Eden Park's new perfume, Number One. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Eden Park has made some weird moves in the last few years, but is a range of perfumes taking things too far? We ask Aussie CEO Nick Sautner what’s going on. Also: We put it to the smell test.
Eden Park’s new fragrance is called Number One and if that name is meant as a pun – and presumably it is – it’s a bit on the nose. When I recently called Eden Park CEO Nick Sautner to discuss the perfume, I asked if he knew Number One was a pun. “Yes,” he said, “but there are other iconic global brands that have a number one product too.” He didn’t name the brands, though, so it’s impossible to know whether their products are also fragrances, or whether the products represent places where urine is frequently part of the experience.
Number One is part of Eden Park’s “Stadium Collection” of fragrances, which currently comprises only one other fragrance – “Garden of Eden”. Sautner said Number One was his favourite, but he wouldn’t be drawn on whether he thought Garden of Eden was number two. Both fragrances retail for $170.
Sautner said he had been interested in the idea of creating an Eden Park perfume for a while. He said that we live in an “experience economy”, that Eden Park faces a challenge for “consumer spend”, that it must find “dynamic and different ways to leverage the Eden Park brand”.
The idea really took shape, though, after one of the park’s staff attended one of the $149 public perfume-making workshops at New Zealand perfume house Miller Road, and brought the idea back to the office.
Miller Road brought their essential oils and other smells to Eden Park, worked closely with park staff to create blends that captured the essence of the Eden Park experience, and next thing you know, the turf manager is on a billboard in Kingsland holding a tiny bottle of perfume he made, which retails for $170.
It was a quite astonishing story and the sort of thing you’d expect to make headlines, but even though Eden Park put out a press release about it in December last year, no mainstream media outlet appears to have even mentioned it, and possibly never would have, had a Herald photographer not noticed the billboard and wondered why the Eden Park turf manager was holding a tiny bottle of perfume he made, which retails for $170.
If you think a stadium making its own perfume sounds a bit wacky, that’s because it is. But if you think it sounds original, you couldn’t be more wrong. The history of unlikely brands producing unlikely fragrances in the hopes of attracting attention is both very long and far weirder than you can imagine.
Only a few months before the launch of Eden Park’s perfumes, another odiferous Auckland icon, just a short walk from the stadium, launched its own fragrance. Road by Karangahape claimed to have captured the essence of the iconic city street’s scent, citing elements including “Preloved garment musk”, “bar waft”, “dance floor pit” and “hair clippings”.
Using a series of clever story hooks to induce content mania amongst media and artificial scarcity to induce buying mania amongst consumers, the perfume’s creator produced a limited run of 150 bottles, then released them in a series of tiny batches, at a series of ever-changing locations on K Rd, with each new location announced exclusively on the K Rd Instagram account.
The perfume was made by Wellington perfumer Ofbody, but the idea and campaign came from advertising agency Motion Sickness, which wanted not for people to smell weird and/or disgusting, necessarily, but to encourage them to visit the businesses of K Rd, because the K Rd Business Association was paying them good money to do so.
As the agency wrote on its web page: “We needed a reason for people to visit the street. So we created a perfume.” That sentence was unadorned by further explanation, as if it was the most natural and obvious thing in the world: How else, the agency appeared to be saying, were they supposed to do it?
They said the fragrance included “a touch of smoke and mirrors”, a line so cheeky as to border on self-sabotage. Accompanying the fragrance’s launch was a series of photographs of K Rd business owners and personalities in outfits and poses that parodied the pretentiousness of the traditional fragrance marketing campaign. Each new batch of perfumes sold out an average of eight minutes after its release was announced on social media, and – more importantly – the media lapped the fragrance up and gave K Rd the free exposure it craved, and continues to do so, in this very article, almost a year later.
There is a lot of bulls*** that goes into selling fragrance, but if the K Rd experience tells us anything, it’s that we love the smell of bulls***.
It took several questions to pin Sautner down on the genesis of the Eden Park perfume, including a detour through his personal backstory during which he said he was very fortunate to have a mother who had dedicated her life to raising three boys, then talked about his wife, children and rescue schnauzer, before arriving at the point: running a stadium takes a whānau.
He had a lot of stories to tell, all of which were aimed at promoting Eden Park and his vision for it. Fair enough, that’s his job, but I was there to talk about perfume.
