We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Victoria England a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Victoria, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
There is a photograph of me at age 4 on Christmas morning in 1980. I am holding a Boxed Set of Bonnie Bell Colognes, with a big surprised look on my face! I would always sneak my Mum’s perfume and try it at that age, so I was given my own set. When I was about 14 I started exploring my passion for perfume by visiting a local scent bar called Body Time in San Anselmo, CA. where I would mix scents and make my own creations with babysitting money. After some time I began mixing the blends I had created with each other to create even more scents. Ever since then I want to smell every perfume that exists and explore scent combinations and this need is endless. Although I also had interest in designer perfumes from the department stores, I had more interest in individual scent notes and how to manipulate them. Aromatherapy was a big part in my early blending years. I found over time that blending essential oils and absolutes with fragrance oils allowed me to create more sophisticated scents that also contain natural ingredients. To this day I still have 100% Essential Oil Perfumes and I am glad for that because there is more demand for them. Have you ever met someone with 20 journals going at the same time? This was my life when I first started conceptualizing Tulip. I had a journal for every aspect of my work. I had to figure out how, why. what where and when and it took me around 18 months to get it all together. I wasn’t a formally trained perfumer, I was an experimenter. A mixologist of scents. I went on a scent journey of discovering what smells I liked first and exploring that on a granular level. Once I knew and understood more about what I liked the most I was able to start thinking about all of the possibilities out there for scent combinations. My methods were simple and straightforward. I discovered my scent memory. Scent memories exist in all of us. They are fragments of our life and moments in time when a scent was present during an important event or memory of a person. We can smell that 20 years later and be taken back to a moment. In my work, I share my scent memories and hope to help bring sweet nostalgia to others. I also wanted to create products that I wasn’t allergic to, having been reactive to designer perfumes most of my life. Careful sourcing of phthalate free perfume oils and pure plant extracts became was one of the first things I had to nail down. Making relationships with suppliers came easy to me because I am a people person. The vendors I started with 15 years ago are the same today, I am a loyal customer! I learned so much from my suppliers and leaned into their wisdom and advice when it came to perfume manufacturing and business in general. I owe them many thanks.
Did you know there are many types of Vetiver, some sweeter some smoky and a perfume will turn out completely different depending on which one you use. Fragrance oil/note companies can offer 12 different Vanilla options and again the number of combinations are endless. I would use my nose to make final decisions and then have friends and family help me narrow things down. There are many scents that I never released because they didn’t graduate on to the next level after being tested by my besties! It takes a village when it comes to starting a business. We need the support and opinions of people we can trust. I was always so amazed at how much people wanted to help me make decisions.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a person who wants to create all of the time, and that is my happy place. A fresh clean stainless steel table, some oils, glass beakers and notebook is a meditative space for me. I also love creating bath, body and skincare products. Sometimes I feel like I have struggled with the business side of things and excelled at creation, and I think this is common for most makers. At first Tulip as a business was art for me, I created but wasn’t sure if people would buy it and hoped that people would see the artisanal qualities in what I offered. It happened pretty quickly after I launched in 2007 but i was picked up by a rep group out of San Francisco who instantly placed my brand in many gift shops and boutiques. Soon after they were pitching it to Whole Foods and to my total surprise they wanted my perfumes. Out of pure passion for creating something as a hobby I had somehow made a product that people wanted and that solved the issue that there wasn’t enough non toxic perfumes in the market. Phthalate Free, Vegan Cruelty Free, Dye Free and made with blend of Essential Oils and Fragrance Oils. It has taken 15 years but we just opened our flagship store in Old Town Eureka, CA which is in a brand new building with our small manufacturing space as well. All under one rood allows us the ability to work directly with the consumer and also be working on the wholesale side of the business. People love coming in and experiencing all of our products in one place, along with many new items only sold in out store. Stepping out in this way to our local community who has supported Tulip for so long has been truly a blessing and I am meeting new customers everyday who have been using my products since the beginning. Our new location is in the heart of historic Old town Eureka and will become a tourist destination, and for this I feel truly lucky. They say that luck has nothing to do with it and that these achievements are based on hard work, dedication and perseverance, I think it has to be both.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
In 2015 I was invited to a meeting with a Target buyer, The meeting was in Miami, FL. and it was only 2o minutes long. So I took the risk and traveled to Miami for the meeting. So much preparation for the weeks leading up to this short meeting. I met with local business leaders to ask for advice and at the time I was on the board of directors for an organization called Humboldt Made, so I had access to all of these amazing business leaders who truly wanted to help. I made the trip, a little rural brand in the big city. I met with the beauty buyer for Target.com (online sales only) and she was late. She came in the room and needed to charge her computer and get settled, but it was only a 20 minute scheduled meeting, and she had many more meeting after me. I told her it was no problem, I only needed 5 minutes to share what I had. I got the account.
We went on to sell on Target.com for 6 years, and almost did a 50 store pilot launch, but circumstances changed and I had my first child instead. A lot of lessons learned from partnering with large corporations, mainly that the experience is much harder than people may dream. Ultimately our values don’t align and small businesses are not a priority for them.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I have many stories of resiliency from over the last 15 years of running my business. One that stands out the most is when the pandemic started and I found myself having to pivot in a major way. We were lucky to already be selling to grocery stores and have those relationships, and so I started making hand sanitizer. The stores I sold to really needed the hand sanitizer as the major producers of it were constantly sold out and the shortage was getting worse. I sold to my stores in gallon jugs for their employees to use and I also sold wholesale in 2 oz bottles for the consumer. I also saw a need for skincare products during the pandemic so I developed products especially for the health food store markets. Natural and affordable products for everyday. It caught on, and now we sell those products in many health food stores and in our own flagship. Resiliency comes natural when you embody the entrepreneurial spirit!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tulipperfume.com
- Instagram: tulip_._perfume
- Facebook: Tulip
Image Credits
Kimberly Ann Boudoir Photography