A few years ago, Febreze began selling an innovative new home air freshener called a Scentstories Player, which “plays” special scented discs in much the same way a CD player plays a compact disc. The Febreze Scentstories Player developed a small, but loyal following and many consumers loved the idea of being able to add scent to their favorite room without burning a candle or having an air freshener plugged in all of the time. With Scentstories, you got fragrance where you wanted, when you wanted. Unfortunately, the Febreze players were too expensive for the mass market, and by 2006, it was getting harder and harder to find Scentstories players or discs in grocery stores or “big box” retailers.
Then late last year, Yankee Candle Company announced that they had purchased the rights to market the Scentstories product line from Proctor & Gamble. Scentstories owners everywhere were delighted with the news, however, the move from mass market to specialty retail meant that the players and discs increased substantially in price. A Scentstories player went from as low as $16.99 at Wal-Mart all the way up to $26.99 at Yankee Candle. Discs that were $5.99 were now $7.50 when you bought them at a Yankee Candle store or the YankeeCandle.com website. (For a comprehensive review of the Yankee Candle Scentstories Player, be sure to check out my previous Associated Content article.)
With the price increase, I have begun to wonder if my Scentstories player was really the best way to meet my home-fragrancing needs. The packaging on the discs said that each one would last for “up to 50 hours,” which at $7.50 a pop means you’ll be spending $0.15 for every hour you are using your Scentstories player. That puts the price in line with burning a wax tart from Yankee Candle, which costs approximately $0.16 per hour. Yankee sells electric tart burners, and the wax tarts give a much stronger scent than a Scentstories player, so the only way I could justify the continuing expense of Scentstories discs was to find a way to make them last longer. With this in mind, I set out to experiment.
The first thing I noticed was that even though Yankee Candle said the discs were good for 50 hours (20 plays), I was able to still smell the scent from the discs after as many as 30 plays. I suspect that people weren’t buying new discs from Febreze often enough, so Yankee Candle placed an “artificial shelf life” on the product labeling. The next observation I had was that the fragrance in the Scentstories discs was in the form of small gel pods, and as the gel dried up, the fragrance went away. I figured that if I kept the disc in a Ziploc bag between uses, it might prevent the fragrance gel from drying up as quickly. When I started my next Scentstories disc, I did just that.
By keeping the disc in plastic between uses, I was able to get 35 plays, or a full 87.5 hours worth of fragrance from one Yankee Candle Scentstories Disc. I was impressed with the gains I had achieved, but I wasn’t content to give up just yet. For my last experiment, I decided to keep the disc in a Ziploc bag in the refrigerator between uses, figuring that the cool environment might slow the drying of the gel even more. By keeping the disc sealed and in the refrigerator, I was able to get 50 plays, or 125 hours from one disc!
Using this method, I was able to reduce the cost of using a Scentstories player from $0.15 per hour to $0.06, or a 60 percent reduction in cost. This brought the cost of home fragrance closer to what it was when Scentstories was being marketed by Febreze. If you own a Scentstories player, hopefully I’ve given you some tips to help save some money. And if you don’t own a Scentstories player, hopefully I’ve inspired you to look at the products you use every day and see if you can figure out a way to extend their life, putting money in your pocket and saving the environment at the same time.
