SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT

• Published date: 21 April 2024
• Publication title: Herald on Sunday

Number One is part of Eden Park’s “Stadium Collection” of fragrances, which currently comprises only one other fragrance — “Garden of Eden”. Sautner said Number One was his favourite, but he wouldn’t be drawn on whether he thought Garden of Eden was number two. Both fragrances retail for $170

Sautner said he had been interested in the idea of creating an Eden Park perfume for a while. He said that we live in an “experience economy”, that Eden Park faces a challenge for “consumer spend”, that it must find “dynamic and different ways to leverage the Eden Park brand”.

The idea really took shape, though, after one of the park’s staff attended one of the $149 public perfume-making workshops at New Zealand perfume house Miller Road, and brought the idea back to the office.

Miller Road brought their essential oils and other smells to Eden Park, worked closely with park staff to create blends that captured the essence of the Eden Park experience, and next thing you know, the turf manager is on a billboard in Kingsland holding a tiny bottle of perfume he made, which retails for $170.

It was a quite astonishing story and the sort of thing you’d expect to make headlines, but even though Eden Park put out a press release about it in December last year, no mainstream media outlet appears to have even mentioned it, and possibly never would have, had a Herald photographer not noticed the billboard and wondered why the Eden Park turf manager, Blair Christiansen, was holding a tiny bottle of perfume he made, which retails for $170.

If you think a stadium making its own perfume sounds a bit wacky, that’s because it is. But if you think it sounds original, you couldn’t be more wrong. The history of unlikely brands producing unlikely fragrances in the hopes of attracting attention is both very long and far weirder than you can imagine.

Only a few months before the launch of Eden Park’s perfumes, another odiferous Auckland icon, just a short walk from the stadium, launched its own fragrance. Road by Karangahape claimed to have captured the essence of the iconic city street’s scent, citing elements including “Preloved garment musk”, “bar waft”, “dance floor pit” and “hair clippings”.

Using a series of clever story hooks to induce content mania among media and artificial scarcity to induce buying mania among consumers, the perfume’s creator produced a limited run of 150 bottles, then released them in a series of tiny batches, at a series of ever-changing locations on K Rd, with...