BORNTOSTANDOUT is not a fragrance brand for wallflowers or pearl clutchers—and founder Jun Lim intends to keep it that way. Launched in April 2022, the Korean company has made an impressive entry to the niche fragrance arena, jumping from $300,000 to $10 million in sales from year one to two, with $27 million in 2024. Lim self-funded the company with “no outside capital, no safety net—just my own capital and love towards perfume.” In February 2025, the brand got a safety net closing a Series A funding round led by venture firm Touch Capital with participation from BOLD, L’Oréal’s venture capital fund.

A key to that success has been a visual and creative boldness. Product names like Fig Porn, Indecent Cherry, and DGAF are printed in all capital crimson red letters across a white bottle, modeled after Joseon Dynasty porcelain designs. Scented car tags are shaped like a hand showing the middle finger, while one of the brand’s slogans is “Who Fuckin’ Cares?” (the brand even sells stationery and coffee mugs printed with the phrase). Campaign images like that for Naked Laundry, which marries the crispness of aldehydes with animalic notes of tonquitone, shows the fragrance bottle nestled in sweat-soaked sheets. But it’s not all about shock value. BORNTOSTANDOUT is also a love letter to the art of unapologetic perfumery, created by some of the industry’s most revered noses like Quentin Bisch, Frank Voelkl, and Nathalie Lorson.

Scents contain unexpected notes like a nail polish note in the fruity musk Angels’ Powder and inspirations, such as the gourmand amber scent, Mud. The 2022 releases—Indecent Cherry (by Florian Gallo), a mixture of its namesake fruit with almond, rose, and patchouli described as “the fragrance version of slipping a nip of bourbon into your cherry milkshake,” as well as Dirty Rice, Olivier Cresp’s lactonic concoction with notes of basmati rice, milk, and musk—put the brand on the map, and it’s been an upwards growth trajectory ever since. Most recently, the brand doubled down on its primal passions with the introduction of its Raw Seduction collection, and Be My Cookie. The Raw Seduction collection includes the aforementioned Naked Laundry, as well as Filthy Musk (Margaux Le Paih-Guérin’s creation of pineapple, honey, jasmine, civet, and animalic musks) and L’Animal (a heady blend of rum, suede, and guaiacwood by Cecile Matton). Be My Cookie begins with a mouthwatering blend of raspberry and vanilla absolute but soon unfolds into a darker and sexier base of castoerum.

In three short years, the brand has built a large retail footprint, including its flagship in Seoul bathed in its trademark crimson red, a giant hand sculpture giving the middle finger, surrounded by rows of fragrance as well as homeware creations and erotic prints and paintings by local artists. This space is responsible for 75% of the brand’s sales (in other regions DTC is closer to 25%). In terms of international retail, BORNTOSTANDOUT is available in perfumeries and retailers across 51 countries.

BeautyMatter sat down with Lim to discuss his creative philosophy, the power of retail partnerships, and embracing polarizing perfumes.

What can you tell us about your life before founding BORNTOSTANDOUT?

.I worked as an investment banker. I've been around the block with several IBs as equity research analyst, but my last stop was at Nomura, where I specialized as an equities broker—specifically in global cosmetics and retail sector. My area of expertise was East Asia. I knew the business inside and out. But at the same time, I've been a collector of fragrance for a very long time, since 2002. Fragrantica was not even there; it was born in 2006. Back then, I started collecting from Blue Jeans by Versace to Serge Lutens, which was the holy grail of nice perfume lovers back then. Now it's gone downhill.

But I've been loving collecting perfume for more than two decades. It's the reason why I do this. This is a combination of my biggest passion and also my profession coming from the investment bank [world].

Rebellion is such a key tenant of the brand. What made it feel important to rebel?

The theme of rebellion came naturally because I grew up in the Western world in my teenage years. But spending my time in Korea during my 20s, I was not truly perceived as a rebellious person. Having this Western mindset growing up in the UK and the US made me feel like a weird Westerner stuck in the middle who does not fit into the values of Korea because our country is very conservative in a lot of ways, still has confusion, and values of the ancient times. We live in a heavily collectivist society where luxury is all about appreciation. You only buy brands that everybody would appreciate.

There were a lot of social norms and practices that I could not understand and made me ultimately feel like I need to have a message if I were to start a brand, and that was rebellion. That was something perfectly suitable for my status, my position as a semi-Korean or a Korean that never lived in Korea. It was very natural for me to start this value from Korea. In the beginning, I started targeting only Korea; that was the key message that I wanted to throw [out there] to the Korean people.

