ERAM: From Helping People Choose Perfume to Creating Fragrances through Hyakunin Isshu, Art, and Words

By choosing what you like through your own senses, I hope you will enjoy fragrance more freely.
Kohei Oshima

ERAM is a brand born from the very sensations involved in choosing perfume. Rather than deciding only by reading a fragrance description, you can be drawn to a picture, imagine a scene through words, or compare it with your own memories. The brand provides several ways to encounter fragrance.

It began as a perfume subscription in 2023. Insights gained from its users led to a rebranding the following year. From a system designed to make selection easier to perfumes that leave interpretation to the wearer, we trace how Kohei Oshima, who led the launch, reconsidered the act of choosing.

Key Information
The Founder and the Origins of the Brand
The Brand’s Commitments
References

Key Information

Brand name: ERAM
Launched: July 31, 2023, with the start of a perfume subscription service
Rebranding: November 1, 2024, with the release of 16 new perfumes
Founding and operating company: POLA ORBIS HOLDINGS (Japan)
Key figure in its launch: Kohei Oshima (business director)
Origin of the name: Eramu, an archaic Japanese word meaning “to choose”
Official website: ERAM

The Founder and the Origins of the Brand

Starting an In-House Business after Interviews with at least 100 People

ERAM emerged from POLA ORBIS HOLDINGS’ internal venture program, Glow. Kohei Oshima interviewed at least 100 people inside and outside the company, frequently hearing that they did not know what fragrances they liked or found choosing difficult. POLA, part of the group, had a history of making perfume since before the war. Drawing on that experience, Oshima conceived a business that would help people choose fragrances.

After about two years of development, the service launched on July 31, 2023, offering a way to try and compare perfumes at home. Initially, customers received three fragrances selected through online questions. After using and rating them, they received three different fragrances the following month, gradually narrowing down the direction of their preferences. Instead of choosing a large bottle at the outset, the system let people explore their own senses while using perfume in daily life.

When you know your preferences, fragrance becomes more enjoyable.
Kohei Oshima

Oshima valued people’s ability to find worth in what they had chosen themselves. The brand’s name also came from the archaic Japanese word eramu, meaning “to choose.” The early service sought to deliver that enjoyment by limiting the options and using reactions from trying them to inform the next selection.

How User Responses Changed the Understanding of Preferences

The fragrances selected by users were more varied than expected. Oshima and the team had thought that preference patterns could be understood through age and gender, but actual responses did not fit those categories. Fragrance preferences were deeply connected to each individual’s experiences and memories.

From this point, the way of supporting choice also changed. The aim was to let people choose fragrance through their own sensibilities, without relying solely on other people’s assessments or established images. Oshima introduced drawings and contemporary tanka poetry for that purpose, envisioning an expansion of the imagination through sight and words as well as smell.

On November 1, 2024, ERAM rebranded and launched 16 new perfumes. The creative association CEKAI joined the brand-production effort, while the creative team heso participated in art direction, design, and artwork. Attentive to the impressions created by color, they designed an ambiguous world with color removed.

Shigeo Kishida Creates the Fragrances; Takashi Sato Evaluates and Supervises

Fragrance creation proceeds through collaboration between Shigeo Kishida and Takashi Sato. Kishida, who composes the perfumes, previously worked at the Japanese subsidiary of a French fragrance manufacturer. Sato spent many years at POLA working on fragrancing cosmetics and developing perfumes. At ERAM, Sato serves as fragrance supervisor and adviser.

Oshima describes Sato’s role as that of an evaluator: someone who determines direction and assesses trials so that a concept can become a fragrance product. Kishida composes, while Sato evaluates and supervises. Connecting Oshima’s planning with these two specialists’ expertise allows scenes from classical literature to develop into contemporary fragrances.

Bringing Together Fragrance and Fashion in Taiwan

Visitors from overseas also chose fragrances at pop-ups after the rebranding. Expansion in Taiwan progressed, with a local launch presentation held in 2025. The official Taiwanese announcement describes fashion designer Wang Li-Ling choosing “7 Katasumi” and pairing it with the designer’s “Earth” collection to present the idea of wearing fragrance.

The Taiwanese publication Stylemaster also introduced ERAM’s 16 fragrances that year, together with its approach of valuing space for memory and sensibility. When bringing Japanese subjects to an overseas audience, the central idea is not simply to explain classical knowledge, but to allow recipients to add their own perceptions.

The Brand’s Commitments

Hyakunin Isshu Numbers and Contemporary Scenes

The number preceding each perfume’s name is the number of the poem in Hyakunin Isshu that inspired it. Feelings and landscapes depicted in the classics are selected as subjects, reinterpreted as scenes that resonate with contemporary life, and connected to a fragrance concept. The accompanying words are not direct quotations from the classics, but contemporary expressions born from their interpretation.

Names such as Dokuhaku (Monologue), Tsukanoma (A Fleeting Moment), and Ryosen (Ridgeline) do not first tell the wearer which fragrance materials are used. Instead, they offer an entry point for considering what scenes or feelings those words evoke personally. ERAM’s current philosophy likewise proposes choosing through images expanded by sight and words as well as fragrance.

Not Making Drawings and Tanka Match the Fragrance Description

We value room for interpretation and deliberately create a “mismatch.”
Kohei Oshima

The creators of the drawings and tanka are asked to work without smelling the fragrance. Even when the concept is shared, the resulting expressions are not made to coincide perfectly; room for interpretation remains in each. The design avoids having pictures or words determine the “correct” interpretation of a fragrance in advance.

Actor Yosuke Kubozuka, who experienced the perfumes at the 2024 launch, associated Tsukanoma with summer evenings and towering clouds from childhood. The same creation’s official description, however, depicts an early summer morning when no one is yet around. A different time of day emerges from the same fragrance. This difference is a concrete example of the experiencer’s memories joining the work.

The black-and-white artwork also aims to avoid fixing an interpretation. Just as yellow can suggest brightness and blue can suggest coolness, color can guide impressions before a fragrance is smelled. ERAM reduces those clues so that people can form their own image among the picture, the words, and the scent they actually perceive.

The Winter of “29 Betsujin” and Knowledge of Tatami Fragrance

“29 Betsujin,” added on December 1, 2025, explores a winter scene in depth. From a Hyakunin Isshu poem in which white chrysanthemums become difficult to distinguish from the first frost, Oshima drew out the feeling of boundaries in a familiar landscape becoming unclear. One’s own perceptions can change between yesterday and today. That change was connected to the name Betsujin, meaning “a different person.”

The fragrance combines the coolness of spearmint (in Japanese) with a gentle green expression reminiscent of igusa rush grass. While emphasizing mint, it layers floral scents and leads into the warmth of musk and other materials. The composition contrasts winter air with the body warmth of a person within it.

The choice of igusa drew on knowledge from an earlier project in which Kishida worked on reusing old tatami with paint and an igusa fragrance. Experience in understanding the smell of a familiar material led to a green expression in a new perfume. The current official explanation states that this igusa scent is made with synthetic fragrance materials based on component analysis.

With Betsujin added to the 16 fragrances from the rebranding, the official website’s range expanded to 17. What continues throughout is the idea of not fixing a work’s meaning to a single interpretation, leaving a place for the sensibility of the person choosing the fragrance.