Commodity: Designing the “Distance” of Scent, a Modern American Perfumery Born Twice

“I wanted people to be able to choose the way their fragrance projects and how strong it is for themselves.”

— Vicken Arslanian (Re-Founder and Creative Director; translated from the original)

Commodity is an American fragrance brand that has redesigned not only scent itself, but also how perfume is discovered and described, and even how far it projects into the space between people. Beginning with crowdfunding in 2013, it went through rapid growth, a sudden closure, an acquisition in 2019, and a relaunch in 2021. Today, its offering centers on Scent Space, a proprietary system that lets people choose a fragrance’s projection.

Basic Information

Brand name: Commodity
Founded: 2013, Los Angeles, United States
Original concept and founders: Yo Santosa and Owen Gee
Re-Founder / Creative Director: Vicken Arslanian
Brand definition: “Modern, American Perfumery”
Official website: commodityfragrances.com

The brand name “Commodity” generally means an everyday article or a product. Rather than making perfume remote through extravagant stories or difficult terminology, the brand helps people understand scent through familiar single words such as Milk, Book, Paper, and Moss. The contrast between everyday language and fine fragrance has remained a distinctive feature from its inception to the present.

The Founders and the Origins of the Brand

2013: An Experiment in Choosing Perfume Online

The original concept for Commodity came from Yo Santosa, who headed the Los Angeles branding company Ferroconcrete, and Owen Gee, a designer at the company. Addressing the greatest weakness of e-commerce, the inability to try a scent, they envisioned “fragrance tailoring”: inferring preferences through online questions and sending samples of possible matches to customers’ homes.

“At one point, we thought, ‘Let’s create our own brand.’”

— Yo Santosa (translated from the original)

Users answered questions about their personality, interests, and style, and the brand selected five fragrances from twenty possibilities. The system allowed them to try the scents in everyday life first and then purchase a full bottle. Rather than demanding knowledge of fragrance notes, this approach guided people toward scent through their everyday understanding of themselves. It already contained the idea of making perfume intuitive that would continue to characterize Commodity.

To turn the concept into a business, the founders raised funds on Kickstarter over thirty days, from March 5 to April 4, 2013. Against a target of $20,000, 740 backers contributed $56,602, successfully funding the project at more than 2.8 times its goal.

The original model combined simple packaging with sampling at home, distancing itself from conventional perfume businesses that spent money on celebrity spokespeople and lavish decoration. In 2013, full-size bottles were priced at $50, and the products were given single-word names that conjured an olfactory image, such as Whiskey, Paper, Magnolia, and Dew.

2014: From an Online Project to an International Brand

The following year, two entrepreneurs took the brand into its next phase. Konstantin Glasmacher, also a co-founder of HauteLook and Sole Society, became involved in the business and happened to meet Ash Huzenlaub in a café in Chelsea, London, in October 2014. They decided to transform the small online project, with its logo and simple website, into a lifestyle brand with distinctive products.

“We put our heads together and decided to build a lifestyle brand around Commodity.”

— Ash Huzenlaub (translated from the original)

The turning point came in March 2015. When a trial launch began in twenty-four Sephora stores in the United States, inventory intended to last six months sold out in five to six weeks, leading to additional orders for one hundred stores. By early 2018, the brand had expanded to around five hundred Sephora stores in seven countries, while its own e-commerce operation served twenty-nine countries.

At this stage, Commodity did not divide perfumes by gender. Huzenlaub explicitly stated that the brand would not dictate who should wear what, but would offer products and leave the choice to the wearer. Although women represented the majority of customers in physical stores, he said that purchasers on the brand’s own e-commerce site were split roughly equally between men and women.

2019: A Sudden Closure

In April 2019, in the midst of its growth, Commodity suddenly ceased operations. Reportedly, by the time it closed, cumulative retail sales had reached $23 million, its distribution network comprised 642 stores in sixteen countries, and its own e-commerce operation shipped to thirty countries. The closure was unexpected for both its devotees and its business partners.

This is where Vicken Arslanian enters the brand’s history. He calls himself not simply its new owner but its “Re-Founder.” The term expressed a role that went beyond reselling past products: identifying Commodity’s essence and designing the brand anew.

An Architect Raised in a Perfume Family

Arslanian spent his early childhood in Kuwait and moved to New Jersey at the age of eight. He says that when he started school he spoke only Armenian, and describes his Armenian identity as a kind of “invisible armor.”

His father, Sarkis Arslanian, built a perfume distribution business in Kuwait from around 1960. He obtained distribution rights for brands including Lubin and in 1979 handled the initial launch of Yves Saint Laurent cosmetics in the Middle East and Africa. Although Vicken grew up in the atmosphere of the family business, the first profession he chose for himself was architecture.

After studying architecture and gaining professional experience, he founded Europerfumes in 1997 to distribute independent perfume brands in the United States. The company grew into a distributor that introduces brands to the North American market by assessing not only their scents but also their distinctive perspectives and stories.

This background is important to understanding today’s Commodity. Arslanian sees perfume as an olfactory work while also viewing names, bottles, retail environments, e-commerce, and descriptive language as a single space. Architectural organization and at least twenty years of distribution experience observing consumers and retailers would feed into the later development of Scent Space.

2019: Choosing to “Re-Found”

Arslanian had long taken an interest in Commodity’s clarity and accessibility, which contrasted with the weightier, strongly narrative niche brands handled by Europerfumes. He says that when he learned of the opportunity to acquire it in August 2019, he decided with almost no hesitation.

“I was a huge fan of Commodity. When I heard that it had closed, I was as sad and surprised as everyone else.”

— Vicken Arslanian (translated from the original)

Europerfumes acquired the brand in 2019. Around four months later, however, the COVID-19 pandemic began, so the rebuilding coincided with market upheaval. Rather than concealing the revival process, Arslanian made product development, the warehouse, and team building public through a series of short documentaries.

The team streamlined a legacy range of around twenty fragrances, retaining four mainstays: Book, Gold, Moss, and Velvet. They also revived the earlier Paper and developed the new Milk with perfumer Christelle Laprade. Using these six as the core, they built Scent Space, giving each fragrance three levels of projection, and relaunched the brand in 2021.

In a 2022 interview, Arslanian said that Milk’s sales had surpassed those of Gold, the previous bestseller. The brand returned to Sephora in the United States that year and opened its first permanent flagship at 113 Crosby Street in New York’s SoHo in October 2024. A digitally born brand had progressed to presenting the “space” of scent through actual architecture.

The Brand’s Commitments

Making Simplicity the New Luxury

Commodity’s guiding phrase is “Simplicity is the new luxury.” It uses names such as Milk, Gold, Book, and Paper that suggest what is inside, and calls perfumers “Makers.” Rather than stripping perfume of its authority, the idea is to translate the creators’ skill into language that people can understand in their everyday lives.

“A round bottle, a square box, a simple name. That makes perfume more intuitive.”

— Vicken Arslanian (translated from the original)

The packaging is built around cylindrical bottles, square boxes, and black and white. The logo juxtaposes two contrasting typefaces, serif and sans serif, expressing “balance” through opposing colors and forms. Minimalism is not simply a reduction of decoration; it also serves to make the fragrance classifications visually legible.

Scent Space: Choosing Projection Rather Than Concentration

The conventional terms eau de toilette, eau de parfum, and parfum primarily indicate fragrance concentration. Scent Space, by contrast, describes “projection”: how far a scent travels from the skin and who perceives it. Rather than simply diluting or concentrating a formula, it rearranges the same theme into different compositions, varying notes that stay close to the skin and notes that increase depth and diffusion.

Scent Space	Symbol	How It Projects	Formulation Approach
Personal	−	Stays close to the skin, reaching the wearer and those nearby	Adds soft, molecular notes such as Iso E Super and skin musk
Expressive	None	Balanced projection perceived by the wearer and those around them	The reference composition for each fragrance
Bold	＋	Fills the space and makes its presence clearly felt	Adds deep, diffusive elements such as patchouli, labdanum, and saffron

The important point is that Personal is not merely a lower-concentration version. Fragrance concentrations across Scent Space range from 15% to 25%, technically placing them all in the eau de parfum category. The idea that people who want a quiet scent still need longevity separates a “close scent” from a “short-lived scent.”

Through many years of retail experience, Arslanian had seen people unable to wear a favorite scent because it was too strong, and others choosing fragrances that attracted compliments rather than those they truly liked. He therefore made it possible to choose not just what to smell of, but who should be able to smell it. This is not a universal answer to fragrance nuisance, but its invitation to consider a scent’s reach before purchasing is an approach suited to contemporary living spaces.

