Britney Spears' Brother Said Her Perfume Sales Grossed $100 Billion

[Urbanney]

We've known this since July 2020 when Brian Spears (Britney's brother) gave an interview to the podcast, As NOT Seen on TV. However, Newsweek has published a recent article about it, and I think it's important to post and to ask everyone once again:

HOW IS BRITNEY SPEARS ONLY WORTH $60 MILLION?

Quote

It has been widely reported in recent months that Britney Spears' fortune is worth $60 million as the pop star fights for control over her life and her finances under her conservatorship.

The agreement is edging closer to ending for good as the singer's father Jamie Spears has been suspended from the court arrangement, in what has signaled a major victory for Britney Spears and her legal team.

Court documents throughout the legal battle to end the conservatorship have stated that the "Toxic" hitmaker's fortune is worth the aforementioned $60 million.

However, this figure has long been speculated about—with endless articles surmising that the Spears' fortune should be far greater.

She sold more than 158 million records (per Billboard) since bursting onto the music scene in 1999, but this hasn't been her only source of income.

World tours, a Las Vegas residency, and a lucrative stake in the fragrance industry have also seen her rake in millions of dollars.

According to Forbes, Spears has earned more than $30 million a year in eight of the last 20 years but she is not topping the rich list any time soon.

In July 2020, Spears' brother Bryan Spears spoke about the business of Britney on a podcast where he revealed that her perfume sales with beauty giant Elizabeth Arden grossed $100 billion.

"My thing was new business development that's what I kind of focused on which was the branding and creating the Elizabeth Arden fragrance line with her," Bryan Spears said on the As NOT Seen on TV podcast, which can be seen here

"Just that alone has done over $100 billion in sales," he said.

While this figure is difficult to accurately verify, Britney Spears' first perfume, Curious, was the top-selling fragrance of 2004, netting over $100 million in sales, per InStyle.

Atmosphere during Britney Spears Fragrance Launch at The Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, New York, United States. 

Spears reportedly netted $52 million from Elizabeth Arden for the endorsement and has since launched 26 fragrance lines.

"At one point every young girl wanted to be Britney Spears," Sue Phillips, president and CEO of Scenterprises, a fragance branding and marketing company, told Racked in 2016. "They wanted to have her lifestyle and be famous and have her figure and her money and her talent. Then she hit a bad streak and went in a downward spiral. But then she reinvented herself.

"Maybe there is a story there about sticking with it and coming back and never giving up. Maybe that's the message that is her legacy. Maybe that's why her perfumes still do well."

These staggering sums don't seem to match with the $60 million fortune stated on the legal documents pertaining to Britney Spears' conservatorship.

But why? Forbes has estimated that much of the singer's earnings have been paid to others.

Aside from around 25 percent going to agents, managers and lawyers and 40 percent for taxes, the financial magazine reckons that she spends millions of dollars on child support to her ex-husband Kevin Federline and millions more on legal fees.

Newsweek has contacted legal representatives for Britney Spears and her father Jamie Spears for comment.

 

[Martian_M00d]

That alone is mind boggling to me 

[Mxra]

$100 billion? I don't know about that one. Last I heard it was $1billion, which seems much more realistic. Britney by far has the most successful celebrity perfume brand but there is no way her perfume line has made that much money. 

[kevin.]

"Follow the money"

[Markoct]

BILLION?????? 

[amiro1989]

He sure confirmed what we all were worried about: The Spears don’t know how to count or manage coins.

With Britney being the exception of course, since she is an Asghari. A Persian queen. 

