Our Experience at the First Asia Perfume Show in Paris

We already made a video talking about our experience at Asia Perfume Show, but we wanted to write everything down too, mostly for other independent perfume brands who might be considering events like this in the future.

This was the first year of Asia Perfume Show, and we want to say that upfront because we don't expect a first year event to have everything figured out.

There were good parts of the experience. We met a lot of people we genuinely enjoyed meeting. We discovered brands, creators and other perfumers we probably wouldn't have met otherwise. There was also quite a lot of content being made during the show, which we think could be valuable for some brands.

But overall, the experience was very different from what we thought we were signing up for.

We're writing this from our perspective only. Some things happened directly to us, some happened while one of us was working the booth, and some concerns were shared privately with us by other exhibitors. When something came from someone else, we'll make that distinction.

### Why we decided to participate

We're honestly not that familiar with the European perfume show circuit.

Asia Perfume Show was recommended to us around Esxence, and we already knew several people who were planning to participate. The idea itself sounded really interesting. A perfume event specifically focused on Asia.

Before we paid, we had a meeting with the team and were pretty specific about why we were interested.

One of our frustrations with some previous conversations around "Asian perfumery" was that they always seemed to circle back to commerce. How to sell to China. How to enter Asian markets. How Western companies should position themselves there.

Those conversations obviously have a place, but it wasn't what we personally wanted to contribute.

We were interested in the people actually making perfume, how culture gets translated through scent, how materials are used, and how the next generation of perfumers can work with cultures thoughtfully.

We remember being at another perfume talk where someone in the audience asked a genuinely good question about how someone outside an Asian culture can use Asian materials or references without feeling like they are just taking from that culture.

That's complicated. That's interesting.

That's what we wanted to talk about.

We explained all of this before we committed to the show, and at the time we felt like everyone understood where we were coming from.

That was one of the reasons we paid for the booth.

### The Smell Talk was where we started questioning things

After payment, we started discussing the Smell Talk we were supposed to participate in.

This was probably the first point where we realized that what we imagined and what the organizers imagined were not quite the same thing.

The proposed direction and questions felt much more surface level and brand focused than what we wanted to do.

We explained that we weren't doing the talk because we wanted more people to come buy perfume from our booth.

If sales were our priority, honestly, we would just stay at the booth and sell.

Preparing a talk takes time. Being onstage takes us away from customers. We were willing to do that because we thought there was an opportunity to contribute something useful to younger perfumers.

We wanted to talk about what happens when you create perfume around cultures you don't completely understand.

Even as Asian Americans, we don't pretend that being Asian means we automatically understand everything happening in Asia. There are things we have to research. There are things we can misunderstand. There are things that require someone else to tell us, "No, that's not actually how we see it."

That's interesting to us.

How do you research properly?

When does cultural inspiration become stereotyping?

How do you use a material without reducing an entire culture to that material?

How do you tell a cultural story when you yourself are still learning parts of it?

### One conversation in particular made us uncomfortable

Some of our perfumes deal with experiences around being Vietnamese American, immigration, race, cultural clashes, growing up in Los Angeles and sometimes feeling othered.

During one meeting, we explained some of that background.

The response surprised us.

There seemed to be genuine surprise that racism would be something we could experience in Los Angeles, and the conversation also moved into how racism is understood in France.

We're intentionally not putting quotation marks around this section because we're recalling a conversation, not reading from a transcript.

But it became clear to us that we had very different ways of understanding these subjects.

For us, racism isn't only someone screaming something racist at you.

Sometimes it's small.

Sometimes you don't even identify an experience as racism when you're young. You just know you're being treated differently. You know you have to prove yourself a little more. You know you're not being given quite the same baseline as somebody else.

Then you get older and start understanding why some of those experiences felt the way they did.

Another thing from that meeting stuck with us.

We were told, basically, that they remembered us saying that we cared about art, culture and the people involved in perfumery, but they had assumed that this was the kind of thing perfumers say when ultimately they really want more sales.

We remember thinking, no.

We actually meant what we said.

### So we rewrote the entire talk

After that meeting, we went back and rebuilt the talk.

We made it around five different perfumes and five different problems we've personally encountered while creating.

Not five tips for selling perfume.

Actual creative problems.

How do you research a culture properly?

How do you work with something culturally familiar without becoming lazy about it?

How do you approach another culture?

How do you acknowledge what you don't know?

How do you reference something without just taking the most obvious symbol and turning it into packaging or marketing?

