ghost town studio | gts magazine

Potpourri Loses High-Tech Battle

by Scott Henderson | September 29, 2004

Filling your home with the alluring scent of Country Spring used to be a snap. Put a bit of potpourri in a bowl and you're all set. Unfortunately for the potpourri industry and most consumers, scent has gone high-tech.

Potpourri's passive approach is now passe'. If you want an Ocean Breeze to waft through your veranda, it'll take more than a bag of dried debris swept from beneath an eastern Kentucky whittler. A decorative, extra-outlet, scented oil, night light fan that puffs and tells "scent stories" is now the minimum delivery device.

Barry Smeltzer says "it stinks!" Mr. Smeltzer is the founder of Barry Smells, a potpourri manufacturing company in Whynot, Mississippi. "Whatever happened to 'quaint?' Whatever happened to 'simple?' asks Barry angrily. "It's like folks gotta have a PhD just to fill a room with Lavander Interlude these days."

Mr. Smeltzer is referring to the new Scent Stories device which recently hit the market. Roughly the size of a table radio, the machine "plays" a series of scents via a "disk" selected and inserted by the user.

"How am I gonna keep up with that?" cries Barry. "We've tried some enhancements on our products, but haven't had much success. Like our Scent Sender. It was a special potpourri bowl with a built-in fan, but it just kept blowin' the stuff around."

The technology revolution began innocently enough. Early Renuzits and Stick-Ups managed to coexist with potpourri in the scent market -- offering convenience and some concealment. "This is a good place for a Stick Up" because the laundry hamper was not a good place for a bowl of Passionate Meadow-perfumed wood chips.

Then someone at Glade decided we had to "plug it in". This, too, began innocently enough; but it quickly became clear that Glade was holding out on us. The simple Plug-In was followed by well-timed rollouts of the Scented Oil Plug-In; Refillable Scented Oil Plug-in; Refillable Scented Oil Plug-in with Extra Outlet (though it's not really "extra" is it?); Refillable Scented Oil Plug-in with Extra Outlet and Night Light; and the Cadillac of them all... the Refillable Scented Oil Plug-in with Extra Outlet, Night Light and Fan.

"I thought I was all set when I bought a bunch of those Extra Outlet jobs" says Marjorie Dell, a scent-conscious homemaker in Monroe, Louisiana. "Then they put a night light on 'em and what am I supposed to do? Let my children stumble in the dark? No way! I mean I gotta have my Vanilla Tranquility, but my family's safety comes first."

Marjorie quickly reoutfitted her home with the improved models and relegated the obsolete products to her laundry room and husband Jerry's basement "hangout."

The recent trend however is to separate the device from the wall. Portable battery-operated devices are rapidly filling the market as businesses such as Mr. Smeltzers' struggle to say afloat. "We've never had to get UL [Underwriters Laboratory] approval on our Mountain Autumn, but now with these battery-powered jobs... they won't have to either."

In a last ditch effort to keep his workers employed, Mr. Smeltzer has developed what he calls The Scent Center. Barry wouldn't give us many details, but he did say it completely departs from potpourri technology -- "taking a page from Plug-Ins and expanding it into a book." He also allowed us to publish a photo of his prototype.