I have a confession to make before I write approximately 2,500 words about a fragrance brand.
I have never smelled Lore.
I don’t own a bottle. I haven’t sprayed it on my wrist at Sephora. I couldn’t tell you whether Somewhere but nowhere dries down beautifully on skin or whether Sublimity deserves a permanent position on my bathroom shelf.
For the record, I’m currently a Tulita girl. Specifically, Divya. Natural fragrance, less synthetic, very much my lane.
And yet, here I am writing about Lore.
Which might actually be the most compelling evidence of its power.
I didn’t discover Lore through fragrance. I discovered it through Instagram. It appeared, as the best things on the internet sometimes do, without enough explanation. Strange images. Beautiful objects. Film stills. Fragments of language. A bottle that looked less like packaging and more like something excavated from another civilisation.
I didn’t immediately understand what I was looking at.
I just knew I wanted to keep looking.
And, I might add, that is increasingly rare.
We are living through an era of extraordinary over-explanation. New brands arrive with their positioning statement, founder story, ingredient superiority, three reasons to believe, five points of difference and a carousel explaining exactly why you should care before you’ve had a chance to become curious.
Lore did something else.
It left the door slightly open.
And curiosity did the rest.
The new brand problem
There are more beautiful brands than ever.
This should be exciting. Instead, I sometimes think it has created a strange flattening.
The tools are better, the references are more accessible, the agencies are excellent. The founder has a Pinterest board. Everyone has discovered art direction.
So the baseline has risen enormously.
And yet, walk through enough beauty brands and something odd happens: they begin to blur.
Beautiful typography, tasteful photography, lovely packaging… A very considered sans serif. Something about ritual. Something about intentionality. A founder in a beautifully lit bathroom telling you why she couldn’t find the product she wanted, so she made it herself.
(yawn).
Everything is good.
Very little is strange.
This is why Lore caught my attention.
It didn’t simply look good. It appeared to possess an internal logic of its own.
There is a difference.
Good branding makes a product attractive.
A world makes a product feel like evidence of something larger.
And Lore arrived with the larger thing already there.
Lore before Lore
Once you understand who is behind the brand, some of this starts making sense.
Lore was founded by Melanie Bender alongside Greg Gonzalez and Joe Cloyes, formerly of Youth To The People. Bender’s résumé reads like someone deliberately trying to make herself interesting to me: she studied aerospace engineering before moving into fashion and beauty, then she helped build Versed and Merit, and later became CEO of Rhode.
Quite the dream ride.
But surprisingly to me, no art school.
Instead, aerospace engineering(!!).
Which I love.
I think there’s an assumption that highly aesthetic people must have travelled towards creativity through an appropriately creative door. Design school, fashion, art direction, photography or something similar.
But some of the most interesting creative minds seem to arrive sideways.
And perhaps that sidewaysness matters?
Bender’s career has given her something more interesting than a conventional creative pedigree: pattern recognition across disciplines. Systems and aesthetics. Commercial scale and cultural instinct. Precision and feeling.
In short: Science and art.
That combination interests me because I’ve always thought the best brand thinking lives somewhere between those things. You need the data. You need to understand the market, customer, distribution and commercial reality. But then there is the other part; the part that notices something before there’s enough evidence to explain why it matters.
Lore feels like a company built in that overlap.
Bender had spent years inside some of the defining beauty businesses of the last decade before finally making something that was hers. She told Business of Fashion that she’d been comfortable bringing her thinking to other people’s visions; people like Hailey Bieber and Katherine Power, but Lore felt more personal.
And interestingly, she hasn’t responded to that personalness by putting herself at the centre of the brand.
She’s there. She does the interviews. She speaks thoughtfully about the decisions. Her letter appears on Lore’s website. She talks to the designers and perfumers behind the work. But, at least so far, she isn’t the product.
I like that.
It reminds me a little of Dianna Cohen at Crown Affair. Not aesthetically, necessarily, but in posture.
I’m a big fan of the founder as author rather than protagonist.
There’s a subtle difference.
The founder-as-protagonist says: enter my world because you want to be like me.
The founder-as-author says: I made a world. Come and see what you find inside it.
The second leaves considerably more room for the customer.
I wonder whether Bender will stay there as Lore grows. Founder-led media has become such an effective growth engine that the gravitational pull towards front-facing founder content must be enormous.
But right now, I think her restraint is part of the magic.
You can feel a very particular person behind Lore without needing to constantly see her face.
The authorship is visible. But importantly, the author doesn’t have to be.
