Fragrance is everywhere – made by perfumers we’ve never met, in an industry few know exists.

It’s been this way for a long time for these creative, hard-working folks who enrich our lives. Today our food tastes better, our hair smells healthier, our houses smell cleaner than ever before. The joy designed and manufactured in the secret corridors of New Jersey, Paris, and Geneva fragrance houses is immense.

Such an immense impact requires an equal measure of responsibility – to adapt to knowledge we’ve gained about safety and sustainability, and to evolve a model that must serve brands, perfumers, supply chain workers, and consumers alike.

Today’s fragrance business is not adapting and evolving far or fast enough to keep pace with conditions that have changed dramatically over the last 100 years. 

Some fragrance ingredients (usually made by smaller players, in regional brands, but occasionally nationally) are being banned, and some rightfully so. Farmers who manufacture the raw natural materials are being exploited. This will change.

The companies who depend most on fragrance have zero transparency into the products they depend on. Think about this for a minute – Frito Lay doesn’t know how to make its Cool Ranch flavor. Unilever doesn’t know the recipe for the scent of Axe Body Spray. All brands need to be accountable to consumers and stand by the ingredients in their products, yet these recipes are held as a secret by fragrance houses, and enforced contractually. This will change.

Most importantly, we don’t know exactly what we’re putting on our skin, or how long it will last. There’s usually just one item, “Fragrance,”  on the ingredients list for most of our household and beauty products – products that we put on ourselves, our loved ones, and our children. “Fragrance” could be 5 molecules, it could be 500. We just don’t know. Today, you are not allowed to know. This will change. 

Modern perfumery started hundreds of years ago in Grasse, in the French Riviera, as a minor supplier to the leather glove industry. Leather goods at the time were cured with urine, and smelled awful, so a healthy trade grew out of distilling essential oils of woods and flowers, and rubbing them into leather products to make them palatable. Perfumery as a craft is of course, much older – the Egyptians had perfume bottles, and even a broader culture of cosmetics. We’ve always wanted to smell good. But Grasse was the birth of the industry we recognize today, and originally, there wasn’t much of a distinction between the industries of pharmaceuticals and fragrance, because chemists of the day practiced both. However, French regulation in the 18th century mandated transparency, and required all medicinal goods to list their ingredients. The druggists acquiesced, because after all, if you’re going to put something in your body, you deserve to know what’s in it. Those that became perfumers refused, and the modern fragrance industry was born, under a shroud of secrecy.

The industry has maintained this secrecy ever since, partly to protect their creations as art forms – and partly because holding their formulas tight protects their business. But over time this secrecy has been a serious drag on innovation that could benefit the customer or the consumer, and on research that could advance basic understanding of scent itself. For example, there is almost zero communication between perfumery and basic research into the biology and psychology of olfaction. This is in contrast to the tech companies of the world, where professors and PhDs cross porously between the industry/academia border, sharing ideas and cross-training. 

It’s time for something new in the fragrance business. 

‍

Osmo is bringing world class talent together across the art and science of scent. Our framework defines a new way to build and buy fragrance, with the art, science, and business of fragrance blended harmoniously. Here’s how. 

Transparent. You deserve to know what’s in your fragrances, full stop. In the same way that product formulation ends up on the ingredient list, we believe both the consumer and the enterprise customer deserves to know at least the names of the ingredients in their beloved products. We are opening up a radical new era in ingredient-level transparency and consumer respect.

Fast. The world is moving faster than ever, consumer trends are changing faster in an ever more connected world. We demand personalization, customization, and novelty. Customers can’t wait months for a new fragrance. We’ll work to deliver solutions in days, and eventually with AI and robotics, just minutes. This allows customers to iterate faster, and drop time-to-shelf for new products. We can reverse-engineer existing real-world scent in minutes, whether they be inspirational products, the scent of a flower, or your childhood stuffed animal. 

Unique. New products live or die based on whether they stand out. Because we have developed AI systems that can analyze the scent of every fragranced product on the market, and we have developed a science of scent allowing us to quantitatively measure the similarity between scents, we can forecast consumer trends and give an edge to our customers. 

The Perfumer at the Center of Creation. Launches that require true inspiration, something completely daring and new, will always require the human creativity of a trained perfumer, without being intermediated by layers of salespeople, evaluators and bureaucracy. Technology will free perfumers to focus even more intensely on creation, and we believe the world should recognize their masterpieces alongside Frida Kahlo, Prince, Frank Lloyd Wright, Coco Chanel and Alan Kay. 

Clean. We believe in a future where fragrance ingredients not only meet the highest safety standards but actively promote health for both people and the planet. Many of today’s ingredients contribute to environmental degradation or have unintended health effects. We’re determined to fix this by building new, beautiful, clean ingredients. We will continuously raise our standards as the science evolves. Our work will impact the environment and the lives of millions, and we take this responsibility and opportunity to heart.

‍

This is why we’re launching a private beta – Fragrance 2o – where we will work with a small set of select clients to design their fragrance with the high technology of tomorrow, and the best artistry of today.  

Our focus is on learning and refining the creative process. We want to understand how each step works, from initial brief to final delivery. Through this understanding, we can identify opportunities to leverage technology to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver exceptional value to our clients.

‍

Together, we will reimagine what’s possible.

‍

‍