Scent & Style: Why fashion and fragrance are finding common ground

It’s a sniff and whiff for consumers these days even at fashion retail stores as they choose the latest addition to their wardrobes. Enhancing consumers’ in-store experience, apparel brands are adding perfumes to their shelves as a natural extension of their brand offerings. With perfumes becoming an everyday grooming product rather than an occasional, luxury purchase, brands such as BIBA, Libas, and Savana by Urbanic, who already have product lines in the fragrance category, are looking to scale up their presence in the coming months.

Fashion brand Libas entered the fragrance segment earlier this year by launching two perfumes—Chase and Fling. Sidhant Keshwani, Founder & CEO of Libas, calls it an “accidental” category, but the company ventured into but says the response has been quite encouraging. “Earlier, we wanted to do it in an over-the-counter format, but we got a great response since our customer base is loyal to the brand. So that got us thinking about fragrances being a very interesting category to look at. Moreover, with the Indianisation happening in every product category, perfumes, especially for women, are still not extremely explored by many brands,” he says.

Keshwani expects fragrances to contribute 3-4% to their overall store business in the future. “We want to explore setting up kiosks where a testing and trying experience can be given. It is a very good gifting category, and we have seen recent repeat rates as well. It is also fairly priced at around Rs 1,000, which adds to its appeal,” he adds.


The perfume market in India is expected to increase at a CAGR of 23.7%, or by $3.80 billion, from 2025 to 2030, as per market research firm Technavio, representing the big opportunity at hand.

Ethnic wear brand BIBA forayed into the segment with the launch of Spelle, a collection of premium fragrances for women, in 2021. Buoyed by the success, they plan to launch more variants by next year. Siddharth Bindra, Managing Director of BIBA, says that they see significant headroom in fragrances and will continue to invest in the category ahead. “The immediate focus is on adding more variants by 2027, improving discovery and building gifting, especially around festive and wedding occasions where fragrances and curated gift boxes perform well. For fragrances specifically, the ambition is to build the category to around 3-5% of store business as we scale,” he says.

But is it as easy for apparel brands to break into a category when consumers have their own loyal favourites in the space? Bindra says that it took them over 12 months to create the right product and supply chain before launching. “We spent considerable time on fragrance development, concentrations, testing, and understanding what works for the Indian consumer before scaling the category.”

“Our existing brand trust and retail network helped us enter the category, but building Spellé into a sizable business requires a different level of category expertise. That is the opportunity we are now focused on,” he adds.

Bindra believes fragrance as a category should be product-led. “The parent brand can drive the first purchase; repeat comes from the quality, longevity, and distinctiveness of the fragrance itself,” he says.

The view is echoed by other brands in the business, who believe that for a non-fragrance brand entering the space, the first and most important thing is to develop a deep understanding of the consumer. This, they say, must be complemented by genuine fragrance expertise spanning formulation, fragrance profiles, product quality, sourcing, and consistency. “That is where our collaboration with local and global fragrance partners becomes important. For us, building a successful fragrance offering is about combining deep consumer understanding with genuine fragrance expertise to create scents that consumers connect with. That is what we believe gives the category strong long-term potential,” says Rahul Dayama, Founding Partner of apparel brands Urbanic and Savana by Urbanic.

Savana by Urbanic started with six fragrances this year and plans to expand the portfolio to another 10 going forward. “We see a significant opportunity to integrate fragrances more deeply into our offline activations, community events, and consumer experiences, where consumers can discover and experience the products more closely. We launched discovery sets to help consumers explore the fragrances, and those have already sold out, giving us a strong indication of consumer interest and intent,” he adds.

Other aspects like shelf economics also build momentum for brands to try such diversification. Anand Ramanathan, Partner, Consumer Industry Leader, Deloitte South Asia, says that this is a category that allows one to use the available space more effectively. “Ultimately, in retail, it’s all about revenue per square foot. It has small packaging and a relatively high price point; therefore, one is able to sweat whatever space they have much more effectively. It’s also an impulse, point-of-sale kind of category. One can’t just go into a store and buy clothes every time. Consumers might buy a shirt or something else, but this is a category where they can make an additional purchase using discretionary income at the point of sale,” he says.

A lot of brand consumption, as per Ramanathan, is a sensory experience. “This is one way in which you can associate your brand with the senses much more intensely than via other categories,” he says.

The extension, as per experts, creates cross-selling opportunities for brands. The brand expansion also works well from a Gen Z perspective. While older brands may not be as relevant to Gen Z, such strategies help in drawing attention from the current generation of consumers and act as a hook.

“That is where the sensory experience becomes really important. One is playing on cues that are not just very tangible. It’s not just about price or certain attributes; it is building an association with something that they can smell. Given all of that, I think this is just another avenue to engage with the consumer,” Ramanathan highlights.