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Cerise - 1 of 5 (or possibly 6)

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After a longer than anticipated delay, due only in part to the robust sales of Cerulean, which they didn't want to affect, the launch plans for Cerise began. Pour Homme almost immediately ran into issues, primarily at the concept stage.

CO-CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER JAKE: What happened was that we had this idea for a cherry based scent that wasn't meant to be a complete sugar bomb. It's easy for those scents to move over from smelling fruity to smelling like really sweet candy, you know? And that's not necessarily bad, but it's not at all what we wanted for this.
CO-CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER JEFFREY: Our idea was to have it be sort of ... cherry influenced, a dominant note, but not a domineering note, if you see what I mean. 
JAKE: What we did was to add in curry, a touch of cumin, cardamom, a touch of basil, a little bit of smoke, a bit of civet, a very tiny bit of roses. A sort of sexy, spicy adult scent.
JEFFREY: Which ... was kind of the problem, at first. We gave it to Carmen and Myra for their opinion, and they came back and said that, as far as perfume scents go, this would be like minting money for the adult market.
JAKE: The problem was, we'd actually intended to make this for both the adult and the younger market, the way we had for Cerulean. And they pretty much said that no older teen who had parents worth their salt would let her come near this. It was just too adult. So we had to go back to the drawing board.
JEFFREY: We came up with a new formulation of Cerise that worked for younger audiences. Much different scent, apart from both of them having that fresh, ripe dark cherries topnote. And it's a much less assertive topnote in the second scent -- not that it's that strong in the first one anyway, but still.
JAKE: Thing was, we really liked the first one. EVERYONE liked the first one. There was no way we couldn't bring that to market. So we wound up splitting Cerise in two, Intime for the darker scent, Légère for the lighter one.
JEFFREY: And then we ran into the second problem. We wanted to use Wagner and Trey Derek for the first ad, and ... we had no concept. None. At all. We were both completely blank.
JAKE: By the time Cerise came out, we were in all-out mode for the A-Line, and it was really hard to yank ourselves back to this, for some reason. Not that it's unusual to have to switch like that, but we just couldn't get going. What wound up happening was that we decided, OK, fine, we don't have a concept, we'll just do the other ads and come back to this, and if we get a concept fine. If not ... well, then it happens. So we started on the others.
JEFFREY: I'm not sure which one of us came up with it. We were at this sort of family company night with our brothers and sisters, and somebody came up with the idea of a retro cherry bomb for the ad. And it sounded perfect, so we ran with it. Retro fifties styling for Trey's clothes and hair. Cherries everywhere. Big prop cherries. Cherry clothes. Cherry earrings. Cherry everything. Sort of misleading, in a way -- the scent isn't THAT cherry -- but still, it worked. Mostly, this was the "Hey, something's coming" ad; the product didn't actually come out for another month.
In part because of the product split, and partly due to other creative decisions, Cerise had what wound up being the most involved and controversial ad campaign in the company's history to that time.

--I. Noah Lott, professor of current history, comparative and modern mythology and modern media studies, Serenity Falls University, pour homme: a modern company plays with gender (Serenity Falls: SFU Press)

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All I can say is, the "creative process", such as it was, for this was more or less as described. Minus the family party. Could not figure this out for love or money, so moved on to the others, and then suddenly, idea! Aided in part by Renderosity putting Cherry Bliss (the big props in scene) on sale as part of Prime Anniversary 3: The RePrimening, and me buying it accidentally. (I truly meant to move it out of my cart, but there were 10 items in it, and I plain forgot it was there until I'd already paid for the thing.) Trey has on a Transferred version of the Paige Dress, which actually does have a cherries texture, and the cherry earrings from EmmaAndJordi's Pinup Earrings for Any Figure, as well as AprilYSH's Deeta Hair. I ... genuinely have no idea what Wagner is wearing. (Well, I put the base of this ad together something like three or four months ago, and then let it go because the concept wouldn't come together. The only thing that changed for him was that he now has 3Dream/Mairy Orion Hair on his head.)
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