During his seven-year reign as CEO of Eden Park, Sautner has established himself as an innovator, introducing a range of new and exciting initiatives and finding new ways to leverage the Eden Park brand and make money outside the traditional earners of rugby, cricket and the odd corporate away day. He’s introduced experiences that allow people to stay at the park, play golf at the park and walk on the park’s roof. He’s made it a site for street art installations, major international exhibitions and even a storage garage for several thousand Lime scooters. But all those initiatives have a tangible connection to the park. The perfumes have taken the stadium into a realm beyond the physical; the realm of smoke and mirrors. This might be a suitable place for Auckland’s weirdest street, but is it suitable for the home of Auckland rugby?
Although many of the park’s staff created fragrances during the workshop with Miller Road, only two of those were selected to be part of the Stadium Collection. Number One was the work of two people, including the park’s receptionist, while Garden of Eden was, as mentioned, the creation of the park’s turf manager, whose creative process Sautner describes as follows:
“He ensured that, as I say, that lush greenery was part of the hallowed turf, the Garden of Eden. So his fragrance was bold and really, from his perspective, he wanted it to have the vibrant atmosphere of Eden Park.”
This description is very similar to the one on the Eden Park website, which reads: “A harmonious blend that encapsulates the lush greenery and vibrant atmosphere of our hallowed turf.” Sautner hewed very closely to the marketing collateral throughout our interview. He twice invoked the same three names (Ruby Tui, Hannah Wilkinson and Kieran Read) that appear in the perfumes’ sales collateral. He twice used the phrase “Hallowed turf” and twice used the word “Bold”.
I couldn’t help but note how bland these descriptors were when compared to the likes of “dance floor pit” and “bar waft”.
I asked a large number of people what scents they thought of when they thought of Eden Park. The responses congealed around the following: fried food, spilled beer, urine, sweaty sports undergarments, liniment and sunscreen. Not a single person mentioned “lush greenery”, “hallowed turf” or “vibrant atmosphere”.
I obtained a bottle of Eden Park Number One and brought it to the office, where I sprayed it liberally and asked some colleagues for their thoughts. To say the responses were varied would be putting it mildly. A selection:
“Like if you whizzed some flowers with something distinctly corporate.”
“Griffin’s Krispies or Anzac biscuits tempered with a sun-soaked lumber yard.”
“A light musk scent, with something a little citrusy and sweet.”
“Lynx Africa.”
“Very high-end toilet spray.”
I asked Sautner if the perfumes were more about marketing than making money. He said they were. He told me that a long-time mentor of his in the stadium business had once told him: “If everything we did was to make money, there’d be a lot of things that we wouldn’t do.”
He said this was an insight that had really stuck with him: “And from a venue perspective, we know that Eden Park is a globally iconic brand. So it was an opportunity for us to develop the two fragrances and make them available as a stadium collection and harnessing, really, the world brand that we have and aligning with our rich sporting, entertainment and cultural sort of roots.”
Although I couldn’t say for sure what he meant by that, I do know that businesses need attention, and that the businesses of K Rd very recently discovered perfume to be a good way of getting it, and that Nick Sautner had noticed that, and that his business, like K Rd, is an iconic Auckland attraction.
But K Rd and Eden Park are very different places and their respective fragrances tell very different stories. The story of “Road by Karangahape”, as conveyed through its pisstake photo shoots, unpleasant smells and use of artificial scarcity, is that it’s aware of its own bulls***, which is a story that also perfectly captures the spirit of K Rd. It’s a fragrance that says: “We don’t care if you buy it or not.” It’s pure rock and roll and we in the media love that sort of thing.
I knew the Eden Park fragrance would tell a different story, but felt it had all the elements to be at least equally interesting: Because a major sporting stadium is an unlikely source for a $170 perfume, because receptionists and turf managers are unlikely people to be formulating perfumes, because Number One is an unlikely name, and because Sautner has done many other unusual things at Eden Park and because he struck me as a bit of a character. Unfortunately, on closer examination, it turned out that the story of the Eden Park fragrance is not nearly as exciting as it appears. It smells less like teen spirit and more like if you whizzed some flowers with something distinctly corporate.
Unmet psychological needs can drive people towards ideas lacking substance.