They started with curiosity
Before Lore properly launched, it created an Instagram broadcast channel called Everything possible.
Not Lore VIPs. Not Join the waitlist. Not Be the first to shop.
“Everything possible”.
More than 1,100 early followers joined a strange little pre-launch universe in which Bender and the community exchanged questions and prompts; including, wonderfully, favourite forms of potato. When asked to describe Lore as a film, Bender’s answer was essentially the universe of Spirited Away wearing the wardrobe of Spice World. Early references moved between Hawaiian cliffs and water, Marlon Brando in Western wear and Surrealist art.
That tells you almost everything.
Not about the perfume.
About the mind making the perfume.
This is one of the things I think modern brands have forgotten.
We have become so obsessed with communicating clearly that we’ve started confusing clarity with completeness.
They’re not the same.
A brand needs to be legible enough to enter, but that doesn’t mean you need to turn every light on.
Sometimes intrigue lives in the rooms you can’t quite see yet.
Lore understood that before people knew the notes, the price or perhaps even exactly what was being launched, they could begin understanding its sensibility.
The references did the positioning before the positioning was explained.
Curiosity became a form of customer acquisition.
And maybe that’s the first thing Lore gets so right.
Most brands launch by asking: How quickly can we make people understand us?
Lore seems to have asked: How do we make people want to understand more?
Those are very different creative briefs.
Selling the invisible
Fragrance presents a particularly interesting branding problem because the actual product is invisible.
Bender has described the challenge herself: she’s effectively selling an invisible product through predominantly visual mediums.
Think about how strange that is.
If you’re selling a chair, I can see the chair.
If you’re selling a dress, I can imagine myself wearing it.
If you’re selling chocolate, you can show me the inside breaking open and make me hungry.
But scent?
You somehow have to make me smell something through a screen.
Which means fragrance has always required metaphor. Story. Memory. Suggestion. You aren’t only describing ingredients; you’re trying to activate somebody’s sensory imagination strongly enough that their brain begins constructing the missing sense.
Lore is exceptionally good at this.
Somewhere but nowhere doesn’t simply give you cedarwood, black tea, cardamom, vanilla cream and worn-in leather. Lovely and a little twisted moves from rose milk and candied pistachio to amber resin, patchouli and, perfectly, “lucid dreams.”
Lucid dreams are obviously not an ingredient.
That’s precisely the point.
The language isn’t there only to tell you what you’ll smell.
It’s there to tell you where to go.
Lore’s own line is Scents that take you somewhere. Its website describes the collection as “a wardrobe of realities both familiar and new.”
And suddenly the perfumes aren’t four SKUs.
They’re portals.
And that distinction is everything.
Build the world first
I keep coming back to an idea I wrote about recently while trying to understand what makes something iconic.
An icon becomes bigger than the thing itself.
Nike isn’t shoes. Chateau Marmont isn’t accommodation. Miu Miu isn’t simply clothing. The product becomes an entry point into a larger collection of associations, codes, characters, stories and meanings.
Lore seems to understand this unusually early.
Its own language makes the ambition explicit: “Each scent is a galaxy and we’re the night sky.”
What an enormous idea for a 12-month-old company with a handful of SKUs.
But that scale of imagination is exactly what makes the brand feel bigger than its current footprint.
Lore hasn’t built four products and then asked marketing to invent a story for each one.
It has built a universe capable of producing stories indefinitely.
This is an important distinction because world-building is not storytelling.
Storytelling asks: What story can we tell about this product?
World-building asks: What are the rules of the reality this product belongs to?
What does it look like there?
How does it speak?
What objects exist?
What is beautiful?
What is strange?
What is funny?
What does this world believe?
Who belongs inside it?
What would feel completely wrong?
A story has an ending.
A world can keep generating stories.
And that’s where Lore starts feeling less like a fragrance launch and more like cultural infrastructure.
The bottle knows what it’s doing
Then there is the bottle.
Lore worked with designer Jérôme Laurendeau through somewhere around 40 to 50 versions of the form and 150 colour versions before arriving at the final object. At one stage, Bender was asking for saturation changes of 1%.
I adore this kind of insanity.
Because it demonstrates something that gets flattened in conversations about taste: sometimes the difference between nearly right and right is almost imperceptible.
But you feel it.
The bottle draws from experimental blown glass, including the work of André Thuret, as well as sea glass and worn European steps. Its shape sits somewhere between manufactured object and something found in nature. The bottle is refillable; even the cap gets a second life as a candleholder.
Nothing about it feels like someone opened a packaging trend report and selected organic form.
