[H]ours after an October fire consumed the Vermont Country Store’s overflow warehouse, the Orton family that owns and operates the $100 million-a-year retro retailer assured customers that everything would be restocked in time for Christmas.
Well, almost everything.
“She’ll have to wait a little longer to get ‘Evening in Paris,’” fourth-generation storekeeper Eliot Orton said of the recently revived fragrance popular from its creation in 1928 until its discontinuance in 1969.
“Valentine’s Day,” suggested spokeswoman Ann Warrell, seeking to find a phoenix amid the ashes.
Four months after the $2 million blaze, the self-described “Purveyors of the Practical and Hard-to-Find” has brought back the onetime “most famous fragrance in the world” just in time for the holiday, maintaining both a promise and a nearly century-old perfume tradition.
A rural business rooted in down-home Americana may seem an unusual choice to be the nation’s sole supplier for a 150-year-old European perfumer headquartered in France’s cosmopolitan capital.
But Vermont Country Stores in Weston and Rockingham and their catalog center in Clarendon specialize in selling nostalgic notions and potions. So when shoppers asked for “Evening in Paris” — the first fragrance sold at both department and dime stores and immortalized in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. — employees listened.
“We get hundreds of customer requests, and we read each and every one,” product development manager Amy Carter says. “This particular product was getting a lot.”
Carter discovered the French manufacturer was still making the fragrance under its native name “Soir de Paris.” The Vermont Country Store, securing the U.S. rights, reintroduced the brand (once advertised as “the fragrance more women wear than any other in the world”) and its trademark cobalt blue bottle in 2002.
“My husband and I started dating in high school, and his first Christmas gift to me was a gift set of ‘Evening in Paris,’” one customer wrote soon after. “I used that perfume for years, until, all of a sudden, it was not available anymore. Can you imagine my delight to find it at the Vermont Country Store?”
“When I was a teenager, I somehow acquired a small blue bottle,” another recalled in her own note. “Now I spray a shot on myself after my shower and I feel transformed to my much younger years.”
The business was set for its best-ever Christmas season last fall when an Oct. 20 fire incinerated a 16,000-square-foot Clarendon warehouse just down the road from its call and distribution center.
“The majority of our product is made in the United States,” CEO Jim Hall reassured holiday shoppers, “so we can get more relatively quickly.”
“Evening in Paris” is the exception.
“It has to be made to order,” Michelle Gershkovich, the store’s head of merchandising, says of a formula the catalog describes as a “rich floral perfume with fruit-forward top notes of bergamot, apricot, peach, green notes and violet; middle (heart) notes of rose Damascena, jasmine, heliotrope, ylang-ylang, and lily of the valley; and base notes of amber, musk, sandalwood, and vanilla.”
The result, which sells for $59.95, finally has returned to the warehouse and website.
“We still get a steady stream of letters thanking us for bringing it back,” Gershkovich says. “It embodies the Vermont Country Store — something nostalgic and cherished but not readily available.”
The fragrance, shoppers say, opens doors.
“I used this perfume when I was 16 years old and met the love of my life,” one woman writes. “I never gave up in finding it again! I love it and my husband still likes it on me. We will be married 50 years in 2019!”
And, for at least one customer, it hopefully can bring closure.
“I confess! It was me, I did it, I broke my beloved eldest sister’s bottle of Evening in Paris in 1950,” the unidentified culprit admits in her own correspondence. “I just wanted to smell it, and it slipped, and … Just now I ordered a bottle to be sent to her, asking for forgiveness!”