Gourmand, but also decadent, sticky, dirty scents are the signature of the brand. What can you tell us about the creative process of working with perfumers and where the inspiration starts?

Inspiration is very personal because I believe that if you are as personal as possible, that's when you become the most creative. That's my philosophy in creation. I work with all the bigger fragrance houses, and smaller houses as well. For me, creativity is the most important part. I don't mind having polarized opinions where people love or hate the fragrances, but my biggest fear is somebody saying, "Oh, you got inspired by this fragrance.’ Originality is the key. I want people to feel that they are a little more rebellious by wearing our fragrances. Our fragrances are quite loud. It's not a quiet scent. It's very strong.

We say it's eau de parfum but concentrated at extrait de parfum concentration, at a minimum of 30% to 40%, which is very high for even modern contemporary standards. We make it very powerful in terms of character, that is edgy. We not only use gourmands, which people can relate to easily, but we use a mix of what I call “decadent” or “dirty,” which is an overdose of animalic notes that can be very off-putting for a lot of people but can be seen as very sensual for a few people. Frankly, I'm not here to please everybody. I'm not interested in selling to Sephora Global and trying to sell one million units.

It would be great if our company could be big in 10 years, but I'm not trying to be a billion-dollar brand next year. We still want to keep the originality, the nicheness. We don't want to be an overly commercial brand though we want to survive, of course.

Tying back to rebellion, animalic scents are the last creative frontier of perfumery in a way because they are such polarizing creations. We've had a very big wave of people-pleasing scents, even from niche brands. Not to diminish that, but there is such an interesting climate happening around animalic scents precisely because a lot of the market has maybe lost a bit of the edge. But it is a very delicate balance with those notes. There are also interesting differences in taste when it comes to dirty scents for an American versus European customer for example. Striking that balance where it's dirty enough but not too dirty, the tweaking of the formula is quite a delicate art.

We do get a lot of polarizing comments as well where people literally say this smells like shit, and they try to make fun of the notes' breakdown. We don't mind, it's not a problem for us. We don't mind being hated. I like to say “Hate is a form of love.” We like to be talked about. We use a mix of not only the quieter animalic notes, such as gray amber or ambergris, but also things like civets, castoreum, tonquitone, or even skatole, which smells very dirty. If it's used in the right balance, it is striking and very sexy, for my taste at least.

We do have good fan base that really loves our fragrances. Like I said, I'm not interested in being loved by 99 out of 100 people. As long as two people in the room love the fragrance, I don't even have to care about the 98 other people. That's our philosophy.

It certainly struck a chord because within such a short span of time, the brand has gained so much of a following, and there's a lot of buzz around it. What was the key to building that brand buzz? Is it just the concept or also the dedication to saying we're going to rebel?

From a business perspective, it's a combination of having the right noise factor and luck. Meeting the right partners, especially retail and distribution partners, which as a platform is key. Having the right noise factors such as the rebellion, the animalic, the funny or catchy names, even the striking designs. I cannot pinpoint and say this is one answer. But I can attribute the success to, mostly luck, having great partners from a very early stage, and also partners endorsing what we love to do because some partners, if we did not have them, we would not be seen. I would say it's a mix of having a good platform and the right product. That is what may draw love and hate.

I've been a big, big customer of Luckyscent before I started the company, and they were my first retailer. We still are good partners. I remember in 2022 traveling in the middle of COVID to meet them because they did not respond to my cold calls or cold emails. I decided to just visit them from Korea to the States during the middle of COVID; after 30 to 40 trials of emails and calls, I had a meeting. They loved the products. Boom, the products took off. They pushed us hard, and it became one of their top sellers and viral across the industry. I cannot just say I made an amazing brand. It's really mostly pure luck, that's what the business is. But you have to be prepared to grab that luck and be very proactive to catch that luck. All I can say is we’re very lucky to have met the right partners.

The US was your next market after Korea, but the brand currently has 335 doors across the globe. What are your biggest markets, and are the bestsellers different in those?

Markets or bestsellers are generally more or less the same. Now it's Drunk Lovers, Dirty Rice, and Sugar Addict. These are the top three sellers that we have, but it's more or less consistent—with the exception of Asia where Drunk Lovers and Sugar Addict do not perform well. The Asian, especially East Asian, people's preference does not lean towards heavy, big character scents. Dirty Rice performs really well for the European and Middle Eastern market. Our biggest and most profitable market is actually Korea, but US is very big, followed by Italy, Germany, and the Middle East as a whole.

