New Niche Sweatshop Stories - Part II

It's day 731 of me trying to be of value to independent perfumers all around the world (see the iteration from the last mails 🥸?)

Before we dive into this issue, a quick favour: Move this email to your Primary tab so future issues land where you'll actually see them.

This week the first modifications of our second fragrance came back from Dario Siegel.

I'd been waiting for them with a quiet kind of expectation. The brief, if you can even call it that, was light. Côte d'Azur, but off the beaten path. That was the seed we had been circling around together. So when I finally got to smell what came back, I expected to feel that same immediate click I had felt with the first fragrance.

I didn't.

Something was off. Not technically, the modification was clean and well executed. But somewhere between what I had imagined and what was now in front of me, there was a real mismatch. And the more I sat with it, the clearer it became that this wasn't going to resolve itself by smelling the strip another twenty times.

So Dario and I jumped on a call to figure out where we had drifted apart.

What came out of that call has been on my mind ever since. For me, this might be one of the more monumental things I've learned in the entire 17 months of building New Niche.

Until this week, my whole model of working with perfumers had been shaped by my experience with Chester.

Chester and I sat together for two hours one afternoon. At some point in that conversation, he mentioned a particular image. The second I heard it, I knew. Both of us did. That image became the spine of Before the World Moved Again, and from then on Chester just ran with it. I gave him nothing else. No mood board, no reference fragrances, no list of dos and don'ts. The image was enough.

I just assumed, a bit naively, that this is how it would always work.

Dario is a different kind of perfumer.

He is more technical. He thinks in colour. When he describes a fragrance, he doesn't always reach for a memory or a place, he reaches for a palette. He also has very clear preferences when it comes to fragrance families. Sweet, fresh, oriental, woody. These aren't just categories for him, they are languages he prefers to speak in.

None of this is a flaw. Quite the opposite. But it means that handing Dario the same kind of carte blanche I had handed Chester was, in a way, an act of mistranslation. Not because the freedom was unwelcome, but because we hadn't agreed on the language yet.

Carte blanche has been a core principle of New Niche from day one, and for a long time I genuinely worried that giving any kind of brief at all would compromise it. I had built up something almost ideological around the idea.

But here is what I'm starting to think instead. Guardrails and creative freedom don't actually cancel each other out. They live in completely different parts of the conversation.

And this is the moment where something else clicked for me.

A while back, I listened to an interview with Antoine Lie, where he spoke about how essential freedom is for him to truly express himself as a perfumer. I had filed that away as a confirmation of the carte blanche philosophy. But this week, replaying that thought in my head, I heard it differently. What Antoine was really describing wasn't the absence of structure. It was the presence of the right kind of structure. The kind that lets the perfumer speak in their own language rather than someone else's.

Which leads me to a slightly uncomfortable but, I think, important hypothesis.

The way our industry currently works, the brand arrives with a fully formed language. The perfumer is then expected to translate that language into a fragrance. The conversation flows in one direction. But if I really believe that independent perfumers are artists in the proper sense of the word, then maybe the relationship needs to start one step earlier.

Maybe before any brief, any guardrail, any mood board, the very first conversation should simply be: hey, how do you actually work best? What's your language?

One perfumer thinks in music and wants to talk about notes the way a composer would. Another thinks in colour. Another carries a small palette of beloved materials they always want to find a way back to. Another wants their cultural heritage to be present in the work. These aren't nice-to-haves. They are the operating systems creative people actually use.

To be honest, I find it a bit absurd that I have never heard anyone in the industry talk about this openly. It feels almost obvious once you see it. And it leaves me wondering whether I am just the exotic chameleon noticing something everyone else already knows, or whether there is something genuinely missing in how brands and perfumers meet.

Either way, it feels right.

In the next issue I'll share the first version of the actual guardrails I've started writing for New Niche. They will almost certainly evolve. But pairing those guardrails with this idea, that every collaboration begins by asking the perfumer what language they speak, is the direction I'm leaning into now.

And the only reason I can lean into it is precisely because the first modification of fragrance #2 didn't land. It didn't hit my heart. If it had landed straight in the chest, I would have kept marching forward without ever stopping to ask any of these questions.

So in a strange way, I'm grateful those modifications fell flat.

It is exactly the kind of detour I want this project to be open to. We are not building a release-and-launch engine here. We are taking the time to look at the process itself, and to let the process change us.

And if we keep doing that, honestly, sky's the limit.

Mood of the week: Curious and quietly recalibrating

More soon.

Sebastian