This Fragrance Brand Isn’t Just Selling Perfume

There is something particularly interesting about the way we talk about fragrance. Unlike fashion, beauty, or design, fragrance exists in a space that cannot easily be translated through a screen. You can photograph a bottle, create a campaign around it, list every note from bergamot to sandalwood, and still never fully communicate what it feels like to smell it. Scent is one of the most personal and elusive senses we have, largely because it is so deeply connected to memory. A smell can suddenly transport you to a specific place, person, or period of your life without warning, often bringing back details you did not even realize you had stored away. That relationship between scent, memory, and imagination is what makes LORE, a relatively new fragrance brand founded by former rhode CEO Melanie Bender alongside Greg Cloyes and Joe Gonzalez of Youth To The People, feel like an interesting brand to watch.

What grasped the attention of many about LORE was not necessarily the idea of creating fragrance inspired by memories, because fragrance has always lived somewhere between storytelling and nostalgia. Instead, it was the way the brand seems to treat scent as one part of a much larger experience. LORE describes itself as creating “scents that take you somewhere,” with the idea of feeling serving as its north star. Rather than beginning with the question of what a fragrance smells like, the brand appears to begin somewhere more abstract, asking what a particular moment felt like, what a place looked like, or what kind of memory could exist within a scent. The perfume becomes an entry point into a larger world rather than the entire story itself.

That world feels particularly present in Sublimity, a fragrance inspired by Melanie Bender’s childhood memories of Hawaii. The inspiration behind the scent is rooted in images of remote beaches, white flowers, the intensity of the sun, and the experience of diving beneath the first wave, a moment she has described as one where time seems to stand still. What makes that story compelling is not simply that it belongs to Hawaii or to Bender's childhood, but that it contains enough sensory detail for someone else to find their own way into it. You may never have visited Hawaii, but you might remember the feeling of your body hitting cold water after standing in the heat. You may not recognize the exact beach being described, but you may know what it feels like to be somewhere so removed from your everyday life that everything around you seems to slow down.

That seems to be where LORE’s storytelling becomes more interesting. The brand is not necessarily selling us a memory and asking us to borrow it. Instead, it appears to offer fragments of a memory and leave enough space for the person experiencing the fragrance to connect those fragments to something of their own. The same scent can become attached to entirely different moments depending on who wears it, and perhaps that is what makes fragrance such a unique medium for storytelling. A film remains largely the same no matter who watches it, and a photograph captures a specific moment that cannot change, but a fragrance becomes something slightly different every time it enters another person's life.

The names of LORE’s fragrances also seem to embrace that sense of openness. Somewhere but Nowhere, Disfruta, and Lovely and a Little Twisted do not immediately explain themselves. Instead, they suggest a mood and allow the imagination to fill in the rest. Somewhere but Nowhere could evoke a place that exists only in memory, somewhere you once visited but could never quite return to in the same way. Lovely and a Little Twisted carries a sense of contradiction, suggesting that beauty does not always have to be polished or uncomplicated. Disfruta, which translates to “enjoy,” feels more like an invitation than a description. Even before encountering the scents themselves, there is already a sense that you are being introduced to an atmosphere rather than simply a product.

This is perhaps what makes the larger world around LORE feel important. The brand does not appear to rely solely on the perfume to communicate its identity, instead expanding its universe through photography, music, stories, interviews, craftsmanship, and conversations around biodiversity. These different elements help create a world that feels connected to the fragrance without requiring the fragrance itself to carry every part of the story. It is an approach that makes sense for a product that cannot be experienced digitally in the same way a lipstick shade or a piece of clothing can. If someone cannot smell the perfume through their phone, perhaps they can still understand the atmosphere around it. They can imagine the heat, hear the music, look at the imagery, and begin forming an emotional connection before ever opening the bottle.

What is also particularly compelling about this approach is the role of imagination. LORE seems to understand that fragrance does not need to be completely explained in order to be understood. In fact, some of the most memorable sensory experiences are the ones we cannot entirely articulate. You may remember the smell of someone's house without remembering the exact candle they burned. You may associate a perfume with a relationship even though you cannot explain which notes remind you of that person. You may walk past a restaurant and suddenly feel transported back to a vacation from ten years ago because the air smells vaguely familiar. These experiences are not always logical or linear, and perhaps they do not need to be.

In a time when branding often feels increasingly immediate, where products are expected to explain themselves within seconds and audiences are constantly being asked to understand exactly what they are looking at, there is something refreshing about a brand that appears comfortable existing in a more emotional and interpretive space. LORE's storytelling does not seem interested in controlling every possible meaning a fragrance could have. Instead, it recognizes that once someone wears a scent, the story begins to move beyond the brand itself. A fragrance inspired by someone’s childhood in Hawaii can eventually become connected to your first trip abroad, a summer in Los Angeles, a person you loved, or a version of yourself you eventually outgrew.

Perhaps that is what makes fragrance so interesting as a product in the first place. The bottle may belong to the brand, but the memories attached to it eventually belong to the person wearing it. A scent can begin with a perfumer's inspiration and end up becoming part of someone else's life in a way that could never have been predicted. It changes with skin, environment, time, and memory, collecting new associations as it moves from person to person.

LORE appears to be building with that reality in mind. The brand may begin with its own stories, places, and feelings, but it leaves enough room for those stories to travel somewhere else. The perfume is still the product, but the experience surrounding it feels much larger: a collection of imagery, memories, sensations, and imagined places that can mean something slightly different depending on who encounters them.

And maybe that is ultimately what makes a fragrance brand memorable. Not just the ability to create a scent that smells beautiful, but the ability to create something that lingers after the scent itself has faded. A feeling you cannot fully explain. A place you may have never been. A memory that is not entirely yours, but somehow still feels familiar.