It feels specific.
And specificity is becoming increasingly valuable.
We are entering an era where almost anyone can produce something aesthetically competent. AI can generate an identity system. Pinterest can supply a visual universe in ten minutes. Manufacturers can give you the same beautiful component as thirty other brands.
Technical beauty is becoming abundant.
But specificity is still scarce.
The Lore bottle is useful here because it isn’t merely beautiful. It carries the logic of the brand.
Fluid but substantial. Strange but familiar. Polished but imperfect. New but somehow archaeological.
It has tension.
And tension is so often the difference between something tasteful and something memorable.
Bender has said that every touchpoint is an opportunity to make someone feel something.
You can see the evidence.
The bottle doesn’t simply contain the fragrance.
It continues the argument.
A brand with lore
Even the name is annoyingly good.
Lore.
Knowledge passed between people. Stories accumulated over time. The mythology surrounding a person, place or thing. The details that make a fictional universe feel as though it existed before you arrived.
It’s almost suspiciously perfect.
Because lore cannot really be manufactured in one campaign.
It accumulates.
A strange bottle. A founder detail. A scent someone wore on a particular night. A phrase. An object. A collaboration. A customer story. A cultural moment. A reference you only understand if you’ve been paying attention.
Eventually, enough fragments collect around the name that the name begins carrying meaning by itself.
That’s brand.
Meaning accumulating until a word becomes shorthand for a world.
Which makes Lore less a name than an instruction.
Keep adding to the mythology.
It arrived already knowing itself
Lore launched in 2025 and moved into roughly 250 Sephora doors within months. Its initial collection of four fragrances was developed with perfumer Jérôme Epinette, and the brand quickly generated enough attention to be described in beauty media as one of fragrance’s buzziest new arrivals.
That’s objectively impressive.
But scale isn’t really the thing I find most interesting.
It’s the speed of meaning.
New brands usually look new.
They’re still figuring out their angles. Testing their voice. Discovering what customers respond to. Gradually accumulating visual codes and cultural associations. You can almost watch them becoming themselves in public.
Lore didn’t feel like that to me.
It arrived with the confidence of something that had existed for years.
Not because it had manufactured heritage. Quite the opposite.
It simply seemed to know itself.
And perhaps that’s what we’re responding to when we call a brand cool.
Not trendiness.
Not aesthetics.
But rather, self-possession.
The ability to participate in culture without constantly asking culture who it should be.
Lore has a strong enough internal world that it can be playful without becoming random. Beautiful without becoming generic. Strange without becoming inaccessible. Premium without adopting all the usual luxury codes.
It doesn’t feel like it’s looking sideways.
And to me, that creates gravity.
Is Lore the fragrance brand of this era?
This is obviously my thesis, not an objective fact. Though I’ll argue it.
Fragrance is having an extraordinary cultural moment, and Lore is entering a landscape already populated by formidable brands: Byredo, Le Labo, Phlur, DedCool, D.S. & Durga, Glossier, Diptyque, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, and a growing number of smaller houses with highly specific points of view.
Lore has also only existed since 2025.
Iconicity can’t be declared at launch.
Culture has to give it back to you.
But I think Lore has claimed something unusually quickly.
It feels like a fragrance brand made for this precise cultural moment without feeling like a product of this precise cultural moment.
That’s hard.
It understands that consumers want objects again after years of aesthetic minimalism. It understands that luxury doesn’t necessarily mean seriousness. It understands internet language without appearing terminally online. It understands the value of community without turning every customer into a “bestie”. It understands storytelling without explaining every metaphor. It understands that people don’t only want products anymore.
They want worlds worth entering.
And importantly, Lore seems to understand that a world needs some mystery to remain a world.
You shouldn’t be able to see its edges.
The best worlds don’t explain themselves completely. They make you want to explore them.
Lore did that to me before I’d smelled a single thing.
Which is why, despite being a Tulita girl, I now know about Melanie Bender’s aerospace engineering degree. I’ve looked at André Thuret glass. I’ve thought about Spirited Away and Spice World. I’ve studied a perfume cap that becomes a candleholder. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time staring at their imagery on the internet.
And now I’ve written an entire essay about it.
I still don’t know what Lore smells like.
But I know exactly how its world feels.
Maybe that’s the magic.
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PS. If this is your kind of rabbit hole, I recently wrote a 40-page Guide to Brand Strategy. It covers positioning, customers, storytelling, voice, taste, instinct and the art of knowing what actually matters. It’s included with a paid Extra Curricular subscription, you can unlock it here:
