5W1H: Mayumi Nakada’s Journey and Fragrances That Accompany Individuality

I want fragrance to be part of someone’s individuality, like a talisman that helps them be themselves.
Mayumi Nakada

5W1H is a Japanese fragrance house founded by Mayumi Nakada in 2019. Its starting point was not perfume, but handmade candles. Having created spaces with fragrance and light, Nakada gradually came to think of scent as a tool that could accompany each person’s individuality.

Her journey encompasses clothing retail, candle making, selling a company, and starting again. From designing things that can be seen to styling invisible fragrances: to understand 5W1H, it is worth first tracing what Nakada wanted to create.

Key Information
The Founder and the Brand’s Origins
The Brand’s Commitments
An Aside…
References

Key Information

Founded: 2019
Founder: Mayumi Nakada
Country of origin: Japan
Official website: 5W1H / Koyu Koryo

The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

From Clothing Retail to Candles of Fragrance and Light

Nakada was born in Tokyo in 1976. After studying clothing at junior college, she joined Onward Kashiyama and worked in department-store sales. Yet she wanted to make things herself. She turned toward a form of expression other than making clothes.

I arrived at candles through wanting to create spaces with fragrance and light.
Mayumi Nakada, on the time when she began making candles

In March 1998, Nakada founded SWATi and began making handmade candles. Initially, she continued creating them while working part-time. As multi-brand boutiques grew in number, more stores began carrying her candles.

Deeper Fragrance Research Through a Series Created in 2004

In the summer of 2004, SWATi’s UN DOUZE (1/12) became a hit. The series explored subjects such as birthstones, twelve women, sweets, and zodiac signs. For Nakada, it also prompted a serious engagement with fragrance.

I pursued fragrance and engaged with it directly.
Mayumi Nakada, recalling her SWATi years, April 2026

Discussing creative work with the staff every day, making candles, researching the market. Looking back, Nakada says she may have learned even more then than during her student years. Creation and research overlapped in her daily work.

In 2008, she established SWATi Co., Ltd. The business expanded to locations including Isetan Shinjuku and Shinjuku Lumine, eventually reaching six stores nationwide. Work that had begun with small-scale handmaking had grown into a brand with its own stores.

Selling the Company and Founding 5W1H in 2019

In December 2016, Nakada sold SWATi and stepped down as its representative, while continuing to work with it as a director. As she learned about management through this transition, her interest in fragrance remained. She wanted to work more personally, closer to people. That desire led her to study fragrance seriously once again.

In April 2019, she left SWATi after twenty-one years of involvement. That same year, she launched 5W1H as a place to express her own creative work. After the sale, she studied again under a perfumer, seeking to make fragrances with stories that could be told over time, rather than relying on visual design alone.

What I do is invisible, but I think this work is also close to that of a stylist.
Mayumi Nakada, on her work at 5W1H

Nakada engages with a person’s character, feelings, and wishes, which cannot be fully understood from appearance alone. She creates scent motifs and styles them, helping people to know themselves. What distinguishes 5W1H is that it begins by considering the relationship between people and fragrance, rather than simply handing over perfume as a finished product.

Connecting Personal Perfume Creation with Fragrances for Companies

Nakada’s work is not confined to her own brand. As a fragrance evaluator connecting businesses with fragrance companies, she also works on scent design and direction for other companies. Her role is to evaluate fragrances and link developers with brands. Her work as a creator sits alongside the work of considering the expression another party wants.

In workshops, meanwhile, she creates fragrances by working with each person individually. By 2024, her experience of creating personal fragrances extended to more than 6,000 people. She has combined both kinds of work: supporting a company’s expression and thinking about a scent for the person in front of her.

The Brand’s Commitments

Expressing Individuality Through Five Ws and Humor

The five words that 5W1H currently presents are WAKE (awaken), WISH (wish and desire), WALK (move forward), WILL (with intention), and WISDOM (gain wisdom). To these it adds HUMOR (do not forget humor). They are words for turning toward one’s own sensibility and expressing it freely.

An original chart also provides an entry point for fragrance recommendations. It gives people who do not know which scents they like, or who want to try a new fragrance, an opportunity to consider their own sensibilities. Nakada’s approach of looking inward at the individual appears in the selection of fragrance, too.

Creating MOUNT to Bring Out the Bitterness of Sansho

For 5W1H, Nakada draws on plants, minerals, nature, and things encountered on her travels. Landscapes she has seen, air she has felt, and materials she has touched are translated into scent.

This choice becomes tangible in 02 MOUNT. Its central subject is the bitterness of sansho, Japanese pepper. Grapefruit and citronella bring out its contours, before the impression of spice gradually blends smoothly into woody and citrus notes. It does not merely add the name sansho; it is designed around which combinations emphasize its bitterness and how to let that bitterness settle.

The composition also includes elements of satsuma mandarin, lime, maté tea, and leather. Connecting the brightness of citrus to the depth of wood, it treats sansho as the central subject of a perfume.

A Collection Connecting Minerals with the Five Ws

The 2024 Mineral Collection, “Mineral Collecting,” used minerals as its subject to express the brand’s five Ws in five fragrances. It linked WAKE, awakening, to agate; WALK, moving forward, to pyrite; WILL, having intention, to garnet; WISH, wishing, to lapis lazuli; and WISDOM, gaining wisdom, to aquamarine.

Here, minerals become subjects whose colors, textures, and associations are translated into scent. For pyrite’s metallic luster, spices and dried flowers are layered over a woody base, with tobacco and leather providing structure. Agate, by contrast, combines green tea and raspberry to give it a fresh green character and tartness.

Although all share the theme of minerals, they are not uniformly expressed in terms of hardness. Moving forward and awakening are each given a different olfactory form. Rather than simply listing the names of natural objects, the collection reconnects its subjects with words about the inner self through combinations of scents.

Simple Bottle Design That Keeps Fragrance Close at Hand

Wanting fragrance to feel more familiar and unobtrusive, 5W1H chooses designs stripped of unnecessary elements. MOUNT’s bottle, too, pairs a wide, clear-glass form with softened corners and a wood-grain cap. The lettering and shapes on the front are restrained, leaving space around the liquid and glass.

Choosing simplicity as a way to place fragrance in everyday life. The brand’s design considers not just visual presence, but also the distance between a fragrance and the person using it.

An Aside…

Nakada also collects visual materials to communicate her fragrance ideas. She draws sketches while imagining a scent and uses images in proposals and presentations. Even in the work of communicating invisible fragrances, visible clues support the creative process.