Where are you, Christmas? Aromatique celebrates 40 years

Where Are You, CHRISTMAS?

Heber Springs’ Aromatique marks 40 years

By DWAIN HEBDA // Photos By DEWAIN DUNCAN

Heber Springs is a homey speck on the map, a tack point pinning Cleburne County into the mosaic of north central Arkansas. Known for its lovely, postcard-esque scenery, it’s a community with a glowing reputation for attracting retirees seeking the slower, quieter pace of small-town life.

But for all of its qualities, it’s not the kind of place one expects to find a multimillion-dollar company in a multibillion-dollar industry, let alone one that revolutionized the marketplace. But that’s precisely what you find in Aromatique, an Arkansas-born national success story. The pioneer of decorative home fragrance, Aromatique marks 40 years in 2022 as a still-formidable player in the crowded market category of its own making.

“There has been so much competition that has entered since Aromatique started,” said Steve Lawrence, vice chairman and CEO. “I used to be able to count the number of fragrance companies at the Atlanta trade show on one hand in the ’90s and now, I literally can’t count them all.”

The same can be said for the company’s product line, which has expanded tremendously over the years. From a single breakaway hit scent, Aromatique has evolved various product lines including candles, wax melts, diffusors, fragrance cards, hand soaps, incense, aerosols and a roster of decorative fragrances for every room in every season of the year.

Across this diverse catalog, one thing remains consistent and intact from the earliest days of the company, Lawrence said.

“Quality. Quality is what started Aromatique, and quality will continue to be important here,” he said. “There’s so much competition that if you falter on quality, you’re not going to survive very long. We have really tried to make sure that we have stuck to our quality/value model. So far that has served us well.”

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If the thought of a billion-dollar home décor category being born on the shores of Greers Ferry Lake is curious, the finer details of Aromatique’s backstory boggle the mind. A butterfly effect of time, place and opportunity, its origin is the ultimate happy accident, directed by one of Arkansas’s most charismatic entrepreneurs.

Jonesboro native Patricia (Pulliam) Upton was born in 1938 and raised in a time when women didn’t get many opportunities to grow into their true potential, stunted as they were by social mores and smothered under glass ceilings. Nonetheless, Patti showed a deep independent streak early, and as a child, her parents indulged her precocious and headstrong nature – to a point.

“I would refuse to wear certain things,” she

reminisced in a video produced for her 2016 induction into the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame. “If I didn’t like a dress that Mother was going to make me wear, I got the scissors out and cut it up.

“And then, of course,” she added, her tone gilded with incredulity, “I was spanked.”

These reinings-in aside, Upton’s spark and gumption became her calling card, central to who she was and rivaled only by her elegant sense of style. The willowy brunette enrolled in Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, to study fashion design, later transferring to Fayetteville where she would win the title Miss University of Arkansas in 1959. There, she also met her future husband, Dick Upton. After time working as a fashion model, the couple returned to Dick’s hometown of West Memphis and welcomed twin boys in 1964. For the next 18 years, life played out in patterns as predictable as they were comfortable.

By her 40s, the family had purchased a Heber Springs lake house and, in spending time there, Upton befriended Sandra Horne, owner of local gift shop The Browsing Post. Upton helped out at the shop, as much to stave off boredom as anything. One day, Horne suggested she create something that would lure shoppers to their Christmas open house, a task that unleashed Upton’s pent-up energies.

“I think, first and foremost, Patti was gifted creatively,” Lawrence said. “She could paint. Her talents in home design and home décor were pretty well-known. She was sought-after by an elite crowd to engage in some of their interior design. She was very in-tune with fashion and had some experience there. She just really was gifted from a creative standpoint.

“When she was asked to help decorate the gift shop, she was able to turn those talents loose and come up with something really unique.”

Anyone who saw her in the grip of that first effort might not have described things so glowingly. As reported by Joe David Rice in a 2018 issue of AY About You, “[Patti], who claimed to have never cooked a meal during her life, was surrounded by pots and pans and a bizarre collection of pinecones, sweetgum balls, acorns, hickory nuts and so on from their yard. Plus, there was an interesting array of natural flavorings and essential oils scattered across the countertops.”

Upton tinkered with the formula until she achieved the desired aroma which, while impressive, was not in itself particularly revolutionary. But the artful presentation of the botanicals mix signaled the beginning of something completely new in home décor.

Aromatique corporate center circa 1960. Courtesy Aromatique.

“The fragrance industry has been around for ages, and certainly the floral industry has as well, but nobody had really put the two together like she had,” Lawrence said. “Even potpourri, the origins there were sachets and potpourri that you weren’t really putting on display. You were putting it in vented bowls or putting it in a closet or a sock drawer.

“She brought it out to the forefront. She put the fragrance in the middle of your dining room table to put it on display, and that was really, I think a lot of people would say, the success of her entrepreneurial efforts. That was The Smell of Christmas.”

Holiday shoppers not only followed their noses to The Browsing Post, they clamored to buy the mixture right out of the bowls placed around the shop for ambiance. The entire first batch of The Smell of Christmas was hastily portioned out in doilies, snatched up by customers and marched out the door in the span of a day, per Rice.

