Fragrance is a Family Business. Be Part of Ours
This is a Q&A Ingrid and I did for The Fragrance Foundation, which was published in their monthly newsletter, Accords. Sharing here with all of you, so you can get to know us a little better.
All the good smells,
Erica, Co-founder
What does the brand’s 5-year anniversary mean to you?
It feels like a significant milestone. We’ve taken our time to breathe our values into the brand — values like creativity, intention, connection, and the joy of being challenged and doing things differently.
These past five years were super special because we took our time, focused on the craft, the customer and one another. We are both really proud that we’ve achieved this milestone.
What is the ethos of The New Savant?
The New Savant stands for the self-made, creative path in life. It is about centering, and celebrating, people and ideas that have often been left out.
The New Savant is also about family.
As we know, fragrance is often a family business, passed down through generations. In the process, family values become imbued in the product.
That idea resonates with us — because even though we aren’t part of the traditional fragrance world or its lineage, The New Savant is a family, just not by traditional design. We’ve come together through our individual paths of growth and ambition, found one another, and committed to this creative partnership to build something new. We want to deliver our values to our generation and inspire them to live their best, most authentic lives.
How would you describe the importance of storytelling when it comes to scent?
We both come from storytelling backgrounds — we’ve worked in nearly every medium and at every level –– and now we get to work in scent.
With the unrelenting pressure of productivity culture and overconsumption, we know scent can bring us back into the moment. But as an invisible, ephemeral product, it requires storytelling that is not just authentic, but also resonates. Narrative development and world building is core to The New Savant.
How have you woven storytelling into your scents?
It’s the starting point for everything. A story is the first building block of every fragrance we create. It doesn’t come from an obscure place — it comes from us. And the stories continue to unfold with our customers. We just completed a series of focus groups with our customers, and this came up in every single conversation. They are taking the stories in our scents and making them their own.
What are some of your favorite examples of the way people have responded to your candles?
One of our favorite examples is when people choose our scents for big life milestones, like weddings. It tells us we’ve become part of their daily lives in a meaningful way, and that our work represents a piece of who they are. As artists, the dream is always for people to resonate with your work so deeply that it becomes a part of them, too.
It is the ultimate act of creativity, generosity, and putting beauty into the world — and we’re so honored to have contributed that in our first five years.