[Moscow]

How Britney Spears Built a Billion-Dollar Business Without Selling a Single Record

On September 14, 2004, Britney Spears arrived at Macy’s in New York City in a red satin cocktail dress with tiny hearts all over it to attend a party in her honor. She was 22 years old and four days away from her second marriage of the year (her first, an impromptu Vegas hitching with a childhood friend, lasted 55 hours; a judge annulled it, saying Spears “lacked understanding of her actions” at the time). Spears was in New York to launch Curious, her first perfume, which cost $39.95 and smelled like the waiting room of a fancy spa. She beamed for the paparazzi and held a bottle of Curious in her palm, cradling the aquamarine flacon in one hand, as if it were a delicate fruit, and squeezing the tasseled atomizer with the other like a silent-film star primping in her boudoir. “I’m so excited about doing my new fragrance with all of you,” she said, while chewing bubble gum. “It smells amazing, and it is in department stores, so I seriously suggest to be **** and go out and get it. Seriously.”

As she walked away from the microphone, Spears did a little shimmy with her shoulders, a hammy movement that seemed like an anxious reflex. She could seriously suggest that people buy her fragrance, but at that very moment, she was struggling to be taken seriously herself. She was trying to launch a perfume business in the middle of a tabloid maelstrom: She’d recently announced her surprise engagement to Kevin Federline, a dancer whom she had only known for a few months. On top of weathering the media fallout from her whirlwind romance, Spears spent the summer in intensive physical therapy following arthroscopic surgery on her knee, which she blew out while filming the video for “Outrageous.” She’d had to cancel the entire back half of her 2004 tour for In The Zone, which meant disappearing from the limelight just as “Toxic” hit the top ten in 15 different countries. When she launched Curious, she was barely healed and just starting to take baby steps back into the public eye.

This is all to say that there was a lot riding on her first fragrance, and Spears knew it, even if she popped her gum throughout its unveiling. Elizabeth Arden had sunk a lot of chemical lab hours and market research into perfecting Spears’ scent (not to mention the $52 million it paid her for the deal): it was a saccharine meringue with a light glaze of white peaches and a delicate lotus basenote, the kind of sugar-dusted mist that’s like catnip to teenage consumers. But celebrity scents are not always a sure thing. Many of them drop into the market with a thud, lasting only a season never to be heard from again (remember J by Jennifer Aniston or Black Star by Avril Lavigne?). So few of them have lasting power — on the skin or in stores.

Fortunately, if there is one thing Britney Spears knows, it is how to make a hit.

In its first year in stores, Curious didn’t just kill, it obliterated. It became a phenomenon. It was the top selling fragrance of 2004, netting over $100 million in sales. To put that in perspective, over the course of her 20-year career, Spears has sold 100 million records worldwide. By 2013, one report stated that in five years Elizabeth Arden had sold over 500 million bottles of Curious. That’s five times as many units in a quarter of the time.

The most obvious and also true explanation for this is that the perfume was good. I mean actually good. Curious has a strong, milky sillage that isn’t too cloying (where most celebrity scents employ a melted-Slurpee level of weaponized sweetness), and it lasts for hours and hours. In 2005, the scent was a finalist in the Women’s Luxe category at the Fragrance Foundation Awards (the Oscars of perfume), alongside Dior’s Pure Poison, Prada Eau de Parfum, and DKNY’s Be Delicious — which cost twice as much if not more. And Curious is still moving units: Walk into any Rite-Aid, and you’ll likely find a locked plexiglass cabinet containing a few boxes of the stuff. You can buy it on Amazonright now. Within the industry, the scent is known as a kind of magical unicorn, the sort of breakout commercial and critical hit that most corporate fragrance firms only dream of when they collaborate with a celebrity — because most celebrity scents are bad.

Britney-caliber stars often aren’t even that involved in making their namesake perfumes: their business team sends out a description of what they want (or a “brief”) and several fragrance firms compete to win the contract. Sometimes the celebrity won’t even smell the formula until it’s done. (Two notable exceptions are Sarah Jessica Parker, who has been said to be intimately involved in every step of her scent creation, and Spears, who, according to Ron Rolleston, the EVP of Global Fragrance Marketing at Revlon, made her tastes very clear throughout the process. “We sat down and talked about her likes and dislikes, colors, bottle shapes, favorite scents, and art that she found inspiring,” he says. “Britney’s love of flowers and a sensuality in scents forms the DNA of many of her fragrances.”)

