GREATEST: Joya Studio

Well, there are obviously so many chemicals in modern perfumery. Anything you see now that says amber or musk is a synthetic replacement. But at the same time, that’s very real. It’s just something that’s been developed scientifically. Everything in nature is a chemical, so chemical is a term much like “fat.” When people hear the word [fat], they think of the jiggly part of the meat that you need to cut off, but in actuality, it’s an asset. It’s something that’s very important for you to ingest. 

Cashew shells, poison ivy—that’s what I mean. Chemicals. Fat. These are things that we can’t go back to until someone re-markets them, maybe in 30 years. But that’s not a battle I want to fight myself. We want to educate. We’re makers. We want to make things our way, to stand for them, and then let people make up their own minds. 

I started with a tiny collection. We made scented candles with a sustainable base, which meant it was over 80% sourced through a company working with the WWF [World Wildlife Fund], so the impact was low. It’s different. Doesn’t mean there’s no impact, but it was better. This whole thing for me has been a learning experience. It is a learning process every day. And it’s funny, because when you’re kind of young and more naïve, you’re making stuff really well with less information. 

Yeah, it’s a difficult thing to communicate actually. It’s something we work on all the time: How we can express what we do without kind of overtly flexing? But look, we make all this stuff. It’s such an important part of what we do that we have control over the material we’re using. It’s important to me that we’re employing people and creating opportunity locally. It’s a totally different ball game. We have a full ceramics studio. We have eight people working down there alone. 

Yes. The setup can be more technical elements like CNC or 3D-printing, plaster and silicon molding, but then it’s all hand cast. We do high-res prints or we can meld downstairs using a router. It’s really cool. And up here [in the showroom], it went from being our collection to having a lot of interest from designers and brands and hospitality groups. We never had huge distribution, but we were in the better shops, and people would find us that way. So then Joya split into two different wings, and it’ll split even more soon. We have a pretty robust industrial business where we develop fragrance identity for brands and we’re making product for them—usually candles and sometimes down to the ceramic. 

Yeah. If it’s distributed through gas atomization in the air, then sure. We just make the fragrance. 

Yeah. We have a checklist. But it’s fluid. Documents can be specific or evocative. We do things differently in that I learned from some really great perfumers, so I can do it in a number of ways. Some of them were older and were classically trained, and for them it’s more like architecture. They have signature styles. Younger perfumers do things in a more modern, simple way. Nowadays, the traditional fragrance house model is truly awesome, because they can create molecules that didn’t exist beforehand. So that’s pretty amazing to watch. 

We like to be as direct as possible in terms of what we’re creating so that the creations are less-rounded, full perfumes that smell like something familiar. Even now, really large clients are willing to take more risks, so we like to go right into the raw materials and ingredients and build stories based on them. Instead of letting people select from some pre-made things, we really dig in and figure out their need. So if they want to capture something ritualistic, we can dive into different kinds of Palo Santo, and then we can go into the elements of classical perfumery—the fougère, musk, chypre families—to create something that is classic and new at once. 

It was a big break. We had our core collection at Barneys. Someone became a fan of it and then contacted me about fixing a fragrance for their hotel brand. He then moved to a different brand and brought us, and since then we’ve done about probably five or six different hotels for him.

Sandalwood is endangered, by the way. So we don’t want to use natural sandalwood anymore. But those new things are the ingredients that are more exciting. It’s downstream from culture. They’re reflections of where we’re at. Sandalwood and Palo Santo, amber, firewood are kind of warm, familiar and ritual; these are comfort smells. People are now so busy… I mean, was everyone always this busy? You have to schedule things with your best friends and then you cancel anyway. There are so many more inputs these days, so many more distractions. So I think for a long time now, and probably for the future, it’s going to be about scents of comfort, of home and of nature. It’s nice to have elements of something warm. 

Well, there’s a fine line between educating and snitching. I don’t want to call anyone out. Because everyone here is involved in this—from making a scent to pouring a candle to casting a ceramic to printing a label to shipping—the stuff we do doesn’t get actualized unless everyone is involved. So instead of debunking other people’s ways of putting things, I’d rather just state our way of doing it. And once again, that’s probably not right and will piss people off in 100 years. I mean, there’s lots of research you can do about this stuff. You can go really deep. Like Freud hated smell. He thought it was just base and animal. But it turns out he had some kind of nose surgery and he was a bit of a cokehead, I believe? 

Right. So there was a lot more there behind why he thought smell was so primal or unimportant. Something to be suppressed. There’s a great deal of misunderstanding throughout history around these things. 

The Polo green bottle with the horse on it! That was actually created by a perfumer who was legendary. You know, it’s a very strange world that I live in. Just like everything, so many of the arguments are false: natural or synthetic, niche versus large, organic, sustainable. So much of our understanding around this stuff is just wrong. And that’s why Joya is transparent about it. You come in here and it’s our workspace. You can see the corrugated [container] we use to ship things. This is what we want: to put it out in front of people and be open. It wasn’t because I was ahead of trend. I was behind it at first. I wanted things to seem perfect and tried and set up everything design-wise to be on par with who I thought was making the best products, and then I realized, in fact, that’s not us. The beauty of what we do is that it is by nature truly more artisanal. So many hands touch these things. That’s beautiful. It took me forever to realize this. 

I don’t understand it at all. I think the people who are good at the model have just figured out a way to distribute that is modern. And that was so ahead of the time that of course everyone is trying to learn from them now in the fashion industry. Because there is much to be admired. They kind of redefined the schedule and the anticipation of how people buy. They’re actually activating something that has an irrational effect on people’s brains. I mean people want it and they know they need to buy it immediately. But for me personally, I just don’t understand the fervor around it all. But the model is brilliant. 

We’re working on figuring out how to sell our scented products digitally. I’m interested in first-mover things. We had the first perfume ever on Net-a-Porter. So since then, we have a great relationship and we’re purposefully very different from the rest of what they sell. Because they’re so good at shooting our product and storytelling around it, it translates well to their platform. People ask a lot, ‘How can we try the scent before we buy it?’ And our answer is, essentially, you can’t. So I’m trying to tackle that. 

Right.