Would You Buy a Perfume You Had Never Smelled?

Marisa Meltzer

“We have this conviction that fine fragrance is like fine wine,” said Owen Mears, the founder of Ffern, a line of perfumes based in London. “Everybody knows it’s just grapes, but you can’t simply re-create it, because there is craft involved.” He was drinking tea at the Nine Orchard hotel next to his sister, Emily Cameron, Ffern’s creative director. “Our starting point was doing things really differently,” Cameron said.

Undeniably, their perfumes are made and sold in a manner far different from a fragrance you might pick out at a department store or at Sephora. Ffern, which Mears started in 2016, is a subscription service. A space on the ledger, as it’s called, costs $129 per season and signifies that you want a bottle from the next batch. From then on, you’ll get a new scent four times a year, as the seasons change.

Each edition is handmade in small batches in the English countryside from ingredients that are 95% natural and aged in barrels. Each scent is produced only for that season, never to be made again, incentivizing subscribers to make sure they collect each precious release.

That may explain the wait list. The number of spots on the ledger are limited, and once it’s full, you have to wait for a space to open up. According to the company, the wait list has 500,000 people on it, and 20,000 people add their names each week.

Jacqueline Peker, a carpet consultant who lives in London, had to wait a few months before she became a member in 2021. “I might have found it on Instagram, or maybe it was one of those word-of-mouth things,” she said. “It’s not just about the perfume but the ritual and the way it takes you through the year. I was literally just sitting in bed thinking it must be time for the next one.”

The perfumes, created by François Robert and Elodie Durande, the company’s “noses,” are released at the equinox and the solstice. Autumn 24 was quince with notes of jasmine and myrrh; Winter 25, which will come out Dec. 21, is a rose scent with bergamot and eucalyptus.

Ffern won’t disclose how many bottles it makes for each season, but the run of the first scent, called Winter 19, was just 300 bottles. Mears, 29, and Cameron, 35, take pains to explain each scent for subscribers who haven’t smelled them. Each release comes with a piece of art. (The autumn 2024 scent, for example, was accompanied by photographs of a still life with quinces by Jamie Beck). Each smell has an evocative backstory.

“We have imagined a figure skating through a moonlit landscape of wild ice and frozen forests,” reads the description of the Winter 25 scent on their website. And indeed, Mears and Cameron had just returned from filming a couple dancing on ice in the Rocky Mountains.

Ffern, which has 35 employees, also has a podcast and maintains an in-house film crew to create short films around each perfume. “It’s not superfluous to the product,” Mears said. “If you’re a company that makes shampoo, your product lives or dies by efficacy, and the storytelling is superfluous. The efficacy of a fragrance is the joy a wearer has. We have to immerse them in the world so they can fall in love and feel part of it.”

Most Ffern customers are buying the perfumes based on descriptions and reviews on TikTok, Instagram or the review site Fragrantica. That is where the fans come in. They post unboxing videos of social media, send in poems they have written about their favorite scents and paint pictures inspired by them.

The siblings had what Cameron described as a “folkloric, pagan childhood” in a rural village in Somerset, next door to one of the first biodynamic herb farms in Europe. Many of their early memories involve playing in fields of echinacea and lemongrass and in apple orchards. They also had a great-aunt who was a botanist.

In 2022, they opened a shop in Soho in London, giving nonsubscribers a chance to experience the fragrances firsthand, and they are thinking of adding a shop in New York. The United States is home to their largest number of members. (The company currently ships only to Britain, the United States, Canada and Germany.)

“We never do market research,” Cameron said. “So we didn’t realize rhubarb and quince don’t have the same connotations in the US. But we quite like the divisiveness.” Rhubarb, she said, is often associated with strawberry-rhubarb combinations, so the scent is not familiar on its own, and quince is generally more common in Britain.

Each Ffern perfume comes with a small sample so subscribers can try the scent. They can return the unopened full-size bottle if, say, the Spring 25 violet leaf scent, is not for them.

Paul Thomas, a creative director in Cardiff, Wales, hasn’t skipped a scent since he joined the ledger in 2021. “Winter 23 reminds me of when I got married,” he said. “It’s a unisex scent we both share. I love that connection, and we go through a full bottle each season.”