A. As you gradually learn about perfume, you begin to encounter unfamiliar terms. Prime examples are maison (in Japanese) and niche (in Japanese). Here, let us explain them alongside mainstream (in Japanese), a term that might be considered their opposite.
Mainstream
Meaning the main current, this is almost synonymous with fragrances from fashion brands such as Chanel, Dior, Bvlgari, and Gucci. They are called fashion fragrances or designer fragrances. Famous brands that began in fashion make perfumes, and many people buy them just as they buy fashion, hence the name mainstream.
As people begin to learn about perfume, they tend to say that they do not want to wear the same scent as others, or to look down on fashion fragrances. Yet the remarkable things about mainstream perfumes are their scale and enduring popularity. For example, in annual perfume sales in the United States in 2019, Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue (2001, Olivier Cresp) reportedly sold about $10 million (approximately ¥1.1 billion).*
These brands devote large budgets to advertising, promotion, and market research as part of their marketing strategies, while perfumers are asked to express the brand, or the director’s vision, within limited budgets and time. Having to create wonderful perfumes within these constraints is, it would be fair to say, a test of a perfumer’s skill.
Maison
Maison is French for house, as in the expression fragrance maison. It refers to a specialist perfume brand whose main focus is fragrance. These brands place particular emphasis on perfume creation, and many spare neither money nor time on their perfumes and do not advertise or conduct market research. Rather than establishing a brand that treats perfume as a business, they often create one that treats it as a more artistic pursuit, and perfumers sometimes establish their own brands.
Some, such as Maison Dior, are specialist perfume brands created within an existing brand, Dior. Others bear the name of their founder or perfumer, such as Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Frédéric Malle, and Kilian, while brands such as The Different Company, Diptyque, and Byredo have their own distinctive names.
Niche
Niche means “a segment that is not large but targets specific needs or a gap in the market,” and is not a term confined to perfume. The maison fragrance brands that have multiplied over the past 20 years are considerably smaller than mainstream brands. In many cases, they launch in the niche market of “treating perfume as art,” so most fall into the niche-brand category. This has led to the misconception that niche fragrances and maison fragrances are the same thing. More precisely, however, it is better to think of niche fragrances as falling within the maison fragrance category. Thus, once a brand becomes internationally famous, whether it can still be called a niche fragrance becomes a borderline question.
Some brands cannot readily be classified as either mainstream or maison (niche), so there is no need to get too caught up in the terminology.
*https://www.statista.com/statistics/441666/dollar-sales-leading-womens-fragrances-brands-us/
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