When a scent goes through a big firm — Coty, Parlux, IFF, or Revlon which together rep almost every celebrity scent you’ve heard of, along with many designer ones — it is designed by a hivemind, and so much gets lost in every moment of translation that the juice that’s bottled and sold is but a weak facsimile of the original idea. The tastes of individuals are wild, but the masses are predictable (they like vanilla, peach, and chemical musk), and it is very difficult to make something transcendent when you have about 100 cooks in the kitchen. This is why so many celebrity scents smell like the same kind of playing it safe — they are like pop songs, engineered with the same backbeat.

But Britney Spears is a wild individual, and Curious has a pulse beneath its honeyed, whipped cream, jelly donut exterior. It suctions itself to the wrist and releases its essence throughout the day in gentle sighs, unfolding and changing almost elegantly. If you encountered the scent in a blind smell test, you might think it was one of those puffy, powdery Guerlain concoctions Parisian girls buy as their first signature scent. In other words, it is far better than it needed to be. Spears was (and still is) one of the best-selling pop artists of the century; her first perfume could have been pure gasoline and it would have flown off shelves, at least for a season. The fact that it has remained in production and in stores is not only a testament to Spears’ ever-regenerating star power, but to the fact that she really loves fragrance. And she just might know what she's doing.

It’s clear Spears adores her own fragrances — she wears them (in real life and her music videos) and often smatters her Instagram with pictures of her favorite bottles and her latest debut. She tweets about the atmospheric smells she loves, like the scent of vanilla candles. Curious, and its blockbuster follow-up Fantasy(a fizzy varnish that smells like fine chocolate mixed with strawberry Pop Rocks) are strong, heady, perfume-lover’s perfumes. In 2013, Spears released a breakup anthem called “Perfume” in which she cheekily sang that she hoped her ex’s next girlfriend would smell the lingering traces of her scent. It was a song about marking your territory, but also about marketing it: she may have lost her man in “Perfume,” but was making a fortune on perfume.

The fact that she still is may make her an anomaly. According to recent reports, celebrity scents are on the decline. Sales of perfumes with famous faces attached peaked in 2011, and have been on the wane ever since. Cosmo reported earlier this year that big fragrance firms have stopped handing out multi-million dollar contracts to celebrities just to slap their names on a bottle, noting a dip as low as 22% in the category's sales. In the era of online retail, consumer tastes have gravitated toward designer or cult indie brands like Le Labo and Byredo, with minimalist bottles made for Instagram. A lot of buying things these days is about broadcasting that you bought them, and celebrity scents — which have always carried with them the whiff of the uncool and overeager, and a slight touch of class anxiety given their drugstore roots — have not fared well in the attention economy. Rihanna, for example, ditched her former fragrance and cosmetic 

endorsement deals to launch Fenty Beauty with the luxury conglomerate LVMH. This has allowed her to lord over her own mini-empire rather than lending her name to someone else's bottom line, but also to play along with the Instagram hype machine rather than operating independently of it, dependent on drugstore foot traffic.

Still, In this precarious new landscape, Britney Spears’ perfume operation has continued to thrive and innovate. Just this fall, she released Prerogative — her 24th perfume — directly into Kohl’s and Walmart stores. It also happened to be her first “gender neutral” scent. Though technically all fragrances are uni*** (the difference between women’s perfume and men’s cologne is a myth cooked up to sell bottles! Anyone can wear anything! Don’t believe the lies!), Prerogative is far woodier and spicier than any of Spears’ other concoctions, relying on an unctuous amber base smothered with tangy fruit, or perhaps zesty Carolina 

barbecue sauce (I mean this as a compliment). Spears has been promoting the scent with as much zeal as she has all of her past offerings, flipping her ponytail in Instagram videos in a strapless metallic minidress with the hashtag #myprerogative. A few days shy of 37 years old, she is still selling fragrance with as much gusto as when she told the crowds at Macy’s to “be ****” and buy a bottle, 14 years ago. The only difference is, consumers have spent more than $1 billion on her perfumes since then, according to a rep at Revlon. As she launches another Vegas residency (Britney: Domination hits the MGM in February2019), Spears is proving that she remains one of the hardest working women in pop; what we don’t discuss enough is how she has been one of the hardest working women in perfume this whole time, too.

