Stora Skuggan: Fragrances of Stories Dwelling in the Shadows

“We did not launch a fragrance line in the conventional way, by hiring established perfumers or a design agency. We have done everything ourselves. Every last detail has been shaped by our own hands.”

— Tomas Hempel, co-founder

Essential Information

Founded: 2015
Founders: Anna Barkne, Tomas Hempel, Olle Hemmendorff, Jonas Nordin and Martin Nicolausson
Based in: Stockholm, Sweden (Östgötagatan 18)
Official website: storaskuggan.com

The Founders and the Origins of the Brand

A Boy Growing Up on the Outskirts of Stockholm

Tomas Hempel, a central figure in Stora Skuggan, grew up on the outskirts of Stockholm. He was fascinated by smell from childhood. His earliest scent memory, he says, is of picking flowers in the garden with his younger sisters and playing at making “homemade perfume.”

As a young man, however, Hempel found himself far from the world of fragrance. Living with agoraphobia and social anxiety, he spent a long time feeling “unable to take the first step toward what I wanted to do.” He tried many jobs, from working in a chocolate factory to bicycle courier, postal worker and a management position at an insurance company, without finding his vocation.

A turning point came when he studied film at university and later moved to Australia to study graphic design. “I began trying things I had previously thought were completely beyond me,” he recalls. On returning to Stockholm, Hempel reached the greatest turning point of his life: admission to Beckmans College of Design, one of Sweden’s leading design schools.

Meeting at Beckmans and the Beginning of DIY Perfumery

Around 2005, Hempel met Anna Barkne, Olle Hemmendorff, Jonas Nordin and Martin Nicolausson through the party scene around Beckmans. All were creative people with different backgrounds in design, art and illustration.

“We had talked about doing something together involving scent. But it did not happen at that stage. It only began to take shape when I started seriously studying perfumery in 2010. Then the others joined one by one.”

— Tomas Hempel

In 2010, while working as an art director at an advertising agency, Hempel asked himself what he truly wanted to do. For years he had carried a vague thought of “working with the sense of smell someday.” He finally resolved to make it his profession.

His first steps began on the internet. He gathered information from perfumery forums around the world, ordered books and obtained raw materials. At first, he mixed inexpensive essential oils in his living room.

“At first, I experimented in my living room with materials I ordered online from around the world. A few months later, I found a studio inside a bus garage and stayed there for about four years. During that time, we set up our own laboratory on the outskirts of town, and we have continued blending perfumes there by hand ever since.”

— Tomas Hempel

This DIY exploration eventually opened the door to becoming a professional perfumer. Although largely self-taught, Hempel worked with two perfumers as mentors during the early years to refine his craft. The fact that he never attended a perfumery school is closely connected to the brand’s “outsider spirit,” as he would later describe it.

Growing Alongside Collect & Bottle, and the Launch in 2015

As his passion for making perfume grew, Hempel first established a studio called Collect & Bottle with his friend Martin. Manufacturing perfumes and candles for other brands on an OEM basis, the business became Stora Skuggan’s financial and technical foundation.

Collect & Bottle and Stora Skuggan developed alongside each other, with one working behind the scenes and the other serving as the public-facing brand. In December 2015, Stora Skuggan released its first perfume, Fantôme de Maules, officially launching as an independent niche fragrance house.

The five founders describe themselves as “a nose in unison.” The studio functions entirely in-house, handling everything by hand at its own Stockholm studio and laboratory: perfumery, concept development, visual production, packaging and shipping.

What Matters to the Brand

Autonomy as a Philosophy

Stora Skuggan’s greatest commitment is to autonomy. Nothing is outsourced to other companies. The team deliberately chose not to hire established perfumers or outside design agencies. This is not simply a matter of cost, but a policy of preserving creative integrity.

The FAQ on the official website describes its commitment to ingredients in candid terms:

“Cutting corners by replacing expensive oils with cheap substitutes only makes sense if you plan to sell millions of bottles. That is not what we are aiming for.”

The brand also takes a clear stance on synthetic fragrance materials. Responding to demand for fragrances promoted as “natural,” co-founder Olle Hemmendorff argues:

“The demand for natural ingredients comes from a very uninformed position. People take it for granted that ‘natural’ means safe and good for nature, but that is not the case in perfumery. Generally, the best materials, in terms of both environmental impact and human safety, are synthetic materials made in a laboratory. Producing one kilogram of rose oil requires vast rose fields, consuming a great deal of water and land. Yet most of the key components of rose oil can be made through chemical processes that require very little of the Earth’s resources.”

— Olle Hemmendorff

Standing Between Myth and Reality

Each perfume is inspired, in Hempel’s words, by “stories on the boundary between truth and myth.” Real phenomena, extinct plants, ancient myths and unexplained natural events: the team prefers these ambiguous territories, neither entirely true nor entirely fictional.

Anna Barkne describes the process this way:

“Each different fragrance revolves around a myth or phenomenon that may or may not be real. They become little worlds or universes in which the scents grow, almost like little babies.”

— Anna Barkne

Bottle and Packaging Design

The packaging combines an exceptionally minimal glass bottle rooted in Scandinavian modernism with a large spherical lid, or orb cap. Created by founder Jonas Nordin, this spherical cap has become the brand’s signature.

