Key Takeaways:
Frances Shoemack, founder of fragrance brand Abel, has long been a champion of the beauty of natural fragrances. With the company’s upcoming relaunch, the way that message is conveyed will take on a new shape and form.
The fragrance brand, founded in 2013 in Amsterdam and now headquartered in New Zealand, has championed ingredient transparency and sustainability-minded sourcing from the outset. The new Abel will keep that same heart but is rewiring its approach to formulations, packaging, and retail strategy.
“I came into the [fragrance] industry from the wine industry with an eco [perspective]. I didn't have all the experience and reference points that other people had, which was super valuable because it meant that there was no status quo. But that was 15 years ago; so much has changed for what we can do as a business,” Shoemack told BeautyMatter.
Three years in the making, the rebranding has been an ambition for the last five to six years. Part of that change includes a larger palette of available natural ingredients, such as passionfruit and tangerine extracts upcycled from the food industry, or biotech-derived ketamber and anisaldehyde.
With the initial guideline of only using natural ingredients, the perfumer’s palette went from the typical variety of 5,000 to 50 or 60 ingredients. Now innovation has opened up a new host of possibilities. “In the early days, we were really limited in our palette. I actually quite like it from a creative perspective; those constraints force you to be more creative.”
Shoemack, who creates the brand’s scents in collaboration with master perfumers Isaac Sinclair and Dr. Fanny Grau, began proactively seeking out ingredients in the flavor and biotech space. “There’s a lot of overlap between flavors and fragrance in terms of R&D. There's way more demand in the food world for natural flavoring than there was for natural fragrance. For me, biotech provides a solution for a low-impact way to cultivate molecules.” Nine years ago, the brand introduced natural isolates; three years later, it started using biotech molecules, beginning with ambrettolide and ambroxan musks.
Shoemack is mindful of the term “synthetics." “I'm trying to can it from my vocabulary. I think it's misleading, in the same way that ‘chemical’ can be misleading. For us, it's the starting material, not the process—that's how I define it.” But the founder is also clear she does not want to feed into fearmongering around ingredient safety.
The existing lineup has been reformulated through three angles: increasing the proportion of biotech, upcycled, or isolate molecules to improve performance; modernizing the formulas of two older releases; and increasing the juice concentration by 37%. If the ecological footprint of a natural material was higher than its biotech counterpart, the brand made the switch. Prices were increased by 25% to reflect these changes.
“Coming from winemaking, no one spent more on their packaging than what was in the bottle. I know perfume is different because the unboxing and the luxury [of packaging] are part of what gives people joy as well. My philosophy is we're making and selling perfume, not packaging. We are spending more on the perfume, and the response [from our customers] so far has been good.”
Nonetheless, Abel has improved its packaging to keep up with innovation, moving from the bioplastic caps it launched a decade ago to home compostable Vivomer caps. The brand also created bespoke bottles with a French glass maker containing a 20% concentration of post-consumer recycled glass, designed with an unscrewable spray pump that can be fully recycled. Manufacturer GF Smith was onboarded to create boxes made from 60% post-consumer recycled coffee cups and 40% post-consumer recycled paper. Abel also ensured that packaging is produced within 400 kilometers of its production house in Holland. As a result, the brand has reduced the carbon footprint of its box packaging by 97%. The company is looking to “future-proof” its packaging for refills further down the line. “We've redesigned the entire way that we make the perfume so it feels really pivotal.”
Getting there requires substantial resources and investments. In September 2022, the brand secured its first $1.5 million capital raise with Maker Partners, resulting in the company making an equity investment of 27% in the Abel Company. The founder noted that the rebrand has presented a financial challenge, as it involves a balance between reducing sales and investing heavily in creative, NPD, and new production. However, this challenge has been mitigated by investor support and a long-term strategy. While the brand wasn’t able to give exact numbers, Shoemack says “it's not a small amount of money required to relaunch.”
Another challenge of relaunching is what to do with previously produced stock and inventory. Abel went quiet with retailers on April 1, 2025, to naturally deplete its existing inventory over time. “In an ideal world, we reduce the supply from now, and it solves itself, but those are the things that we will buy back a little bit. We don't want any heavy discounting, but hopefully that's enough.”
The brand is also reducing its retail network by a third due to its shift in pricing and proposition, focusing more on its physical retail channels. Skins Cosmetics and Printemps will be two new retailers in the brand’s network. Abel has also committed to exclusive partnerships with Dover Street Market Paris (France), Liberty (UK), Galilu (Poland), and Artifacts (Taiwan). “We're trying to carry that less-is-more philosophy through into the retail footprint as well.”
Despite the retail slowdown, the brand still managed to grow by 50% this year. Shoemack predicts a higher growth figure for the next year. “I feel really good about how we're managing to keep the momentum going with the current business. Those are the kind of growth numbers we're looking for. It's really solid growth, but it's also sustainable and manageable. We want to cement it in an intentional way with key partners.”
Shoemack also decided to rethink the brand’s “one in, one out” policy of discontinuing a fragrance when another was introduced. “The collection is not going to explode, but we really do want to go deeper on fragrance. It means we can be a little bit more singular and risk-taking. If you've only got seven perfumes, each one really has to do a job and serve a customer. Whereas if that grows to fifteen, we can have a few in there that are quite polarizing.”
Cyan Nori (a sweet and salty aquatic scent with tangerine, the plant-derived musk ambrettolide, and nori), The Apartment (a floral gourmand with upcycled tart cherry and cacao, tuberose, and myrrh), and Laundry Day (a green citrus scent with cut grass, lime, and vetiver notes using biotech-derived aldehyde C-12) are the current bestsellers. The latter two were launched last year, while Cyan Nori has been going strong since 2020. Shoemack sees the creative signature moving from being only raw material-based creations to more conceptual creations “rooted in memories and moments that we want to evoke.”
There are nine new fragrances launching this month. “I get told all the time we have a very strong DNA among our collection, which I take to be a real compliment. It's not something we necessarily aim for, but it's that legacy of working really closely with one perfumer for 15 years.” With its legacy getting a new look and gaining momentum, it's opening up the world of Abel to an even larger audience—one ready to embrace the beauty of natural fragrance, whether it came from the earth or a biotech lab.
