Bernard Dworin, 76, a former cosmetics salesman who determined amid the collision of tradition and free love in the early 1970s that the young would prevail, that they would want to smell good and that S.E.X. would sell, died of a heart attack Thursday, Feb. 7, in his Water Tower Place condominium.
With a men’s cologne called S.E.X.–short for Sexus Et Xenia (a nonsensical Latin phrase)–Mr. Dworin launched his own fragrance company, Romane Inc., a small Chicago-area business that shocked its way onto the scent scene in 1969.
It was a calculated move at a time when Playboy bunnies were becoming part of the mainstream, but “you still couldn’t say sex” in the business world, said Mr. Dworin’s wife, Melody.
“The novelty of the name, sparked interest on the part of consumers even though S.E.X. doesn’t stand for sex at all,” Mr. Dworin told a reporter in 1977.
With an equal amount of salesman’s savvy, he continued adapting his company’s product line to anticipate the whims of fragrance shoppers, keeping his company alive in specialty stores with such non-designer and private label colognes as Dakota, Pacific Sunwear and Musk for Men.
Mr. Dworin moved Romane’s offices, once headquartered in the John Hancock Center, to its Bensenville plant in the 1990s.
Born in Chicago to Russian immigrants, Mr. Dworin grew up on the Northwest Side and graduated from Von Steuben High School in 1942. He briefly served in the Navy during World War II, though a persistent ear problem limited his duties to stateside.
He studied business and finance at North Park College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after the war, but Mr. Dworin wanted to be an actor and moved with a friend to Hollywood. It didn’t last long. He returned to Chicago in the late-1940s and became a salesman for cosmetic companies Trilon and Helene Curtis.
He founded Romane Inc. when his hand was forced. He had already peddled his own fragrance line on the side to the increasing irritation of his former employers. Rather than drop the sideline, he quit his job and started his company in an apartment with a handful of buddies and a girlfriend who lived upstairs from him.
Mr. Dworin “really didn’t have a nose for fragrance” at all, his wife said. But he was an inveterate traveler with a knack for discovering the next promising trend in a European boutique or nascent cultural shift. He left picking the fragrance to others, she said.
The business, he managed himself. Romane Inc. first sold S.E.X. in department stores like J.L. Hudson and, later, Montgomery Ward, Sears and J.C. Penney. When designer fragrances began their ascendancy at department stores in the 1970s, Mr. Dworin targeted men’s specialty stores instead, and by the mid-1980s he branched into small private label production, as well.
Mr. Dworin married Melody Uhlman, a former Chicago model introduced to him by the friend with whom he went to Hollywood. He never retired, his wife said. In addition to his wife, Mr. Dworin is survived by a sister, Sylvia Schwartz. Services were held Monday.