We wanted to use our own mistakes and experiences as examples.

But from what we could see in the submission system, the revised proposal wasn't opened.

We were told the team was extremely busy and dealing with many speakers, which we understand. Organizing something like this is a huge amount of work.

But at that point we were essentially asked to give a simple yes or no about continuing in the direction already planned.

So we said no.

We withdrew from the Smell Talk.

That changed the value of the entire trip for us because the educational part was one of the main reasons we had been excited about going.

### We already had communication problems before Paris

We also want to make this clear because otherwise it could sound like we went to Paris, didn't make enough money and became angry afterward.

That's not what happened.

We had already raised communication concerns before the event.

There were basic questions about our booth and setup that took several emails to resolve.

At one point we were still trying to get answers to questions we had already sent while receiving separate communications about additional paid opportunities.

We don't know whether those things were related, and we don't want to imply that they were.

But as paying exhibitors, it was frustrating.

We actually wrote about these concerns before arriving in Paris. We have those emails and have chosen to only publicly show our own side of the correspondence rather than posting other people's private emails.

### The media exposure was also different from what we understood

Media and access to new markets were definitely part of what made the event attractive to us.

China and the wider Asian market came up in our conversations, which was especially interesting because some of our work is already carried in Taiwan. We thought the show could potentially help us build more relationships in that part of the world.

Closer to the event, we started receiving information about paid media opportunities.

One magazine opportunity was around €3,000 for a page.

We want to be fair here.

The organizers later made it clear that they had never promised every exhibitor guaranteed editorial coverage or individual social media promotion.

We are not saying, "They promised us a free magazine article and then charged us."

That isn't what happened.

It was more that media exposure had been part of the value discussed around participating, and we personally did not understand beforehand how much some of that visibility would involve additional paid placements.

During the actual show, someone from Nez came to our booth and brought up the magazine opportunity again.

We said we had already seen it, but it was simply too expensive for us.

Selling advertising isn't wrong. Sponsorship isn't wrong. A trade show being commercial isn't wrong either.

It was the mismatch that bothered us.

We had been extremely direct from the beginning that we were looking for something cultural, artistic and educational.

As the event got closer, it increasingly felt like what we had joined was a perfume trade show.

Maybe that would have been completely fine if we had gone into it expecting that.

### Then we got to the actual show

Some of the on site problems were honestly pretty basic.

We needed internet to process transactions, and the mobile connection inside wasn't reliable.

We asked for the WiFi password and were told that there was no WiFi in the building.

Later, friends exhibiting at the same event had working WiFi and shared it with us.

We still don't know why we were given different information.

We're not going to guess.

But if exhibitors need internet to take payment and WiFi exists, there should probably be one clear answer for everyone.

The badge situation was similar.

Because there was a point where everyone had to leave, we specifically asked how we were supposed to get exhibitor badges so we could come back in.

We were told not to worry about it because they knew our faces.

After the break, one of us tried to return and security stopped us because we didn't have a badge.

We explained that we were exhibitors and that we had specifically asked about this beforehand.

Eventually one of the organizers became involved, and the explanation was that the security guards change, so of course they won't necessarily recognize everyone.

Which was exactly why we had asked for badges.

None of this is some giant scandal.

It was just frustrating.

And after already struggling with communication before arriving, little things like that start feeling much bigger.

### We also underestimated how physically exhausting the event would be

There was no seating provided at our booth.

So you're standing all day.

You're talking nonstop. You're spraying perfume. You're explaining the same story over and over. You're processing purchases. One person can't really disappear for very long because the other person is suddenly dealing with everyone alone.

Then after one of the exhibition days there was a gathering for the exhibitors, which was a nice idea.

But that was standing too.

After spending an entire day standing, we remember thinking that the last thing we wanted to do was go somewhere else and stand again.

For future years, honestly, chairs and more consideration around breaks would make a huge difference.

It sounds minor until you've been working the booth all day.

### Who was actually walking around the show?

A large percentage of the people we encountered were industry people.

There were press and creators, particularly on the first day.

There were distributors looking for brands.

There were schools and different perfume related businesses offering services.

At different points we even had people offering access to their perfumers.

For certain brands, that could be useful.

For us, it was kind of funny because the perfumer of our company was standing right there.

The perfume itself is also deeply tied to our personal and cultural stories. Outsourcing the actual perfume creation doesn't make much sense for what we do.

There were also a lot of people asking about European distribution.

We would explain that we're not actively searching for a distributor, but we're not completely against it either.

