I was sitting at the dinner table thinking about why niche fragrances are so boring, when a certain designer frag caught my eye: Dior's new Sauvage Elixir Baccarat Limited Edition. If niche is boring, let's talk designer for a moment, shall we?
Dior decided it was a great idea to hire Baccarat craftsmen to make two hundred 16.91 oz crystal bottles with palladium painted on them. The lettering and the trim around the bottle necks are treated to a spider's-skein thin coat of palladium, which is probably worth a total of seventy-five cents, given that a gram is $32. The whole thing is housed in a solid oak case in a dark finish, worth about $60 per cubic foot. I can buy a Baccarat vase of roughly the same size for $1K, and heck, that's practical. The price for this Elixir? $8,200.
This may seem ridiculous, and it is ridiculous. Naturally, it's aimed at millionaires, and the sort of millionaires with hundreds of millions, because even your garden variety rich boy with two or three million would think twice about dropping close to $10K on something as vapid as this. Hilariously, Dior says that the crystal is so clear that it allows the fragrance's color to show through. Rich people get clear glass. We get colored glass. Since they get the clear container, the liquid needed coloring. Makes total sense. Tack another buck onto production. Add it to the two bucks needed for the lead mixed in with the glass (about 33% of the finished glass content) and we're up to somewhere around $63? Factor in the man hours and people's pay, which Dior says were "at least a dozen" workers, and if they're making $50 an hour, for ten hours of work, that's $6K, just for labor.
What niggles at me is why it would take twelve people to make one of these things. Twelve people? It seems like four people could handle the job just fine, even if one of them was strictly the palladium painter. The other the oak carpenter. Two people for the glass. And the perfume is just delivered from the factory with its twenty-five cent color job. And are they making $50 and hour? Why do I doubt that? At that rate, the workers are all making $100K per year. Doesn't seem realistic. Baccarat is probably paying them something like $35 an hour. That's $70K per year, as a specialist in crafting hot crystal into perfume bottles and throwing oak boards together into boxes. That's $1,400 for labor per bottle. That yields five times Dior's cost per bottle. That makes more sense.
This assumes a lot, of course. I have no idea if it takes ten hours to make one of these things. Maybe it only takes five hours. Maybe six. Maybe they only use three guys and grossly exaggerate their labor scale. All I know is, eight grand for this is obscene, and it speaks to the culture we're living in. It's a big club, and none of us are in it.