`Perfume Lady's' Business Sense Carries Worldwide

A WALLA WALLA woman's skill at tracking down hard-to-find fragrances has attracted lured many customers to her small mail-order company.

WALLA WALLA - Brenda Isley's telephone rings at all hours of the day and night.

Callers are men and women desperate for a favorite scent they cannot find on their own. The calls come from around the United States and from other parts of the world.

Such is business as usual at The Fragrance Factory, Isley's perfumery on Main Street in Walla Walla. She is known to the affluent from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif., to New York's Park Avenue as the source of hard-to-find perfumes and colognes.

Orders often come from less wealthy people trying to find a fragrance they wore when they were younger, or something their grandmother used to dab on.

"They just call me the perfume lady," she said. "The thing that's satisfying is the response I get from women."

But men can be equally obsessive about tracking down their signature scent - often a fragrance that has been discontinued or one not readily available in the United States.

It took her a year to locate a discontinued designer scent named for French actress Catherine Deneuve. People in the business would tell her, "Forget it - it's gone."

But she found it when she placed an order with a representative for an Italian designer. He asked if there was anything else he could get for her. Isley replied that if he could find 1,000 bottles of Catherine Deneuve, she would buy it.

It turned out he had 200 pieces on hand.

"I sold over $6,000 of Deneuve in about two hours," Isley said. "I already had everyone in my data base. Some cried. I had to limit their orders, because one would buy it all."

Isley's special-order business has exploded since a 1998 article in Allure. Someone from the magazine asked her to find a perfume for a writer. At first she didn't understand she was talking to a fashion magazine.

But when the woman asked when she would have an answer for her editor, Isley promised to get back to her within an hour and a half.

"I cleared my desk and I found it," she said. "That's when they published the article.

"Ever since then my life has not been the same - my business has not been the same," she said. "It's amazing."

That month, she logged 1,500 telephone inquiries. She said she had to adapt to handle all the orders she began to receive.

Isley's business was given another boost in September when her scent sleuthing was noted in Vogue magazine.

"I'm 500 calls behind right now," Isley said last month.

It's bound to get worse. In Style magazine has an item about her in this month's issue. People, Marie Claire and the Washington Post magazine have called her for information.

Customers include members of Congress, high-ranking corporate executives and well-known television and motion-picture actors.

Isley, 42, started the business in 1991 on her 15th wedding anniversary. On the advice of her former boss, she continued working mornings at the former Meridian Mortgage bank where she had worked for 15 years, then opened up her shop at noon. She expected that arrangement to last just a few months, but it went on for three years.

"It's been tough, real tough," Isley said. "We started on a shoestring, and we were close to bankruptcy. No one would give me a loan, and here I was a banker."

She finally got a $35,000 Small Business Administration loan. "And they wanted my first-born," she said. "I'd rather have my tonsils pulled out through my nose than ever go through that again."

The petite green-eyed blonde is nothing if not determined.

"I'm 90 percent successful in finding what I want," she said.

If a distributor doesn't have what she is looking for, she will find a "back door. There are so many distributors out there, you have to keep just plugging away."

But suppliers are far easier to deal with now that Isley is in a position to place larger orders.

Her client list has doubled in the last year to 6,000. "And these are paying customers," she said.

As of mid-October, The Fragrance Factory had racked up $230,000 in sales for the year, one bottle of perfume at a time.

But she is quick to point out that the business won't turn a profit until next year.

"That money is going to pay off debt," she said. "After nine or 10 years of plugging away, I will finally be able to take my profit-and-loss statement to the bank and get a loan."

Before her mail-order business got a shot in the arm from Allure, monthly sales were running between $3,000 and $5,000. Now she is selling $40,000 a month.

Eighty percent of her orders come in via e-mail and the toll-free number she set up about six years ago. National publicity and her new Web site have kicked her mail-order sales into warp drive.

She is so busy now she's a little apprehensive about the holiday season. "I can't get sick," she said. "I just can't."

Isley said she hopes her success will encourage other new small-business owners to hang in there.

"Use the resources you have, have confidence in yourself and ask questions. You've got to be on your toes, constantly. You've got to think for yourself," she said.

"If I can do it, anybody can do it."