Milwaukee FASHION

Amore. Italian for love. A word crooned by Dean Martin and cooed by romantics. “You say amore anywhere in the world and people know what it means,” Robert Amore said. A little more than a year ago, Amore was sitting in Italy considering his surname. A person should take advantage of a name like that, he thought. It should be attached to a product of some sort. Then an idea suddenly came to him. If he were a cartoon character, a light bulb would have appeared above his head.

His last name, he decided, should be a cologne. But other than wearing it, Amore had zilch experience with cologne. He was, and is, the co-owner of a downtown Albany men’s clothing store founded by his father, Angelo Amore, many decades ago. But Robert Amore was undeterred. He pressed ahead. And with the help of a Chicago-area company, Michael Christopher Ltd., he spent 14 months developing and refining the fragrance. Now, the cologne is ready for sale.

It comes in an attractive black box and a graceful glass bottle. For $65, a 3.4-ounce bottle can be yours. And Robert Amore is aiming to get the cologne in stores nationally. He’s working his contacts in the men’s clothing industry, planning to attend trade shows, and mailing bottles of Amore, the cologne, to locations far and near.

So at this point, the curious reader is likely asking a key question: What does the cologne smell like? Describing a smell isn’t easy, either for a newspaper reporter or for Robert Amore. To him, it has Mediterranean character and includes bergamot, a citrus fruit grown in Italy, as a noteworthy ingredient. Even if it smells wonderful, succeeding with the cologne won’t be easy, said Rachel Bloom, president of the Fragrance Foundation, a trade group in New York City.