Less than a year after launching at Sephora, DedCool is releasing Sunlit Blooms, a fragrance exclusive to the beauty specialty retailer.
The gender barrier-busting cult-favorite brand worked closely with Sephora to develop the citrus, floral and salty vanilla scent in order to fill a white space in the retailer’s fragrance assortment for a fruity floral option and raise DedCool’s profile within the Sephora universe. Priced at $90 for a 1.7-oz. size and designed to last nine hours, it will eventually be available on the brand’s e-commerce website as well as online at Sephora and in the retailer’s doors.
To create the exclusive scent, DedCool went “in the kitchen” with Sephora—a term coined for the collaborative process of developing products with the retailer’s team. “Being a Sephora brand, we got to work alongside our retail partner to ensure that we’re making something that their community can really align with,” says DedCool founder Carina Chaz, adding that Sunlit Blood features a “very different composition than our traditional scent, which is a fun way for us to enter into a new phase for the brand.”
In February, Chaz flew to San Francisco from Los Angeles, where DedCool is headquartered, and ventured to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned Sephora’s American headquarters with 15 samples of possible scents to present to a conference room full of the chain’s employees. “Sunlit Blooms was the first scent they sniffed, and they were obsessed,” recalls Chaz, adding, “We’re able to extend based off of new trends and fragrance trends, doing it in our own special way.”
To support the launch of Sunlit Blooms, DedCool seeded samples of the fragrance to consumers to garner reviews pre-launch. Out of approximately 300 pre-launch reviews, the scent has received 4.6 out of five stars, and 96% of reviewers recommend it. Chaz says, “We know this fragrance is going to be an absolute hit at Sephora.”
Sunlit Blooms’ launch comes on the heels of DedCool’s successful collaboration with the haircare brand Ouai. The collaboration brought the haircare brand’s Melrose Place perfume to limited-edition laundry detergent. Introduced in May this year, DedCool sold out of four month’s worth of detergent inventory in four days.
“We were like, we’re not going to overly invest,” says Chaz. “We’re going to use our existing stock bottles. We’re going to put labels and stickers on it to differentiate. It was Ouai’s biggest launch, their biggest wait list.”
Ouai and DedCool got back together quickly to figure out next moves. For the next run, the packaging of the laundry detergent was customized, and DedCool produced 11 times the amount of inventory it had for its previous run. DedCool added dryer sheets to the collaboration and had to limit the amount of detergent units people were buying of it to ensure as many of them as possible were able to get their hands on it. Still, the detergent rapidly sold out again a month ago. One person was able to slip through with 15 bottles at $35 a pop.
Chaz, who founded DedCool in 2015, hints at a future in which the collaboration products could be more than limited editions. “The success of the partnership, the success of the category launch, there’s just so much to be said about two brands working collectively, bringing awareness to their audiences and building off momentum,” she says. “People come in through the laundry detergent, and they then enter into the fragrance category, or we have people entering the fragrance category then crossing over to home. It’s beautiful to see the idea of this cross-pollination.”
The home good category, which encompasses DedCool’s candles, room sprays and “poop drops,” accounts for 30% of the brand’s business. Chaz shares that DedCool’s sales grew in excess of 130% from 2022 to 2023, and she’s anticipating they will increase over 250% in 2024.
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