February Trip to London

New module always means we get to treat ourselves & do more research in a bigger city & no better to choose from than London.

Our newest project is all about Scent & Branding. How exciting! We have already had so many introductory lectures on scents, but now its time to take our learning & put it into some use.

I used my day off last Friday to carry out the research. We booked the 8 o'clock coach departing Nottingham & we approx arrived in London, Hyde Park Corner at about 12. Which made us in perfect time to catch the London daytime experience.

First up on our list was definitely to get an intake of caffeine.

While taking our little break before even getting started we mapped out what and where we were going to go first & last, obviously mapping it in a certain way so that we could end up close to Victoria Coach Station for our journey home.

We began looking around & using google maps to see what was closest to us, we recognised Browns so we took a wander down there which was very luxurious & also had many shops which looked like they stocked a lot of premium scent brands. Unfortunately we had a lot to look for so we didn't really have a lot of time to 'diddly dadly' around the place. Especially how we were planning on walking for the entire day as we weren't very familiar with the London Underground service.

Our walk around the area of Browns like headless chickens soon seemed to be a success as we ended up coming upon Penhaligons.

No joke the Penhaligons shop was about the size of my utility room, but that didn't effect there wonderful visual merchandising. We walked in to find two staff members really looking after a couple in their shop. I got a good vibe from when i walked in, I could tell that they were not only interested in getting a sale out of these people but they just had some nice general conversation going on. I love paying attention to how shop assistant treat there customers, it appears that many assistants have quite an opinion about themselves (aka snobby) when they really have no reason to be. So I was quite happy with the way the shop assistants were greeting us. The main woman in the shop which seemed to look like the manager approached us & she was very interested in our project & what we were studying. We spent so long in the store picking up scents from their new portraits collection. The one thing which i found the most fascinating with there store was that the cards were already pre-sprayed.

So i definitely do want to do more research on what is actually in them cards that makes the perfume stick.

Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures but the shops which we were in were all so fancy & it either just felt awkward to take pictures, or else we were not allowed.

There were many shops which we spent so much time looking for & then they weren't even worth our while. (But I'm not going to name names)

We spent the rest of our day lost or even eating.

Fortnum & Mason also didn't fail to impress, they had a whole floor dedicated to perfume & beauty, and it was beyond amazing.

But their ground floor dedicated to food, which was where these Easter eggs lived really was truly amazing.

Such an absolute rich atmosphere inside this shop it was all such an experience. As mentioned before when I mentioned Penhalig

ons Shop assistants, the Fortnums were much the same but even better. There was absolutely no feel of intimidation in store even though it was so clear we couldn't afford any of the scents we were looking at. But it was very clear that They treat all there customers the very same & like everyone is more special than everyone else.

Sorry about the layout of this post it's a bit all over the place & not very attractive looking. But defintely for posts like this i feel that there has to be a bit more photos rather than information. I promise my next post will have a bit more structure, It's just good to document my course work.

Hope you all enjoyed reading this post & know where to head in London if your planning on purchasing a more premium fragrance.

Much love,

G x