The Letter No. 2 — Two, not one

Hi Fragrant Friend 👋

Last week I mentioned fragrance #2 and #3 almost in passing, at the end of a paragraph about production runs and label quantities. That was unfair to both of them. So here is the longer version.

Status

We are not working on one new fragrance. We are working on two.

If there is one thing about New Niche I am quietly proud of, it is that the decisions behind it come from the gut and from the heart, not from a spreadsheet. My default setting is analytical. The front of my head wants to plan, steer and optimise everything, always. With this brand I have been trying to let that part rest a little, to trust the process, and to stay open to what life actually puts in front of me instead of forcing it into a plan I made months earlier.

About three months ago that approach gave me something I still find hard to believe. I met Christophe Laudamiel, my personal perfume hero, in Berlin, in his former lab. And in the same afternoon he introduced me to his protégé, Mansour Osman.

Mansour has been learning from and with Christophe for more than six years. Technically he is remarkable. In commercial perfumery, though, he is still an unwritten page, almost nothing out there under his own name yet. Which is exactly why this makes me so happy. I get to work with an enormously gifted perfumer, and at the same time we get to double down on what New Niche is actually for: giving independent artists and their ideas a way into the world, people who might never take that step without a house standing behind them.

One More Thing

Next week I will share the first insights from our evaluator group.

Letting a few community members into the creation process was part of the concept from the very beginning, a small attempt at democratising something that normally happens behind closed doors. Right now that group is Anna from Finland, Damjan from the Netherlands and Petra from the Czech Republic. Small, but exactly right.

And it is not a pleasant gimmick. Independent brands create inside an echo chamber far more often than they would like to admit. Having three people who understand the DNA of what we are building, and who tell us early and honestly what lands and what does not, genuinely changes the result.

That is issue No. 2. Next week, actual notes from the evaluations. As always, if something here makes you curious, hit reply. I read everything.