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Nancy Booth local entrepreneur, dies at 80

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Nancy Mutch Booth, mother, wife, perfumer, inventor, author, came from a family whose business had been the manufacturing of ice cream, soda and food flavorings since the 1880s.

Nancy was given a perfuming kit as a holiday present at age 11, which started her on a career outside the family’s mainstay. With a husband out of work she took the reins and with $50 and flavorings from the family business (America’s second largest flavorings manufacturer) she started crafting potpourris, Colonial-themed home fragrance gift items, and Colonial recipe spice mixes like her Joe Frogger Cookie Mixes.

Her potpourris were quickly taken on by Yankee Candle, QVC and over 2,500 global retail stores over the years. She invented the Vacu-Fresh scented materials to go into vacuum cleaner bags to quell the nasty smells a product soon taken on by large manufacturers.

Nancy went the extra yard and in her Colonial Spiced Orange potpourri had son Christopher, at age 16, in just one season blend hundreds of pounds of cinnamon, Elmer’s glue and water to be rolled out and cut into over 10,000, Ginger-people for her flagship product. People were amazed by the house being under a cloud from basement to the third floor of cinnamon, still visible in the nooks and crannies of the second floor a few years late.

And the scents from the house on Biddeford Circle could be smelled up to a quarter mile away. Christopher was an athletic boy and few dared to comment on him or sister Robin smelling like tussie-mussies on the school bus.

It was a family business in many ways as Nancy developed a workforce of “work from home mommies” who came to pick up supplies with children in tow. Over the years there were over 250 women involved in sewing, stenciling, blending, filling, tying French wired silk ribbon bows, filling spice bags and attaching headers. Nancy’s longtime full-time assistants were Ginny Tatum and Valerie Rapp.

She made the first Mother-Daughter perfuming kits in a choice of four of the main perfuming families, for QVC. Her signature scent was a spiced orange copy of the $68 per 6-ounce Neiman Marcus bitter orange scented Agraria, a potpourri which with a road group of 42 salespeople across America and even was featured as the American product at “A Tour de Monde,” Paris for many years.

Working from the large full basement and a large outbuilding she manufactured up to a million dollars a year in retail sales before moving into a factory on Burnt House Hill Road.

One person might pick up a bolt of fabric and cut swatches by Waverly or Schumacher, for the annual vogue patterns for home decor. A second would sew the long rectangle closed on three sides to make a sack, while a third person blended the substrate and oils and fixative for the fragrance process. The fourth person or mother daughter team would get a large bucket or two of scented coriander seed or cellulose (corn cob pieces) and 100 pre-sewn bags and fill, then tuck closed and tie a “Perfect Bow” from ‘wired French silk ribbon’ to the sachet and with a glue gun add a prefabricated French silk rose.

Gingham ‘n Spice Ltd. had 120 Items in its product line, or more local were the Emlen Physick Estate in Cape May or The Soap Opera in Lahaska, Doylestown’s hallmark The Paper Unicorn, The Larder, et cetera.

When manufacturing from our Carversville home she had 65 25-pound pails of essential oils, and hundreds of one-pound Boston Round jars of everything from pure sandalwood to a few ounces of pure jasmine and Attar of Rose oils.

Nancy wrote “Perfumes Splashes and Colognes” a book on the history of perfuming full of how to do for the home perfumer. Working with the “Perfume Foundation” in New York City she published the book, which is still selling well on Amazon and in our local bookstores.

After gaining notoriety as a perfumer or “nose” Nancy was approached by numerous large manufacturers to develop fragrances for their product lines. On the books release The Intelligencer ran a full page article on Nancy titled “A Woman of Uncommon Scents.” She went on to develop the product lines as “A Nose” for many manufacturers to add home fragrance to their product lines. She blended the offerings for “The Hamptons” making a signature scent for Southampton, East Hampton, Bridgehampton, and Montauk Point, Long Island.

Nancy Booth of Chestnut Hill and Carversville surrendered to kidney failure with her son and families at her side via a Zoom conference call on July 16. She is survived by Christopher Lee and Robin Noelle and her husband of 33 years, William J. Booth, and grandchildren Victoria Lee Morales, Kyle Morales, Trinity, Riley and Lauren McFayden. And stepson William Mason and family.

She grew up attending Germantown Friends School. Living in Chestnut Hill she was an early bloomer as an equestrian and rode lead line at the Devon Horse and Country Fare since 1946 and went on to ride from a nearby stable in Fairmount Park to Valley Green, her favorite place.

Nancy was a parishioner and Sunday school teacher at Trinity Solebury and Buckingham Episcopal churches.


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