STORA SKUGGAN

Stora Skuggan fragrances are made in collaboration with perfumers Olle Hemmendorff, Tomas Hempel and Anna Barkne.

“Ephemeral and highly subjective, perfume is a challenging product to market. Few of us regularly exercise our sense of smell, leaving many without much of a frame of reference for buying perfume, especially when shopping online. Some fragrance brands have responded to this challenge by leaning on the trendy buzzwords of the beauty industry, such as by touting their “natural” or “clean” formulations, offering lower prices through direct-to- consumer models, or by marketing fragrance as a wellness product with mental health benefits.

But then, perfume is not a practical product. Why should there be a practical solution to describing it?

“All this is very intuitive and gut-decided,” says Anna Barkne, one of the five co-founders behind the Swedish perfume brand Stora Skuggan, of the label’s creative process. “The different scents usually circuit around a myth or a phenomenon that’s maybe real or not. These become like small worlds or universes that the scent grows in, like a tiny baby.” [...]

With their oversized, architectural caps and fantastical names, Stora Skuggan’s perfumes are instantly eye-catching. The addition of playful mythologies around each scent makes them doubly appealing for those who look to perfume for a sense of escapism. But with new scents released only intermittently over the years, building the audience has been a slow curation over time, co-founder Tomas Hempel explains. “We have not followed the traditional way to launch a perfume line by hiring established perfumers and design agencies and so on. We have done everything ourselves; every little detail has been formed by our hands,” he says.”

— Emily Jensen, Highsnobiety