How do you keep up with the production demand given the brand’s explosive growth?

Production management is always a wild ride. Every month, we’re chasing demand, scaling up, and tweaking forecasts. It’s been tough, but we’ve learned to move faster, think bigger.

You previously mentioned the Korean fragrance market being dominated by department store niche brands and people preferring lighter scents. What are the challenges of building a brand in that market?

You have to acknowledge it. There are two things for brands that have already been successful. Their bestseller is just their bestseller in Korea—or even Japan, which are very similar in taste. They are irrelevant; what sells the best in Western countries are not the bestsellers in Korea. What sells the best in Korea is of course not the bestseller in Western countries. That has to do with people's perception or people's tendency to use perfume. People rarely use perfume, but if they ever do, they use perfume that is the least offensive as possible. So with the smallest sillage, with the smallest character. They like soapy, skin scents, light florals.

These Miss Dior Blooming Bouquet scents, these are what people really love. Byredo Blanche is a good example. At the same time, people only buy brands that everybody else acknowledges. The challenge, of course, is starting in Korea as a local luxury brand because people naturally don't think of local brands as luxury. That status quo is a big, big challenge. But our strategy was always having this distinctive storytelling, good stories, and the in-store experience because I believe in offline experience. That offline experience is more strong than what an online store could ever provide. We try to really invest in the offline experience as well as having crazy fragrances. Though I may not tackle the mass markets, I can tackle at least a small niche where they are willing to pay for the creativity and storytelling. These are the markets that we targeted from the beginning. I know that these are who is going to be our cult following.

Speaking of retail, in terms of the design and visual styling of your flagship store, how did you translate your creative vision into a physical space?

I want everything to be immersive. Why do we have to pay a visit to this flagship store? I feel like a lot of the Western stores–because I'm in Paris and London all the time–I don't have a reason to visit this store. Why spend the time when I can just visit a department store, buy everything on the same floor, and get discounts, coupons, and membership rewards? That's the start question. I try to define my brand universe, like what does our brand represent and how do we reflect this into a visual format?

We collaborated with a lot of local artists to make it happen. We have six designers, and we're only three years old. We have a very big design team that is focused on crafting this unique brand experience in the offline [experience], across packaging and products, everything. It's very important for me to come up with something unique. Of course, I'm the creative director, and I confirm everything, but it's a team effort. It is a collaborative effort with a local, a contemporary artist, and we try to combine their artworks with perfume. I think of perfume as a medium. How can we offer such a unique experience that it gets stuck in their head and they would want to come back the next day? How do we create this experience? How do we make people stay in the flagship store for one hour? What do we have to install? Those were our starting points.

It's funny because Fragrancetok and these online spaces of fragrance discussion have certainly bloomed a lot in recent years, but the beauty of fragrance is certainly also the fact that in such a digital world, it's one of the very few things that you still have to experience physically. As a young brand investing in your retail space, that does help build so much of the character even more for your audience. What other projects or releases or are on the horizon?

Next year is more about deepening our fandom. We are releasing an extrait series, which will be labeled as an extrait extreme and will carry a concentration of 55% to 60%. It will be a very powerful fragrance the world has never seen before. We're trying to push the boundaries.

I'm guessing that fan base also can't be pigeonholed into one demographic or category.

It's always hard to define who exactly it is, especially now that the lines are blurring. People in their 20s may have a very Gen X taste or Gen X has a Gen Z taste. But we do have a very strong fan base—whenever we do preorders, you can measure it by how many blind buys people have. We're very happy, thankful, and grateful for all the fans.

What's been the biggest surprise or unexpected reaction to any of your work?

I never expected the brand to grow so fast, so big in such a short period of time, because in Asia, there was never a precedence of success, a niche perfume brand expanding this fast, this big. There are brands like Kenzo and Issey Miyake, which are fashion brands, but never a niche perfume brand that ever succeeded that originated from Asia. Our work as a whole is something that our country, our region has never seen before. We're very happy to be a front runner in this space.

We want to take action and do things that people feel, “Oh, this brand is really different.” We want to make noise. I've been hating the industry because it has become redundant after the successes of so mang big bestsellers such as Baccarat Rouge or Aventus. This industry has lost its soul to a certain extent. A lot of brands are just being over commercialized and trying to exploit this market. This is what I cannot stand in the niche perfume industry, and I really want to bring it back. I want to bring something, fresh, full of soul.