Each bottle cap has a design reflecting the perfume’s concept. The cap of Thumbsucker, for example, bears the fingerprint of Indra, the god of Hindu mythology. The idea that the bottle should also function as a beautiful object is built into its design, positioning perfume as a threefold combination of concept, wearable art and an aesthetic object.

The Fragrance Lineup

Since its launch, Stora Skuggan has deliberately kept the number of its creations small. As of March 2026, it had released the following nine eaux de parfum.

First Release: Fantôme de Maules (2015)

Inspired by the story of “Le Loyon,” a mysterious figure said to appear in the woods of Maules, a small village in French-speaking Switzerland. A figure about two meters tall, wearing camouflage and an old mask, reportedly wandered the local woods for at least a decade, smelling plants and picking flowers. A green-woody chypre. Hempel calls it “the most classical creation,” reflecting that a little “fear of standing out too much” influenced their debut.

Second Release: Silphium (2016)

A fragrance recreating the legendary silphium plant, prized in ancient Greece and Rome as a medicinal herb, spice and aromatic, but difficult to cultivate and eventually believed to have become extinct. The team studied related species thought to survive and reconstructed its character with synthetic fragrance molecules, or aroma chemicals. It was selected as a finalist in the Artisan category of the 2018 Art and Olfaction Awards, not as a winner. This landmark creation made Stora Skuggan the first Scandinavian fragrance house to become a finalist in the awards.

Third Release: Moonmilk (2017)

Inspired by “moonmilk,” a white liquid phenomenon inside caves described by sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner in a work published in 1555. In the old account presented by the brand, white liquid dripping from stalactites forms pools that never dry up. This mysterious image lies behind the fragrance. Described as “inverted sandalwood,” its unusual composition consists of approximately 50% Mysore sandalwood and sandalwood-type molecules. Hemmendorff unearthed the story, and Hempel created the fragrance.

Fourth Release: Mistpouffer (2019)

A fragrance translating the “mistpouffer,” a booming sound like distant thunder sometimes heard near lakes and coasts, whose cause remains scientifically unexplained. Known in Japan as “uminari,” it is a natural phenomenon that has inspired explanations involving solar winds, earthquakes, gas bubbles and spirits. It took four years of research and trial and error to complete. Hemmendorff describes the challenge:

“An amateur might think you could recreate the very smell of the air on a misty morning, but concentrating it into a perfume turns it into something completely different, and not necessarily pleasant.”

— Olle Hemmendorff

Fifth Release: Thumbsucker (Late 2020)

A fragrance tracing the origin of babies’ thumb-sucking to ancient Indian Puranic mythology. In the story, King Yuvanashva accidentally drinks magical water prepared for the gods and becomes pregnant himself; the god Indra then cuts open his finger to feed the child the nectar of life. A sensual gourmand expressing both “sweet, nostalgic comfort and a disreputable, risqué underside.” Because it contains beeswax, it is the only fragrance that is not fully vegan.

Sixth Release: Azalai

Inspired by the Azalai salt-and-gold caravan route, which crossed the Ténéré region of the Sahara for a thousand years, and by the Tree of Ténéré, the world’s loneliest tree, which stood in isolation along that route. The acacia survived by extending its roots to groundwater at least thirty meters below the surface. In 1973, it was struck and killed by a truck driver who had fallen asleep after drinking. The fragrance centers on the warmth of saffron, blood orange and amber.

Seventh Release: Hexensalbe

A fragrance on the theme of the “witches’ flying ointment” used in medieval magic. Made from a mixture of highly poisonous plant ingredients, the ointment is said to have caused hallucinations and a sensation of flight. The image of the “witch astride a broom” is also said to originate in how the ointment was used. A dark floral evoking notes of wormwood, tuberose, belladonna and patchouli.

Eighth Release: PINE

The first Stora Skuggan creation to move away from a mythic story and place an ingredient itself at the center. The brand’s description says only that it “smells like pine,” a simplicity that paradoxically makes it stand out. It is a kind of homage to the pine tree, a living organism that has survived through a long span of the Earth’s history and shaped forest landscapes. It was selected as a finalist in the Artisan category of the 2025 Art and Olfaction Awards, not as a winner. Stora Skuggan became the first Scandinavian fragrance house to be a finalist in the awards twice.

Ninth Release: Monkeyflower

The newest fragrance is inspired by the still-mysterious story of musk monkeyflower (Erythranthe moschata), which decorated windowsills and scented the streets of Victorian England in the nineteenth century, but is said to have suddenly lost its scent in the early twentieth century. Rather than “recreating” the lost smell, the composition takes the approach of “imagining beyond its absence.” A soft, dreamlike floral composed of tussilago, fig, hay, musk and other notes.

By the Way…

The name Stora Skuggan means “The Big Shadow” in Swedish and is also the name of an actual nature park in northern Stockholm. Hempel explains, however, that “there is no particular geographical connection. We were looking for a Swedish name with a mysterious, surreal sound, and it happened to be the name of a nearby place.”

Stora Skuggan offers refills for customers who bring used bottles to its own shop at Östgötagatan 18 in Stockholm. The price is €100.

Collect & Bottle is named as the manufacturer on the products, with Stora Skuggan functioning as its own brand. It is interesting that the two continue working side by side in the same studio and laboratory.

In an interview around 2016, Hempel said that he had received a sample of pine absolute, an aromatic pine extract, which was waiting for a future project, and had been amazed by its scent. Public information does not establish whether that material became the standalone fragrance Pine some years later, but it is an intriguing parallel.

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