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Bath & Body Works wants to elevate the laundry experience by bringing its fragrances to another area of the home: the dryer.
After the success of entering into the laundry category, the specialty retailer is expanding its product offering with the launch of dryer sheets.
“We’ve always revolutionized the kind of things that are in your life. We have hand soaps, foaming hand soaps, and we brought this immersive fragrance experience to something that actually can be very mundane,” Chief Merchandising Officer Betsy Schumacher said in an interview with Retail Dive. “Whether it’s hand soaps, car freshener, room freshener, candles, those are all places where we have revolutionized the marketplace on things that are really kind of simple ideas. But, we’ve elevated it through the power of fragrance. Laundry, to us, was a natural extension.”
Dryer sheets in four fragrances are now in all U.S. stores and online.
The company originally entered into laundry care in 2023 with a pilot program, then expanded to all U.S. stores by the following year with its detergents and scent boosters.
The products performed well — nearly a third of the customers who tried laundry products made repeat purchases. Bath & Body Works found that its detergents and scent boosters were successful in some of its most popular fragrances, but the company also launched laundry-specific scents, like Moonlit Goddess and Sunwashed Santal. Seasonal offerings took off too, with last year’s Halloween release of Vampire’s Blood becoming a surprise hit with an immediate sellout.
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At the start of the category launch, the company thought that the detergent product sales would sell in larger quantities than boosters, but ultimately discovered that the product sales were fairly equal to each other.
Bath & Body Works also found that customers buy different products for different end uses. A customer might buy one scent specifically for their towels and a different one for their sheets, for example. Or, a shopper may select a laundry scent just for herself and another for her significant other. Another thing shoppers are doing is mixing and matching fragrances, much like how some customers layer perfumes to develop a signature scent.
“That idea of layering is interesting,” Schumacher said regarding fragrance. “It even carries over to laundry.”
And the company continues to push things forward with fragrance in categories outside its new laundry assortment. Just last week, it introduced a new scent, Touch of Gold, which is a blend of orange blossom, tonka and blackberry. Bath & Body Works also recently partnered with dessert company Milk Bar on a limited-edition Birthday Cake collection in honor of its 35th birthday celebration.
“We brought this immersive fragrance experience to something that actually can be very mundane.”
Betsy Schumacher
Chief Merchandising Officer at Bath & Body Works
The retailer is accelerating other efforts too: This past spring, it introduced a new store design, called Gingham+, which features an updated layout, larger aisles, technology features and scent bars in select locations. The move has been, in part, a strategy to reach more Gen Z shoppers. The company is also targeting the cohort by offering some of its top-selling products at 600 college campus stores nationwide.
“We must continue to evolve with our consumers, positioning ourselves as a global leader in home fragrance and personal care,” CEO Daniel Heaf, who joined the company this spring from Nike, said on an August earnings call with analysts.
Newness is specifically important to the Bath & Body Works shopper. “We’re always innovating,” Schumacher said. “We’re always trying to surprise and delight our customer.”