Hey Fragrant Friend 👋 ,
It’s day 644 of me trying to change the perfume industry for the better.
Welcome to my first weekly check-in on how that’s going. Thanks’ for being with me.
Status
New Niche is… close. Painfully close.
The launch was meant to happen in calendar week 50, 2025. It didn’t. Not because of a big strategic rethink or a dramatic pivot, but because one supplier failed in a very unglamorous, very practical way.
Six hundred packaging units were produced incorrectly. Straight into the shredder. 5k€ damage.
I don’t have to carry the financial cost, which I’m grateful for. But emotionally? It hit harder than I expected. This is the part people don’t romanticise: when something you’ve poured two years of work, doubt, money, and belief into gets delayed by someone else’s mistake.
Packaging was the one area where I thought I was playing it safe. Local partner. Clear specs. Fewer risks. Turns out that safety was an illusion.
So I took the whole thing back in-house.
Glass. Pump. Cap. Packaging. Supplier conversations. Compliance details. Everything.
I’m now deeper in the weeds than I ever planned to be and maybe deeper than is strictly healthy but also more in control than I’ve ever been.
There’s something sobering about realising that if you want something done exactly right, you might have to touch every single part of it yourself.
A detour that mattered
I was on holiday for the first time in over eight months when all of this unfolded. Two weeks in the Austrian Alps, snowboarding during the day, mentally renegotiating supply chains under my helmet.
My body was on the mountain.
My mind was somewhere between China, spreadsheets, and quiet panic.
Somewhere in that noise I landed on a podcast conversation with Steven Pressfield:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7LYB2H7Cj0
He talked about creative calling, how ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear, it just sends that energy somewhere else. Often somewhere darker.
What he didn’t promise was ease or reward. Just a lot of hard work. Possibly forever. Possibly unnoticed. But aligned.
That stayed with me.
Because yes, delaying the launch hurts. Not launching for Valentine’s Day hurts. Launching with just one fragrance hurts. All of it invites doubt.
And still, I know I’m answering a call I can’t ignore without paying a different price.
What I’m sitting with
Lately I’ve been wondering whether this delay is really just friction, or whether it’s doing something else.
Being forced to touch every single part of the process has changed how I understand the work. Every component, every decision, every compromise. Not because I want to control everything, but because I now see how much weight even the smallest choices carry.
It’s uncomfortable. It’s slower. And it’s not how I imagined this phase would look.
But maybe this is exactly what I needed before moving forward.
At least that’s the story I’m choosing to believe this week.
Mood of the week: cautiously hopeful 🙂
Song that stayed with me this week
Angie Stone – Wish I Didn’t Miss You (Max’s disco rework) (RIP 😢 !!!)
That’s it for now.
More soon, while it’s still messy.
Sebastian