How Bath & Body Works Comes Up With Its Holiday Scents

On a Thursday evening not long before Christmas, as tourists and the after-work crowd started filling up a Bath & Body Works store near Grand Central Terminal, in Manhattan, a woman walked up to a table piled with products labeled “Perfect in Pink.”

She dabbed lotion on her hands and sprayed a mist in the air, called over to the man she was shopping with and had him smell. She grabbed a few bottles of “Perfect in Pink” body cream, stuffed a pink, bow-shaped makeup bag under her arm and headed to the checkout line.

One small data point for the retailer’s big holiday bet.

Every year, Bath & Body Works releases 250 new fragrances, but it puts muscle behind just a few, like “Perfect in Pink,” that it expects to carry the holiday shopping season.

This is a crucial time of year for most retailers, but Bath & Body Works, which sells some $7.4 billion of lotions, perfumes and candles each year, especially benefits from the gift-giving imperative of the season. In 2023, the company, the mass-market stalwart of scent purveyors with 1,850 stores in the United States and Canada and 510 more in over 40 other countries, reaped 66 percent of its total net income toward the end of the year. Some of its customers shop there only during the holidays.

“People come in not because they ran out of their scent,” said Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets, but because “it’s time for ‘’Tis the Season.’ Just like people walk in to get their pumpkin spice latte.”

“Perfect in Pink” — a fruity gourmand scent built on a cherry base note — hit shelves in October. The aromatic concoction wafts from three-wick candles, hand cream, glossy lip oils, pocket-size hand sanitizer containers and a $69.95 glass bottle of eau de parfum, packaged in a hot pink bow-shaped box; 29 products in all.