How NewNiche
began.

People ask me how I came to building NewNiche as a fragrance publishing house. The story starts when I was six years old.

Other kids were playing with dinosaurs. I had a soap collection of 150 soaps. I was obsessed. Not with having them. With the ritual of it. The smell, the texture, the idea that each one was different, a different story, a different maker.

In retrospect, I think Lush owes me royalties for inventing their concept.

But I didn't become a perfumer. I chose a different path. For most of my career, I worked at the intersection of digital product building, innovation, and solving problems that mattered. I was good at it. I built ventures that helped people.

But after all these years, something shifted. I felt a longing to understand fragrance and the fragrance industry in a deeper way. Not as a consumer. As someone trying to understand how it actually works.

So I started having conversations.

For months, I conducted interviews. Not casual coffee conversations. Real, structured interviews with people who knew this industry inside out.

I talked to people from Givaudan, IFF, Symrise, Takasago, Mane, the fragrance ingredient houses that supply the world. I talked to farmers who grow jasmine, bergamot, and sandalwood. I talked to perfumers. Independent ones. In-house ones. Retired ones who had moved away from the industry.

I wanted to understand the ecosystem. How fragrance actually gets made. Who has creative freedom. Who doesn't. What happens when you care about the art of perfumery versus the commerce of it.

The picture became clearer with every conversation.

But also more troubling.

The fragrance industry exists to sell what comes from L'Oréal, Estée Lauder, Hugo Boss, and a handful of other corporations. That's the entire system.

Inside that system, in-house perfumers function as technicians. They solve briefs. They follow specifications. They create within constraints set by marketing departments and commercial strategy.

But independent perfumers — they are different.

An independent perfumer is an artist. They don't compromise their creative vision, no matter how costly or hard to source the materials are. They find a way. Even when it's commercially stupid. Even when it means they barely make a living.

That differentiation is what makes them special. It's also what breaks them.

Because an independent perfumer is not one person. They are twenty people.

They are the creative nose. They source ingredients. They handle safety and compliance. They run their own brand, or their own shop. They manage influencer relations. They are every role at once.

And maybe, maybe, 10 to 15 percent of their time is spent actually creating fragrance. The thing they're actually good at. The thing they love.

The rest is survival.

I realized something: the industry is not built for independent perfumers to succeed. It's built for the big boys to sell more of what they already make. And independent perfumers are left wearing twenty hats, making nothing, creating genius work that nobody ever gets to experience because they're too busy managing a shipping invoice.

That was the moment I knew: this is a problem worth solving.

To understand the demand side of this problem, I started a newsletter.

Scently Speaking. Independent perfumery. Real conversations. No marketing.

I thought maybe 50 people would read it. Maybe 100.

It became one of the most-read independent perfumery newsletters in the world.

Over the course of running Scently Speaking, I conducted more than 80 experiments with my readers. I tested ideas. I asked questions. And I answered every single email my readers sent me. Over 1,000 emails. Personally.

What I learned from those emails changed everything.

Customers are not looking for luxury. They're not looking for status or limited drops or hype cycles. They are looking for truth. For authenticity.

They want to know what is actually in the fragrance. Which naturals are used. Why those specific naturals. What was the true inspiration of the perfumer. Who is the perfumer, by name.

They want to read a fragrance the way they read a book. They want authorship. They want to know the person behind it.

And they will spend €120, €200, €350 on a bottle if they trust the source. If they believe in the creator.

Trust and transparency. That's what they wanted.

I read every single email and I understood: there's a gap. A massive gap between what independent perfumers want to create and what customers are hungry for.

And nobody is bridging it.

I was sitting somewhere, I don't even remember where, and everything crystallized.

On one hand, I had lost my heart to independent perfumers. These artists who refused to compromise, who were being crushed by a system that wasn't built for them.

On the other hand, I had 1,000 emails from customers who were desperate for exactly what independent perfumers make. For truth. For authorship. For connection.

And nobody was connecting them.

The solution became clear. Not a brand. Not another fragrance line competing in the marketplace.

A publishing house.

The exact same concept that works for literature. An author writes a book. A publisher takes care of everything else, the printing, the distribution, the business side, so the author can focus on writing.

What if we applied that to fragrance?

What if an independent perfumer could focus on creating their fragrance, on developing their vision, on being an author. And someone else handled the twenty other hats.

The sourcing. The compliance. The production. The marketing. The community.

Everything except the creative act.

That's when I knew what NewNiche had to be.

A publishing house where authors are granted complete freedom.

They write their story. We publish it. Carte blanche. No briefs. No compromises.

The author is not a vendor. They are the creator. The one whose name appears on the cover. The one whose vision shapes the entire edition.

And the community, the readers, they are not consumers. They are collaborators in the creative process. They witness the work being made. They give feedback. They travel to the source. They become part of the story.

This is what NewNiche is.

It's not a perfume brand. It never was.

It's a publishing house that publishes fragrances, authored work by independent perfumers who have something to say. Slow, intentional editions. Numbered and dated.

For people who want to read fragrance the way they read a book.

For people who understand that the person behind the work matters more than the marketing around it.

For people who are tired of the system and ready to buy from the margins instead.

That was the idea.

And when Chester Gibs said yes to the question, "what would you create if you had complete freedom?", we finally got to build it.