Department store perfume counters have earned a less-than-positive reputation in recent years, often associated with caricatures of pushy salespeople rather than glamorous shopping experiences. But at the fragrance display at New York City’s newest department store, Printemps New York, there are no big glass counters to divide curious shoppers from perfumes, and there are no displays or ads for major designer perfume brands. There is not really a counter at all, but rather a series of architectural shelves surrounding a central display that Printemps New York’s head of beauty, Ariel Fantasia, calls the “kitchen table.”
Such a layout is meant to create the feeling that you’re not entering a store, but instead visiting a chic friend’s apartment, Fantasia explained.
“Anytime I have a conversation with one of our brands and they’re like, ‘Oh, but I want four-inch gold letters of our brand name up here.’ Whichever CEO it might be, I say, ‘Let me ask you this. This is a French apartment in New York City. Do you have that four-inch gold letter in your living room at home?’” said Fantasia. “I say that not to be cheeky. I say that to really help them understand the journey that we want to cultivate for our customer.”
Printemps New York opened in Manhattan’s Financial District in March. The 55,000-square-foot location is a ways away from both the Midtown department store giants like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, and also the growing fragrance corridor in Nolita. But the Printemps New York outpost combines both the luxury of old school department stores with a café and restaurant on site, as well as the niche curation of an indie perfume boutique. The fragrance offerings include hard-to-find names like Hellenist and Les Cocottes de Paris alongside heavy hitters like Diptyque and L’Artisan Parfumeur.
With that aesthetic and curation, Printemps New York is making a case for the department store as a perfume playground. But the retailer is also emerging at a time when the department store perfume counter has lost ground to newer players like indie boutiques, Sephora’s growing fragrance aisle and online shopping.
Printemps is hoping to stand out in a saturated environment by going smaller, rather than bigger.
“Our curations are quite tight, and that’s intentional. Ninety percent of the time, you will not see a [fragrance] collection that goes over six, maybe eight SKUs at most,” said Fantasia. Of that brand curation, she said roughly three-quarters are French, to give the store another point of differentiation from its competitors. “A lot of people would say, ‘Oh, it’s the 80/20 rule: You do 80% of your business on 20% of your SKUs.’ No, because we have such small collections, … we’ve bumped that trend.”
Fantasia got her start in retail at the department store giants like Saks Fifth Avenue and Henri Bendel, the latter of which closed its doors for good in 2019. Some shoppers will recall a time when the department stores like Henri Bendel largely ruled the perfume retail landscape.
“The fragrance departments at, for example, Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman, Takashimaya, Saks — they all looked different from each other,” said perfume historian and writer Jessica Murphy. “They were not interchangeable, and that was special. There were long-time staff who would get to know you and recognize your face and remember what you liked. There were brands you couldn’t get anywhere else.”
Murphy likened Printemps New York’s fragrance section to that of the since-closed Henri Bendel, which offered a sensorial escape from the busy New York streets on the second floor. But many Gen-Z and younger shoppers, who have largely driven the post-Covid fragrance boom, never experienced the department store heyday.
“Department stores — the ones that still exist — are going to have to edit a little more tightly. They are going to have to have events, and they are going to have to distinguish themselves in ways that resonate with Generation Z and Xennial and millennial shoppers,” said Murphy. “I talk to a lot of people who have never been in the big, great surviving department stores at all because they’ve come up with the niche shopping experience. So I don’t think it’s winning them back. I don’t think it’s getting their attention.”
While young consumers are interested in brick-and-mortar store experiences, they haven’t necessarily gravitated to traditional department stores. According to 2024 data from Numerator, Gen Z represented just 6% of Nordstrom shoppers. The Seattle-based department store is putting its focus on beauty for the fall 2025 shopping season, when it will unveil a redesign of the beauty department for its New York City outpost, including an expansion of its fragrance selection.
Printemps New York’s curation has already earned approval from some of PerfumeTok’s young consumers. Fragrance content creator Emelia O’Toole, better known to her 400,000 TikTok followers as Professor Perfume, recommended Printemps New York’s fragrance counter on a recent trip to the city. Perhaps the key to winning the department store genre is to not look like a department store at all.
“I don’t see it as a department store. I really see it as a concept store,” said David Benedek, founder of the Parisian perfume house BDK Parfums, which is stocked at both Printemps’s Paris and New York locations.
While the original Parisian flagship follows a more traditional department store layout at 480,000 square feet of retail space, he said the New York location’s smaller footprint gives it a more intimate feel.
“It’s big, but it’s not as big as Saks or Bergdorf’s. But at the same time, it mixes fashion, it mixes design, it mixes perfume. And I love the fact that our perfumes are mixed in this energy of creative things,” said Benedek.