 

[Pinky98]

If curious sold 500 million by 2010 (one of 20-something perfumes), then they have easily grossed over $100bn in pure sales, if she’s entitled to 10%, that’s $10bn before tax. Where is the money? 

[Bigno]

26 minutes ago, ol123 said:

$100 billion? I don't know about that one. Last I heard it was $1billion, which seems much more realistic. Britney by far has the most successful celebrity perfume brand but there is no way her perfume line has made that much money. 

This. 

Bryan was being the dumb hillbilly he naturally is

[Oprah Winfrey.]

This has to be explained over and over again doesn’t it.

it’s ok lol maybe we should make a massive thread about this but all her perfume sales and other money is tied to Jamie’s LLCs and don’t have to be reported to the court. The money exists and if it doesn’t Jamie will have to make it exist really soon 😂

So forever they pretty much only reported certain figures about her estate to the court and  any earnings owned by Jamies LLCs don’t need have to be reported 

so many legal loop holes in this, rosengart is gonna get you and figure all of them out

[rik]

Bryan is a moron. I don’t know why he would reveal that lmao (I still think he meant 1 billion)

but yes let’s not be shocked! Britney is the original beauty and fragrance girl   they used to say that every 40 seconds a fantasy perfume was bought

don’t know how well that holds up now though  

[Urbanney]

4 minutes ago, Britman512 said:

This has to be explained over and over again doesn’t it.

it’s ok lol maybe we should make a massive thread about this but all her perfume sales and other money is tied to Jamie’s LLCs and don’t have to be reported to the court. The money exists and if it doesn’t Jamie will have to make it exist really soon 😂

So forever they pretty much only reported certain figures about her estate to the court and  any earnings owned by Jamies LLCs don’t need have to be reported 

so many legal loop holes in this, rosengart is gonna get you and figure all of them out

I'm not asking for an explanation. I'm trying to raise awareness that Britney has had hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from her. So far, the media coverage has barely touched on Britney's money, mostly focusing on the personal abuse. So here's me doing what I can to push Britney's stolen money into the spotlight.

[ronron]

21 minutes ago, Pinky98 said:

If curious sold 500 million by 2010 (one of 20-something perfumes), then they have easily grossed over $100bn in pure sales, if she’s entitled to 10%, that’s $10bn before tax. Where is the money? 

Thisss?

[London Girl 98]

It's impossible. I think it's $1B. He's bad at math. 

[Stefani]

Did Jamie not teach him how to count?  $1 billion is realistic, $100 billion is not. Like really, what kind of overinflated numbers was he given? Does he work for Tidal? 

[oscar0]

the Surprise Witness has a video about the money on youtube and explained that the 60 million was only what was in his name, the rest was the trust, which was not subject to the conservatorship of the state of California, and is managed by Bryan.

[Britneylandia]

That explains how her not worth is only 60M, they are horrible with numbers lol.

[Yasux34]

[that's hot y'all]

7 hours ago, Don't Trust Sam said:

It's impossible. I think it's $1B. He's bad at math. 

for sure !  the amazon guy, Jeff Bezos (191.4 billion)

 

LOL Bryan is dumb !

[Stannedforever]

Okay let's do the math:

The last confirmed $1.5 billion  sales figure (from 2012);

• The average price for her perfumes is $20 which means that the total amount of perfumes sold by 2012 would be 50 million bottles
• She made about $100 million in 2004 alone which means that around 5 million bottles were sold by 2005
• This figure was confirmed in 2012 so it would mean average 6.25 million bottles per year since then which imo is realistic 
• If the sales were steady from 2012 to now, it would mean that the total sales would be around 105 million bottles with total revenue of ~ $2.5 billion

The claimed $100 billion  sales figure;

• It would mean that the total sales would be around 5 billion bottles which is almost 300 million bottles per year