Rephrasing the Time of a Fragrance

The redesign also replaced the traditional note labels top, middle, and base with “First,” “Then,” and “Finally.” Saying that “perfume is not a layer cake,” Arslanian places greater emphasis on how the wearer experiences a fragrance over time than on its structural upper and lower levels.

This does not mean rejecting expertise. Different perfumers take responsibility for particular fragrances and formulas: Ketrin Leka for Book Expressive; Jérôme Epinette (in Japanese) for its Personal and Bold versions and for Velvet; Donna Ramanauskas for Paper Expressive; and Christelle Laprade for Milk, among others. The brand brings them to the fore as Makers and lets them discuss the inspiration behind each creation on its official pages.

Materials and Ethical Policies

Commodity positions its fragrances as genderless, vegan, and cruelty-free, and displays Leaping Bunny certification on its official product pages. It does not use parabens, phthalates, or sulfates. In addition to ingredients prohibited by IFRA or the EU, it maintains its own “Blacklist,” with a policy of excluding ingredients it determines fall within that list from its formulas.

The ethics page, updated in August 2026, sets out commitments including working with fragrance houses that prioritize environmental and social responsibility, using synthetic materials when natural sourcing becomes unsustainable, and making improvements toward fully recyclable packaging. Although most packaging is described as recyclable, improvements are still ongoing. “Clean” can therefore be understood less as an absolute standard already achieved than as the brand’s own exclusion criteria and policy of continual improvement.

The Perfume Lineup

The Scent Space Collection

The main offering is the Scent Space collection, whose basic premise is comparing three formulas of a fragrance with the same name: Personal, Expressive, and Bold. As of October 2026, its scope has expanded from the initial six creations into juicy fruits, cooling sensations, florals, and spices, with Milk, Gold, Book, Paper, Moss, Velvet, Juice, Ice(d), Milk Orchid, Spice, and others. Milk Orchid, however, is available only in Expressive, with Personal and Bold announced for release in 2027.

Representative Fragrance	Core of the Expressive Version	Olfactory Profile
Milk	Cold milk, marshmallow, mahogany, tonka bean	A lactonic woody gourmand layering coolness with the warmth of wood that seems charred
Gold	Vanilla, sandalwood, amber	A modern vanilla whose sweetness is balanced by the warmth of creamy woods and resins
Book	Eucalyptus, sandalwood, cedarwood	Cool woods depict dry library paper and the air outside
Paper	Iso E Super, cedarwood, sandalwood	A skin scent that interacts with the wearer’s own smell, leaving a quiet woody trail
Moss	Oakmoss, cedarwood, petitgrain	A composition of greenery, citrus, and damp wood recalling a forest at dawn
Velvet	Roasted almond, rose petals, black amber	A tactile amber rose, with smoke introduced into soft rose and sweet amber
Juice	Strawberry, raspberry, rhubarb, amberwood	Dry woods support the sweet-tart quality of ripe red fruit
Ice(d)	Frozen mango, spearmint, eucalyptus	A cooling scent that freezes tropical fruit and sets it against the heat of ginger and black pepper
Milk Orchid	Fig milk, magnolia, vanilla orchid	A floral gourmand that develops Milk’s warmth into bright, milky-white flowers
Spice	Saffron, allspice, cinnamon sugar	A spicy gourmand with sweet, chai-like spices and suede-like shadows

Even when they share a name, the three bottles are not different dilutions of an identical formula. Gold Personal, for example, adds Iso E Super, while Bold adds nutmeg, saffron, and patchouli. Milk Personal moves closer to the skin with skin musk and white cedar, while Bold amplifies its scorched sweetness with firewood and amber.

For a first encounter, a Scent Space Kit comparing the three versions of a single creation offers the clearest grasp of the brand’s philosophy. An Exploration Kit spanning multiple creations allows preferences in fragrance character and projection to be compared separately. Sample kits remain the brand’s answer to the challenge it faced at its foundation: choosing a scent from behind a screen.

Editions

The other pillar is Editions, a collection bringing together past, present, and future creations. As of October 2026, it consists of an Archive containing older fragrances, with a stated intention to accommodate reworked creations and limited collaborations in the future. It includes names familiar to those who knew early Commodity, such as Rain, Wool, Bergamot, Tonka, and Orris.

