Singapore memories capped in a bottle

Scentopia, a tourist attraction on Sentosa island, helps visitors create their own perfumes using essential oils infused with more than 200 orchids found in Singapore. Prachi Saini Garg, Founder and Managing Director, Scentopia, shares while their product is popular with corporate groups, GITs and leisure travellers from India were also booking sessions with them.

Hazel Jain

Prachi Saini Garg, Founder and Managing Director, Scentopia, wants Indian travellers to understand what Scentopia can offer them when they are visiting Singapore. So, her team trains and updates travel agents about her product who, in turn, can explain about it to their clients. Garg was in Mumbai recently to meet and engage with a select group of travel agents and M!CE planners and conduct a session with them to identity the best fit of perfumes for them. She said that while her product was popular with corporate groups, GITs and leisure travellers, such as mother-daughter duos from India, were also booking her sessions while visiting Singapore. “All our essential oils are infused with about 200 orchids found in Singapore. When you make your perfume at Scentopia using these oils, you are essentially capturing your memories of Singapore in a bottle and bringing home with you. We see a lot of FITs and some series. In FITs, we see many groups of women, mother-daughter duos, and even large family groups,” she says.

Great fit for corporates

Scentopia does get some incentive groups from India, but Garg hopes to see more corporate customers from the country soon. “Our team building and corporate engagement activities can be as large as a few 1,000 people. We are the largest perfume workshop in the world, we can cater to 1,500 pax in one go, and we can do it a couple of times a day. As far as I know, we are the only company in the world that can operate at that capacity when it comes to perfume workshop. The shortest session can last for 45 minutes, but we have also done some 30-minute ones.”

Clients can walk in any time for these sessions, and they don’t need to be part of a group. “We get travellers from everywhere – lots from South India. Our perfumiers can speak Tamil, Hindi, English and Punjabi. We are now considering opening India outlets soon,” Garg shares.