On Strong Language (a "sweary blog about swearing"), Nancy Friedman shares insight on the naming of Tom Ford's "decadent and spicy leather"-scented eau de parfum, Fucking Fabulous. A naming and branding expert, Nancy was once hired to develop names for a new perfume, "There was no actual fragrance for me to sniff, or even a list of ingredients—just a concept and a target audience. The 'juice,' as it's called in the business, would come later."
This is how Tom Ford's F-bomb "juice" got its name:
It may come as a shock to some of you to learn that no branding agency or professional naming consultant was involved in the creation of the Fucking Fabulous name. Au contraire, it was very much an inside job. Here's how reporter Jane Larkworthy told the story for Coveteur in September 2017:
"We were sitting in a meeting smelling the fragrance and Tom said, 'This is fucking fabulous,'" recalls John Demsey, executive group president of the Estee Lauder Companies, which owns Tom Ford Beauty. "I said, 'Yeah, it is fucking fabulous.' He said, 'Well, why not [call it] Fucking Fabulous?' So we did. It's a descriptive. Some people talk about fragrance ingredients; we talk about how it smells."
Demsey denied that there was anything prurient about the name. "Tom Ford is the consummate gentleman. No one cares more about manners than he does," he told Larkworthy. "I understand that this could be offensive to people, but it's been done in a super elegant, high-end way with good taste. There is a very fine line between what's salacious and what's pornographic, what's erotic and what has a sense of humor. Tom is one of those people who has the ability to do both."
Read the entire post: Smells like … Fucking Fabulous.
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