Bubble burst: the future of blind buying

I knew I would write this article, it has been a fire smouldering in the pit of my stomach. What I didn't know, was how I would go about it until I read a comment left on one of my July blog posts. If like me you progressed in this weird and wonderful hobby on a high of blind buying during the pandemic, then perhaps the rest of this article will resonate with you.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we mostly had too much time on our hands and too little sensible things to do with our resources. Therefore, we responded to the rise of YouTube fragrance content by finding ourselves a new and addictive means of entertainment whilst contributing to the economy- blind buying/ hauling perfumes bottles upon perfumes bottles. One could say that the pandemic is now over, life as we know it is back on the train tracks it used to run on... so what's next?

I'll tell you what I suspect is next: sampling, sampling and sampling all the way. There will be a rise in demand for fragrance samples as fragrance lovers find much better, future-proof ways to dispense of their cash, and with demand, the industry will have no choice but to meet the challenge by supplying samples. 

Better still, there will be a rise in the middle man- individuals/ shops providing make-do samples for consumers who do not want to commit without first taking a nibble. And if independent fragrance stores want to maximise their profits, then they'll include free samples of other related fragrances with every purchase a consumer makes.

But what about blind buying? I dare say, it's going nowhere. We've all tasted the thrill of jumping into depths unknown and although our outings will scale down, it will not diminish. We've enjoyed the wild ride too much to ever give up the adventure.

Perhaps we will scale down our blind buying in a different way- rather than reduce the quantity of explorations, we will reduce the bottle size we seek to buy. We might increasingly prefer to buy the mini even though it might not be as good of a deal as the full bottle.

And for those wild hearts who were blind buying before blind buying became a recognised word, the show will only go on for them. Samples or not, their adventures of curiousity and exploration will not cease.

What is the future of blind buying for you?