The second annual Best of the City issue of Sactown, a young bimonthly magazine that covers Sacramento, includes about four dozen accolades, pointing out scenic hikes and skating rinks. It also highlights a mandarin orange festival, so the art director included an image of a mandarin slice on the cover.
Then came the idea: What about giving that slice a scratch-and-sniff coating?
A Sacramento magazine put an orange aroma on its cover.And then the questions: Was a scratch-and-sniff cutout even possible on a cover? Would the smell rub off on the back covers of other magazines on the newsstand? Would it be too expensive?
Answers arrived over the next couple of weeks. The magazine’s printer, Quad/Graphics, discovered that the idea was technically possible. Sactown was assured that the smell would not stick to other magazines. And the price ended up being around $2,000, an affordable expense.
So the magazine pulled the trigger, ordering three pounds of the orange-smelling coating for its 51,000 copies, which hit newsstands in late May.
“This was a great way for us to be interactive and engage the reader,” said Rob Turner, who owns and edits the magazine with his wife, Elyssa Lee. “It’s the kind of thing that brings a smile to everyone’s face. It’s nostalgic for a lot of people.”
Scratch and sniff dates back several decades, and magazine advertisers have long used the technology. But Howard Polskin, a spokesman for the Magazine Publishers of America, said no one at the organization had heard of scratch-and-sniff being on a cover before.
Mr. Turner and Ms. Lee introduced Sactown in 2006 after spending much of their professional lives as magazine writers in New York. For years, though, their plan was to move to Sacramento, Mr. Turner’s hometown, and to start a city magazine.
Mr. Turner said that he expected their latest issue to be the best-selling one in the magazine’s history. He said newsstand sales had been brisk.
“I don’t know that we’re changing the world,” he said. “But we’re getting a good reaction out of people” — not to mention a little smell of success.