By capturing Christmas in a bowl, Upton had caught lightning in a bottle. The next batch was mixed in a plastic garbage barrel and soon thereafter, a commercial facility was established in Heber Springs. Aromatique was off and running. * * * * * * * * * * *

Even though Upton had little if any prior ambition for owning a business, once Aromatique launched, she quickly developed a highly focused strategy for distribution and marketing. She scouted potential outlets with a critical eye, believing a quality retailer reflected well on her product line. Savvy though this approach was, it didn’t account for the level of demand the product would generate, and Upton had to broaden her field of vision to keep up.

“I didn’t want everybody in Little Rock to

I wanted products that the average American household could afford to buy. ‘‘ ”

be carrying Aromatique,” she said in her Hall of Fame video. “I wanted it to stay special. Through the years, we just gave up on that [approach] because people just wanted what they wanted when they wanted it.”

As with product quality, the strategy of focusing on better retail outlets is also something that survives to this day.

“We’ve done business with really high-end folks like Bergdorf’s and Nieman Marcus,” said Chad Evans, president and COO. “Upper-end mom-and-pop independent retailers are still a big part of our business, along with some higher-end department stores, Belk being one of them. I think that is where our price points lie, that’s where our value is, that’s where our customer demographic lies.

“You aren’t going to find Aromatique candles in Kohl’s and Walgreen’s and Target. Nothing against those retailers, they’re great retailers. They’re just not our market. That’s not our customer.”

Aromatique quickly became a national sensation and in time would count First Ladies Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan – as well as entertainers Cher and Dionne Warwick – among its clientele. As the company’s glamorous face, Upton herself was a story the media couldn’t resist. She was featured on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,”

Chad Evans stands proudly next to Aromatique merchandise. Evans is the president and COO of the business.

Displays line shelves at Aromatique. The business is know for its high-end fragrances.

and interviewed by The London Daily Express, The Washington Post, Southern Living and People magazine, to name a few.

Though choosy about who carried Aromatique, Upton never wanted to only serve what she often called “the hoity toity” market segment. Her strategy to bring the company into budgetary reach of as many people as possible worked magically as from one end of the country to the other, families from many walks of life delighted in the premium product without a premium price tag. It’s an operating philosophy the company promulgates today.

“I wanted products that the average American household could afford to buy,” she said in the video, shot three years after retiring from the company in 2013, and a year before her death in 2017. “I didn’t want ritzy, fancy things that they couldn’t enjoy.”

“Patti always liked to say she wanted to offer class for the mass,” Evans said. “By that she meant offering very high-quality products at the lowest price that we could, to deliver consumer value. It was her philosophy that has planted us on the lower end of the luxury

Decorative home fragrances from one of Aromatique’s many fragrance lines. Photo by Dwaine Duncan. market. We’re certainly not mass and cheap, but you can go buy $60 to $180 candles on the high end of luxury, and that’s not us either.

“We offer very high-end fragrances, high concentrations of fragrances and really highquality waxes. The raw materials the company uses are on the high end, but we work very, very hard, probably on less margin than some, to make sure our customer is still getting value. I think that has really allowed Aromatique to stay relevant in the industry for as long as we have.”

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Today, Aromatique finds itself in a market environment very different from nearly any time in its history. Decorative home fragrance can be purchased almost anywhere, and consumer shopping habits have changed dramatically in 40 years, to say nothing of the aging of its core clientele.

Evans compared Aromatique’s product development strategy to the ice cream business, where a few mainstay varieties are augmented by new and seasonal selections. Doing this, Aromatique leverages nostalgia through the core scents while rotating fragrances target the younger demographic.

“As the market changes, as demographics change, as new generations or ages come along, we do adjust those fragrances,” Evans said. “But it’s interesting; The Smell of Christmas is predominantly purchased by those 60-plus. But there are also people buying it who are 20 years old who, when they think of Christmas, they think of being at their grandmother’s house and they remember The Smell of Christmas.

“So now, even if they’re 30 years old or 20 years old, when they get around Christmastime, there are certain memories they have and they want that fragrance to go with it. Most of the time, yes, there is a difference in what the 20-yearold and the 60-year-old favors, but when it becomes seasonal, it’s only The Smell of Christmas.”

Despite the challenges of rampant competition, rising costs, the new frontier of online retailing and changing customer demographics, both Evans and Lawrence said there are still opportunities for the company to explore, as Aromatique enters its second 40 years.

“I think different [fragrance] delivery systems are on the horizon,” Lawrence said. “We’re currently working on one right now that utilizes Bluetooth technology so you can control the fragrance level in your home from your phone. Another area the consumer is becoming increasingly sensitive to are the ingredients in wax, the ingredients in fragrances. It’s becoming much more regulated. There’s a lot more time and attention being committed to the healthiness of the raw materials being used.

“Aromatique has been involved for several years in tweaking formulations to make sure that the fragrances that we put out are very health-conscious, very environmentally sensitive. That’s an ongoing process that has been in play for a while that I see continuing to be a very high priority.”

Evans noted the company is well-positioned to meet challenges and leverage potential opportunities, including, of late, privatelabel manufacturing. He said the company’s corps of well-seasoned employees, some of whom have worked here for decades, are a big reason why.

“If we were in a larger metropolitan area, I think it would give employees an opportunity to be less loyal, and to go from one company to the next,” he said. “In a smaller community, our staff appreciates the company as much as we appreciate them. Our turnover rate shows it; we looked at recent numbers and the average length of service at the corporate office is 17 years. With that kind of workforce, we have lots of opportunities for continued growth.”