Red Satin and the Scented Ocean Current

Last time we posted about Charles Granville, we left off with his idea of perfumed snow, which was just one of many ideas he had. While Granville was in charge of Angelique, he used very creative methods to promote his perfume.

During the first few years of business, Granville orchestrated many stunts to promote his perfume. Angelique started out with just one perfume, Black Satin. So, when they came out with a new perfume, White Satin, they needed an effective way to promote it. Granville came up with the idea to have a plane fly over Wilton and scatter strips of blotter soaked in the scent! This got his perfume the attention he was aiming for. So much that it is still remembered today, like many of his promotional ideas.

Granville chose to celebrate Angelique’s first profitable month in June 1948 with a perfume bombing of LA. He got 12 Beechcraft Bonanzas mobilized, each with a pilot and a “bombardierette.” They dropped “bombs” by spraying perfume out of the airplane as they flew overhead! It is said that the scent didn’t really reach the ground, but they got plenty of publicity from it. Shortly after this, Granville started using machines to pump out perfumed bubbles; he had them sent all over the country for stores to use to promote his perfume. Granville even had perfume delivered in the form of a gigantic Easter egg by a helicopter!

The next big event occurred in 1959, when Granville was promoting Angelique’s newest perfume, Red Satin. He arranged for a flotilla of his friends’ yachts to form a square-mile formation off of Miami, on the Gulf Stream, and dump the perfume into the current. His goal was to have the scented “red mile” of water to reach the shores of England, bringing a lovely smell to them around Christmas time. Unfortunately, it is believed that the scent never did reach England. But it did puzzle ships’ crews in the Atlantic for some weeks after!

A couple of years later, in 1962 Charles Granville made the decision to sell Angelique. Then in 1967, he founded Celeste, where he continued to use his ideas to give the company the foundation it needed to last.  

To be continued…

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