The Letter No. 6 - the making of

Hi Fragrant Friend 👋

Most of what I tell you about happens on screens and in couriered boxes. This week I actually went to where some of it gets made.

If you're new here, a warm welcome. Some of you are joining from my old Scently Speaking letters, and I'm glad you came along. The short version: New Niche is building its first collection of fragrances, and this is the letter where they take shape.

In Stephanie's Studio

We visited Stephanie in her atelier, and she handed over the artwork that goes with the first fragrance. The whole packaging is built around that one image, box and label and all of it, so getting to receive it in the room where it was painted meant more than opening another parcel would have.

Then she started a new one while we were there, which is the part I hadn't expected to see. Watching her work, the questions she seemed to be turning over sounded oddly familiar. What am I trying to say here, which colours and textures carry it, which canvas will take it, and which technique in the end. Swap a few words and that is a perfumer at their bench. I didn't think the two jobs would line up that closely.

Next Stop, Hamburg

On the 11th we drive up to Sophia, near Hamburg, to see her studio too. She has already sent her artwork ahead of us. It's in Berlin this week getting digitised on a proper art scanner, the kind used for real paintings, because I want what ends up on the box to sit as close to the original as it possibly can.

Where You Can Actually Smell It

A lot of you have written in asking the same thing: where can I experience the scent and the artwork together, in one place. There's an answer coming. A permanent exhibition is in the works, and if it holds together the way we hope, we'll open it to the public in Berlin towards the end of the year. More when it's real.

The Corner Nobody Sees

Last week I mentioned how two materials with the same CAS number can smell nothing alike. That's one corner of a bigger tangle I've been living in, so here's the honest version of it.

There are, roughly, two kinds of nose. A perfume creator makes small batches and releases them himself. An independent perfumer works out in the open but has an aroma house behind him. Andreas Wilhelm is the clean example, an independent name with a Luzi lab on call to turn any formula into finished liquid. We are the third, more awkward thing: an independent perfumer with no house behind him, trying to source the best of every world himself, while already needing real kilos of compound to put bottles on a shelf.

That is about the least popular place you can stand. When Mansour writes a formula, he writes it from the materials in his own lab. Take that formula to a manufacturer at our size, single-digit kilos, wanting only the compound and not the full-service package where they design it for you, and most of them simply aren't interested. The ones who are often want a 10 to 25 kilo minimum, which for a brand our size is a non-starter. And the odds that one partner happens to stock your exact spread of materials, at the quality you fell for in the first place, are slim.

I've started drawing it as a triangle. Viability, whether a supplier will even sell us compound and whether our materials are things they can get. Feasibility, whether the minimum order and the price per kilo are within reach. Desirability, whether the result actually smells the way it's meant to. Hit all three and you have a fragrance you can sell. Miss one and you're back at the start. Most of the search is spent somewhere in the middle of that triangle, and the whole thing is close to a black box. Even finding a company that offers this is hard.

Nobody sees this part, and there's no real reason they should. It's most of the job right now.

As always, if any of this sparks something, just hit reply. I read everything.