Samples from Houses - best experience

I'm not talking about decanters, but ordering directly from the perfumer. For me best experiences so far are with Parfum d'Empire and Neil Morris who earn gold stars for reasonable prices, prompt Internationl delivery, nice hand written notes AND fab fragrances. So who would you recommend?

Hello!! Good to hear I have had great experience from "SmellBent" he hand writes notes and throws an extra in there too. Though it takes a little longer than 2 weeks for international delivery. My friend ordered direct from "Rose de Rosine" and was very happy, they were quite prompt too.

Parfums Divine send a beautiful sample package, fast too and also with hand written attention to detail ... best service I've ever experienced!

I have been very impressed with a number of houses on the sample front. Here are several with excellent sample services, reasonable prices, and free shipping for samples-only orders.

Keiko Mecheri

Tauer Perfumes

Ineke

Histoires de Parfums

Sonoma Scent Studio

Juliette Has a Gun

Bond no 9

Parfums de Rosine
I really prefer house-produced sample sets since I like to get a feel for the aesthetic approach of the house, which requires testing a selection of their perfumes. There are good legitimate decanters working at Aedes and MinNY--where the emporium is working for the house as a sample service--but I prefer not to use rogue gray-market decanters, whenever this can be avoided...

The only one I know of that hasn't already been mentioned is Neela Vermeire. Quick turnaround, beautiful packaging and a handwritten personal note.

Been checking out all the perfumers nominated so far (thank you!) and I'm surprised how affordable their sample offerings are.

Only one I've dealt with was Sonoma Scent Studios and they were wicked fast with a handwritten note from the perfumer.

The one that really stood out was the sample set by Czech & Speake.
Incredible value (I think they only charge a minimal amount for shipping, in the UK at least)
Beautifully presented.
Generous and covering pretty much the whole range
Delivered quickly

Another one was from Juliette has a Gun
Again, great value, sent quickly, nicely presented in individual little envelopes and generously filled spray vials.

Yes Neil (Morris) sticks out, he is very nice. Also Josh (Meyer) from Imaginary Authors is a sweetheart, so are Sam & Sasha from United Scents of America.

Strangly I never asked samples from perfumers How do you ask for them
without being Obtrusive

Many of the houses have services which allow you to purchase samples for a small amount of money. Some will send samples for free, but that's hit or miss, and I'm sure that they are inundated by requests from people who either do not buy perfume or else hawk the free samples on ebay. Sad but true, such persons corrupt the whole system and provide good reason for refusing to send free samples even to customers with a sincere intent to try before they buy, since there is no sure way to tell who they are...

Some houses send out free samples to former customers, which seems like very good customer service and makes excellent business sense to me, since they know that the recipients will at least consider purchasing the perfume being sampled...

Which Houses are those?

Which houses are...? Sorry I didn't understand your question...

Which perfume houses our good to order from

About four messages up, I gave a list of suggestions. There are others, but that's a good start...

I ordered samples from Tulip, a niche fragrance line. I emailed the owner and she kept good contact with me about shipping, prices, etc. I did have to send a check though as she didn't have PayPal or an online shopping site yet; the full bottles are available on BeautyHabit but I didn't want to blindly buy a bottle. But I received the samples within a week of sending the check so the owner held up her end. I ended up not liking any of them and one of them was a dead ringer for a common perfume, but that's a whole 'nother story.

How to get samples directly from the perfumer? Simple as 1,2, 3 Lola! Choose any/all of the brands mentioned on this thread, go to their website (linked via their Parfumo pages) and look for samples or discovery sets.

Many of them are quite reasonably priced and you end up with very reliable samples since they are house produced. It's definitely worth the small amount of money, in my view...

I find that many vendors are issuing discovery sets these days. Some of the vendors include the entire collection the perfumer is offering, depending on the size of the collection of course. While this is a great idea, many times 20% to 50% of the discovery set might including fragrance you know you're not interested in. Some of these set's can be expensive and around $75 to $300. I find that ordering small samples from Lucky Scent suits me just fine. There's not a great deal of financial commitment and if I absolutely hate it, I have other fragrance friends that will appreciate the opportunity to test the particular perfume.

Divine, Tauer, Heeley, Kurkdijan, Ineke are those that spring to mind.

So Kurkdijan now has a sample program? When I contacted them a while back, they invited me to "stop in" the next time I'm in Paris.

I signed up for the Floris newsletter one day. Got an email soon after if I would like some samples of their Private Collection. As I was more interested in their line of men's fragrances I politely asked if could receive some samples of those. Sure enough, I received 7 samples of their Floris for men range, free of charge. I bought a bottle of Floris Santal as a result.

He/they offer a four-sample discovery set on their website. As I recall, it's reasonably priced.

Very tempting sample program but when you read the fine print while they offer international postage they don't appear to accept credit cards linked to non-American addresses. WTF?