Country star Megan Moroney is partnering with fragrance developer Scent Beauty to parlay her idiosyncratic artistry into perfume for the first time.
Available starting Wednesday, her inaugural scent settles somewhere between a hyper-feminine floral and an ultra-masculine musk, with notes of peach blossom, jasmine, velvety orris, pink peony and soft ambroxan. The name, Calliope, nods to the Greek muse of epic poetry, who, like Moroney, was said to be a vulnerable storyteller.
“Some of my biggest heartbreaks led me to beautiful things like being able to write songs that impact hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe the broken part of me and all of it was worth it because it became more beautiful than before, even though there was a time when it felt like everything was falling apart,” Moroney told WWD. “The bottle symbolically shows that.”
Following the Japanese art form Kintsugi, the packaging is made up of gold- and silver-filled pottery fragments to resemble a broken heart pieced back together.
Calliope by Megan Moroney.
Having grown up enamored with speciality scents like Taylor Swift’s Wonderstruck and Justin Bieber’s Someday, Moroney knew she wanted to one day gift her fan base with a sensorial expression of her musical iconism. “To have a perfume with one of my favorite artists, getting to wear that on special occasions and stuff, that’s kind of what I’ve always wanted to do,” she said.
With an already robust portfolio of artist-led perfumes such as Sabrina Carpenter’s Sweet Tooth, Dolly Parton’s Scent From Above and Cher’s Eau de Couture, Scent Beauty was Moroney’s ideal partner to make her dream a reality.
“Megan has a unique place in American culture as a young and beautiful country musician who is crossing over into larger musical forms and is gaining international popularity. She has a type of ethereal, everlasting beauty, which we felt we could actually dimensionalize in a fragrance,” said Steve Mormoris, chief executive officer of Scent Beauty, adding that Calliope will be sold exclusively on a 360-degree contextual website, where consumers can discover details about the inspiration, the formula and the corresponding campaign behind the fragrance timed to the “Cloud 9” tour.
The fragrance is slated to hit retail shelves around the world — including Walmart, Chemist Australia and Boots in the U.K. — by the end of August. The rollout is forecasted to amass $10 million to $15 million in gross sales revenue. “We believe that next calendar year, as this grows and we have subsequent fragrances, this should easily be a $50 million business,” Mormoris said.
While Scent Beauty has certainly launched a scent to this scale, Moroney’s perfume is unlike anything on its menu. “We see Meghan Moroney as occupying a very distinct place in our portfolio. I see her as an incarnation of American music, which is appealing to people all over the world. That is an essential element of its success,” Mormoris said. “It is not duplicative with any other brand. What’s very interesting is that Megan Moroney has been extremely successful at selling merchandise, and you can see that fans are looking to have a token of her in their everyday lives through beautiful products that she’s created. Clearly, she’s much more than music; she’s someone who’s about creation.”
