It has been more than three decades since Arkansan Patti Upton mixed together acorns, pine cones, hickory nuts and other natural ingredients, added fragrance, dubbed the mixture The Smell of Christmas and sold it in a friend's gift shop. Her Heber Springs-based company, Aromatique, pioneered the modern decorative-fragrance industry.
Since then, "the variety and choices of home fragrance products has exploded," says Steve Lawrence, Aromatique's vice chairman and chief executive officer. Aromatique now includes nearly 20 home-fragrance scents as well as multiple products ($5.50-$29.50). Aromatique also creates special products for other national retailers and does private label production for brands like Martha Stewart.
The Smell of Christmas continues to be the company's best-seller.
Aromatique products are sold in all 50 states, Canada and Europe, in more than 4,000 gift shops as well as select department stores such as Dillard's and Macy's.
A former Miss Arkansas, Lencola Sullivan-Verseveldt, is the lone international distributor for Aromatique. With the help of husband Roel, she has operated from her home in the Netherlands since about 2010.
"Our whole idea is to keep [Patti Upton's] vision alive," Sullivan-Verseveldt says. "That's what's important and that's what's important to me."
Sullivan-Verseveldt distributes Aromatique to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Hong Kong, Australia, Korea.
In Europe, product preferences differ from country to country, Sullivan-Verseveldt has observed. For instance, in Belgium, they don't buy candles except at Christmastime. They primarily buy the decorative fragrances. In the Netherlands, they buy candles almost exclusively. "When you come to the Netherlands you will hardly go to anyone's house who doesn't have candles," she says.
-- Helaine R. Williams
HomeStyle on 07/12/2014