The Academy

Academy Round-up

The Fragrance Foundation is pleased to announce the completion of its new Training Academy.
Whilst many excellent training courses already exist for Beauty Consultants and Store Managers (ie. COPRA, LCBT and CFSS), the objective of this Academy was to increase knowledge for anyone working within the fragrance industry – whatever the department - with a concise, yet detailed, 3-day programme designed to improve standards throughout our industry.

Course 1
On Friday 17th June, 2011, The Fragrance Foundation held the first course, ‘The Fundamentals of Fragrance’, hosted by the worlds most quoted fragrance expert, Roja Dove. The participants were taken on an aromatic journey where along the way they were educated on a variety of fragrant topics, including the fascinating ‘History of Fragrance’ – a detailed insight into detecting the various fragrance families and the methods of extraction. The course ended with Roja putting the delegates’ knowledge to the test with group activities that provoked ‘light bulb’ moments as their newly installed knowledge clicked into place.

Course 2
‘The Creation of Fragrance’ was the second course in the series and took place on Wednesday 31st Auguest 2011, and was held at the beautiful Barrington Hall in Bishops Stortford, home to CPL Aromas.

The delegates were looked after by CPL Aromas’ Angela Straveska and Claire Holland, who talked through the fascinating overview of how a fragrance house operates, and how different fragrances are created.

Angela and Claire shared with the group the day-to-day challenges of meeting and maintaining industry standards and regulations, including IFRA and CHIP. In some cases, perfumers have been challenged to re-build classic fragrances to comply with the latest guidelines. The group also covered the vast variety of raw materials and sniffed their way through the afternoon, sampling the variety of key accords in ach olfactory category. The day closed with the delegates putting their newly learnt knowledge to the test, in a fun task of creating their own fragrance brief. The assignment produced some great results and the information absorbed from the day was clearly noticeably.

Course 3
The final course took place on 25th October at Fortnum and Mason, Piccadilly.
The day was broken into different categories, starting with Market Research, where Mike Ramseyer, CEO of MyMarketMonitor, presented to the group, and June Jensen and Gareth Shaw shortly followed with insights from NPD. Following this was ‘Marketing Communication’, conducted by Helena Fisher, Talk PR and writer and highly-respected blogger, Persolaise, where both shared with the delegates fascinating insights from the world of ‘Social Media’ and PR.

The afternoon session, ‘In-Store Communication’, covered Sampling, Point of Sale and Packaging, with presentations carried out by Mark Lockyer, Sampling Innovations; Matthew Burns, Glossy Box; Dawn Evident, Colouration, and Tom Bosenquet, Wrapology. Nicola Mendelsohn, partner at Karmarama, entertained the group with her presentation on advertising. The afternoon concluded with an interactive panel, which included Lauren Thornton, Debenhams; Claire Hawksley, Les Senteurs; Mark Tranter, Selfridges, and Matt Walburn, The Perfume Shop/Superdrug. This session proved to be one of the most popular of the day and finished with a very interesting Q&A session.

The Fragrance Foundation’s 2011 Academy had over 50* attendees spread over the three days, those who completed all three courses received a certificate.

Congratulations to the following participants who completed all three courses:
Sarah Smith, The Disney Store
Laura Steer, Clive Christian Perfume
Tamara Bogdanovskaia, Clive Christian Perfume
Erin Spicer, L’Oreal
Marina Torres, YSL Fragrances
Steve Carr, Crespi Milano