If we met someone who does business ethically and who we genuinely liked and trusted, we'd consider working with them.

Some people actually laughed when we said that.

And we'd have to say, "No, we're serious."

Maybe that sounded naive in a trade show environment.

But we're still serious about it.

Making more money isn't automatically worth working with someone we don't want to work with.

### France was also useful for understanding our own brand

One thing we actually appreciated about the trip was seeing how differently people interacted with our perfumes.

We're obviously not going to pretend we understand "the French consumer" after standing at one booth for three days.

This is only based on the people who came to us.

But our general impression was that more people approached perfume primarily as something to wear and smell beautiful in.

That's completely normal.

American customers obviously do that too.

But in the U.S., we've developed a pretty significant group of customers who approach perfume almost like art.

Sometimes the story is the reason they want it.

Sometimes they want to smell something strange or emotionally interesting.

Sometimes they like having a scent at home even if it isn't something they'd necessarily wear to dinner.

Our work tends to live somewhere between perfume as beauty and perfume as storytelling.

So we think some of what happened was simply market fit.

That's not necessarily anybody's fault.

And it was useful information for us.

### So, did we make money?

No.

And we're going to share the numbers because we think this is useful information for other independent brands.

We did approximately $1,000 in sales on the first day.

About $2,000 on the second day.

And approximately $1,000 on the final day.

So roughly $4,000 in total sales.

After the booth, the cheapest flights we could arrange and our Airbnb, we ended the trip roughly $7,000 in the negative.

That doesn't include our booth materials, setup expenses or cost of goods.

But here's the thing.

We didn't necessarily expect the booth itself to make us money.

If we had gone into the trip thinking, "We're spending this money to sell perfume for three days," we probably wouldn't have gone.

We thought we were also investing in education, cultural exchange and conversations about where Asian perfumery is going.

We were comfortable losing money for that.

Once we withdrew from the Smell Talk, though, the value equation changed considerably for us.

### There were still things we really liked

The other exhibitors were probably our favorite part of the entire experience.

We met passionate people.

We had genuinely good conversations.

We met creators who cared about perfume.

Those relationships made the week much more enjoyable.

We also saw a good amount of social media content being created around the event.

So if you're a brand with the budget to attend and you're primarily looking for networking, creator exposure, meeting potential distributors and getting your work in front of industry people, we can see why the event could make sense.

It just wasn't particularly aligned with what we personally thought we were going there for.

### Conversations with other exhibitors

This is the part we're being the most careful about writing.

During the show we spoke privately with several other exhibitors.

Some told us they had also struggled with the preparation process around their talks.

Some felt that parts of what they originally wanted to say about their own cultures needed to be softened or changed to be more understandable or palatable for a French or European audience.

Some described situations where they personally felt dismissed, laughed at or uncomfortable.

We weren't there for all of those interactions.

We cannot verify someone else's private experience for them.

So we're not going to write those stories as if we witnessed them ourselves, and we're not identifying anybody who hasn't chosen to speak publicly.

What bothered us more was how hesitant some people were to say anything.

There was a feeling from some exhibitors we spoke to that the perfume industry is small, that access matters, and that publicly criticizing the wrong person or organization could potentially hurt future opportunities.

Some thought we were being too confrontational.

Some also thanked us for being willing to be confrontational.

We have complicated feelings about that.

### What we would actually like to see happen

We don't want Asia Perfume Show to fail.

Actually, we hope the opposite happens.

A show centered around Asian perfumery could be incredibly important.

And this was the first year. There are things you only discover once you actually run an event.

For a second year, we would love to see communication with exhibitors happen earlier and more consistently.

We would like the difference between included media opportunities and paid opportunities to be very obvious before brands commit.

We would like basic logistical things like badges, internet, seating and breaks to be thought through from the exhibitor's side.

But the biggest thing for us isn't logistical.

If you're going to build an event around Asian perfumery, we think Asian perfumers and artists need room to make the conversation complicated.

Our cultures aren't marketing themes.

Sometimes talking honestly about them involves immigration, colonialism, racism, class, cultural appropriation, identity, language, diaspora, generational conflict and things that aren't always comfortable or immediately useful for selling a bottle of perfume.

To us, supporting Asian perfumery can't only mean bringing Asian brands into an existing European perfume industry structure.

It also means letting those people influence the structure itself.

That's what we hoped this event could eventually become.

Maybe it still can.

This was our first experience with Asia Perfume Show, and other brands may have had an entirely different one.