For the past year, anyone who visited Cult Gaia’s eight stores got a whiff of its first, then unreleased scent without knowing it. Now, shoppers can take the smell home with them.
The womenswear brand, known for its asymmetrical occasionwear and sculptural bags, on Thursday will launch its first fragrance line. Priced at $228 in 50 mL arch-shaped bottles, the three fragrances were developed with a Swiss manufacturer and will be managed in-house. There are three to start: Mast, an orange blossom scent, Zan, with notes of warm cedarwood and Guatemalan cardamom, and Noor, which smells like a French rose; their names mean intoxication, woman and light in Farsi, respectively. The fragrances will be sold exclusively in Cult Gaia’s stores and e-commerce site. A fourth scent is currently in the works.
“I always dreamed of launching fragrance because I always wanted my stores to smell a certain way,” said Jasmin Larian Hekmat, Cult Gaia’s founder and creative director. “I grew up going to Abercrombie. I remember the smell more than I remember anything else.”
The fragrance line marks Cult Gaia’s entry into beauty, but also the latest push in its effort to become a full-fledged lifestyle brand. Product expansion has been a constant part of its history. Founded in 2012, the brand initially sold wired head wraps and flower crowns; it had its first viral moment in the 2010s with its bamboo Ark bag. Since then, it’s steadily grown into a multi-faceted fashion label, selling its signature cut-out dresses, chunky heels, jewellery and more handbags. The company now does more than $50 million in annual sales and operates stores in New York, Los Angeles, Mykonos and Saint Tropez.
It’s a good time to get into fragrance: Sales of prestige fragrances, typically priced around $75 or more, rose 12 percent year over year in the first half of 2024, according to estimates from market research firm Circana. And Cult Gaia is using it as a moment to make some big swings. For the launch, the brand will run video ads on streaming platforms like Hulu and YouTube; the fantastical, high-production spot shows a woman pushing a boulder up a mountain that is later revealed as the fragrance bottle. It’s the type of marketing consumers expect from luxury’s biggest labels.
“Great brands hold real estate in someone’s mind,” Hekmat added. “The product, the customer and the memory that that creates should always lead.”
But digitally native brands have a harder time in perfume. For one, three quarters of fragrance sales occur in stores. Despite the rise of indie labels like D.S. & Durga and Byredo, the market is still dominated by a few big names with large retail footprints.
“It’s not an easy market to really break into,” said Larissa Jensen, senior vice president and global beauty industry advisor at Circana. “There’s already so many brands there, and consumers tend to go for bigger fragrances, whether it’s a name everyone knows or a name that’s gone viral.”
While most of Cult Gaia sales occur on its site, the brand’s stores are playing an outsized role in the fragrance launch. The company is giving out free test kits for the first 50 customers that visit its stores on launch day, Sept. 5. The plan is to see how the fragrance performs with Cult Gaia’s DTC customers and then launch with retail partners. Leveraging an existing customer base could be an effective way to break into the market, Jensen said.
“If you’ve got that consumer already, that’s an advantage because they’re already in your store and they’ll probably test your scent,” Jensen added. “You already have a consumer base and you’re not starting from scratch.”