Editions is available year-round at the New York flagship, while online sales generally take the form of two limited-time drops each year. Rather than restoring all twenty earlier creations to the permanent range at once, this system preserves and re-presents them while distinguishing them from the brand’s current position.

By the Way… “Digital First,” Twice

Commodity began in 2013 as an attempt to make perfume selectable online by sending samples to people’s homes. After re-founding the brand in 2019, Arslanian also made its development process public through documentaries, reconnecting online with customers who had sought information after the closure. Although the methods differed at the original founding and the re-founding, both addressed the same question: how can scent be communicated to someone on the other side of a screen?

The first flagship, opened in 2024, was designed not merely as a retail space but as a studio in which to compare Scent Spaces physically. Arslanian’s wife, architect Rosette D. Khorenian, designed the interior in collaboration with SHED London, translating the website’s brand experience into a real space. It is a characteristically Commodity development that a perfume brand which began online ultimately turned space itself into its product explanation.

References

1. Commodity: Rebooting a Modern, American Perfumery Brand – https://www.essencional.com/en/posts/commodity-rebooting-a-modern-american-perfumery-brand/
2. Commodity official「Our Story」– https://commodityfragrances.com/pages/our-story
3. Kickstarter「Commodity: Premium Fragrances Tailored to Your Style」– https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/509730979/commodity-changing-the-fragrance-industry-forever
4. Niche Fragrance Brand Commodity Set For A Rebirth Under New Ownership – https://www.beautyindependent.com/niche-fragrance-brand-commodity-rebirth-new-ownership/
5. LinkedIn Learning「In depth: Commodity case study」– https://www.linkedin.com/learning/yo-santosa-branding-expert/in-depth-commodity-case-study
6. Allure「Fragrance Notes: The Warby Parker of Perfume?」– https://www.allure.com/story/fragrance-notes-perfume-sampling-service
7. Fashionista「Commodity Unisex Perfume Fragrance」– https://fashionista.com/2018/01/commodity-unisex-perfume-fragrance
8. Beauty Independent「Once-Promising Niche Fragrance Brand Commodity Seems To Have Come To An End」– https://www.beautyindependent.com/fragrance-brand-commodity-shuttering/
9. Commodity official「How to Build a Fragrance Brand: Interview with Commodity’s Vicken Arslanian」– https://commodityfragrances.com/blogs/commodity-blog/featured-perspectives-vicken-arslanian
10. AGBU「Scents and Sensibility」– https://agbu.org/we-are-agbu/scents-sensibility
11. Royal Beauty Group official「About Us」– https://royalbeautygroup.com/aboutus.html
12. Europerfumes official「About」– https://europerfumes.com/about
13. Cult Beauty「101 Guide to Commodity」– https://www.cultbeauty.co.uk/blog/guide-to-commodity/
14. Commodity official「Scent Space」– https://commodityfragrances.com/collections/scent-space
15. Commodity official「Book」「Paper」「Velvet」「Milk」perfumer profiles – Book / Paper / Velvet / Milk
16. Commodity official「Ethics」– https://commodityfragrances.com/pages/ethics
17. Commodity official「Exploration Kit」– https://commodityfragrances.com/products/exploration-kit
18. Commodity official「Milk」– https://commodityfragrances.com/products/milk-expressive
19. Commodity official「Gold Expressive is The Perfect Vanilla Fragrance」– https://commodityfragrances.com/blogs/commodity-blog/vanilla-fragrance
20. Commodity official「Book」– https://commodityfragrances.com/products/book-expressive
21. Commodity official「Paper」– https://commodityfragrances.com/products/paper-expressive
22. Commodity official「Velvet」– https://commodityfragrances.com/products/velvet-expressive
23. Commodity official「Milk Orchid」– https://commodityfragrances.com/products/milk-orchid-expressive
24. Commodity official「Spice」– https://commodityfragrances.com/products/spice-expressive
25. Commodity official「Editions」– https://commodityfragrances.com/collections/editions
26. Glossy「Digital-native perfume brand Commodity opens first retail store」– https://www.glossy.co/beauty/exclusive-digital-native-perfume-brand-commodity-opens-first-retail-store/
27. Commodity official「Explore the Innovative Design of Our Award-Winning SoHo Store」
28. Commodity official「Gold」
29. Commodity official「Moss」
30. Commodity official「Juice」
31. Commodity official「Ice(d)」