supermarkets — were unveiled in the United States alone. Yet despite more entries, sales have been slowing, while the overall luxury goods sector has grown by about 12 percent this year.

The reason is olfactory overkill. “All the new perfumes resemble each other too much,” said one shopper. “They just change their packaging, but everything smells the same inside.”

With so much competition, many companies spend as much as $50 million to promote a major new scent. That’s equivalent to an entire year of sales for most major perfume brands, making it increasingly difficult to recover the costs.

Some fashion brands have been trying a new strategy to make perfume an upscale purchase again. Many new fragrances have been introduced in the $135-$600 range with aromas such as licorice, lavender, tobacco, gardenia and cedar.

But so far these ultra-exclusive perfumes aren’t selling enough or “reaping bouquets of profits,” mostly because they are so expensive to make. However, makers continue to keep them on the market for years, even as they remain unprofitable.

And you thought the OPE business could be tough!

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