Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) is continuing its investment in fragrance. In October 2023, the company announced plans to open its Fragrance Atelier in Paris to accelerate the development of its product portfolio, set to open later this year. In September 2024, it announced a multiyear research project with the Dresden University of Technology to study the connection between scent, memory, and emotion across 80 subjects.
Now the company entered into an exclusive commercial agreement with Exuud Inc., a Georgia, Atlanta-based start-up focusing on a smart fragrance expression hardware platform called Soliqaire. This follows an investment in the company for an undisclosed amount during the second half of fiscal year 2024, led in partnership with ELC’s New Incubation Ventures. Ryan Piela, Executive Director, New Incubation Ventures, The Estée Lauder Companies, who helped oversee ELC’s initial investment tells BeautyMatter: “Exuud embodies the disruptive innovation we champion at NIV. With NIV’s minority investment and ELC's deep expertise, alongside the cutting-edge Soliqaire technology Exuud provides, we are poised to revolutionize the olfactive beauty market. Together, we can accelerate this concept to market and create new artisanal expressions of luxury fragrance, changing how consumers experience scent.”
Ever since the pandemic, the home fragrance category has been booming, with a global market value of $24 billion in 2024. Meanwhile Circana reported that fragrance is the fastest-growing category in prestige beauty, with sales up 12% in the first half of 2024.
With the exponential growth of the category, certain pain points need addressing. Heat in candles can either break down top notes like citrus too quickly or the use of resins can negatively impact burn performance due to their inability to completely blend into certain waxes. Furthermore, there is an increasing, although small, subset of consumers concerned about the potential health impact of burning candles in the home. For example, burning paraffin candles has been found to release tolulene (a neurotoxin) and benzene (a known carcinogen). Diffusers don’t use a flame and therefore pose no fire hazard, but can sometimes be too weak to fully fill the room. Aerosol sprays, which use hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) or compressed gases as propellants that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, while the small particles can irritate airways for those with sensitive respiratory systems.
Abhishek and Neerja Breja were determined to find a home fragrance solution that was more sustainable, less hazardous, and also delivered on scent diffusion. Both came fron a nonbeauty background: Abhishek is the former co-founder of AI-led mental health solutions company Primaface, while Neerja is the previous Vice President of Professional Services at IT consulting firm, Zillion Technologies, Inc.
“We saw that the home fragrance industry has remained stagnant for centuries. I felt strongly about aesthetics and that it has never been complete without the fragrance. The way the space smells, it's very crucial part of the experience,” Neerja tells BeautyMatter. “In fragrance, it’s how you develop, how you decode, and how you deliver. Right now, a lot of AI can be used in developing fragrance. Electromechanical [tools] and sensors can be used in decoding the fragrance. But what has remained the holy grail was the delivery of the fragrance,” Abhishek adds.
They self-funded and founded Exxuud in May 2018, and in January of 2019 enlisted the help of engineer Jesse Killion, co-founder of Evicient LLC, which specializes in temperature control and thermal energy transfer products. “For the first two years, we just struggled and failed. Jesse joined in 2019, and that's when we had a real engineering mind behind it,” Abhishek adds.
Exuud’s technology converts liquid perfumes into a solid bead form (made of biodegradable, plant-derived polymer blends), which is then released into a gas state. The smart fragrance delivery system that holds and releases these beads controls the air flow, which wafts over the beads to release the aromatic molecules into the air, similar to a flower releasing its scent into the air in nature. By controlling airflow, the intensity of the fragrance can be dialed up or down, unlike plug-in systems that use the same flow strength of air consistently.
Its founders hope this controlled release mechanism can counteract olfactory blindness, as the same continuous concentration of a scent leads to our brains stopping their perception to avoid overstimulation. However, there is currently no scientific data available on this, and some would argue that a change in the scent completely, rather than its concentration could be most effective here. “In terms of the nose blindness, yes, oscillating helps, but what helps even more is change. If you go into one room and you're smelling one fragrance, and you go into another room, you're smelling another fragrance. Every human being is different, some people go nose blind faster, some people get slower. This is based on the extensive anecdotal experience that we have because there's no quantitative measurement of nose blindness,” Abhishek states.
The company states the plant-derived beads have an 80% smaller carbon footprint than petroleum-derived plastic beads one might find in a reed diffuser for example. Furthermore, customers simply purchase a refill of the bead capsule, which can last several months.
“We embraced the fact that fragrance is going to do what fragrance does. It has top notes, middle notes, base notes. Rather than try and mask that with other agents that change the evaporation profile or we can suspend a micro droplet in a solid form. It will still evaporate as if it's the liquid off the blotter. What we've developed are techniques that then reintroduce that fresh dose over time so that as the consumer, you buy one refill, but for hundreds of hours you can get the same fragrance consistently over and over again. That's not something that you get from most other dry gas diffusion systems,” Kilion explains. Abhishek states that Exuud’s system measured against dry gas system is at least tenfold better from a quantitative efficiency and effectiveness perspective.
Despite these promising outcomes, finding a backer to push Exuud to the next level was not an easy road. “When we invented this medium, we thought we had invented the biggest thing in fragrance and VCs and investors would line up. But the problem is very few VCs or technologists understand the science and beauty of fragrance. It's a different world, very technical. We were not able to communicate to the general investors why this is going to be a game changer. Then we met Estée Lauder at a conference and they said, ‘All right, we'll be happy to look at it,’” Abhishek recalls.
As ELC grew interested in Exuud’s offerings, the start-up’s technology was put through a rigorous evaluation. This soon opened up the third dimension of the product’s potential aside from controlled scent release and a more sustainable model: creative potential. The co-founders paired up with ELC’s team of in-house perfumers to put the creation to the test. “Our mission was to liberate the perfumer and liberate the artist; to let them present their best craftsmanship to the world,” Abhishek proclaims.
Given the lack of heat use, Soliqaire enables perfumers to use the entire spectrum of fragrance notes at their disposal in the home fragrance category. It will also ease the creation of personal fragrance-adjacent home products, since the formula needs less adaptation to burn cleanly in candle form for example. Neerja describes Exuud as “bridging the gap between fine fragrance and home fragrance.”
Killion explains that 1.1 gram of the air droplet medium can hold many times its weight in fragrance, meaning less material is needed upfront. “It's also able to release 99% of the liquid back out. Most other systems, like the plastic beads, you end up with maybe 80% of the fragrance trapped in the bead. You pay for it, [but] you never get to experience it,” he says. “Similarly, with a candle, you're actually burning a lot of the fragrance. Some of it's coming off the wax pool, but a lot of it's just going up in smoke. In terms of the amount of fragrance you get to experience for the dollars you spend with our system, that's extremely high, very efficient at the use of these fine fragrances.”
“We believe that fine fragrances should be an everyday luxury. Both from the perspective of how efficient it is, which will reduce the cost, but also from the perspective how easy it is to use. That's where the digital technology will come in,” Abhishek adds. The company has already filed 10 patents for this system and is developing an app that allows users a limited amount of control over the time and intensity of scent release. The app will also identify when the bead capsule may be running low and prompt a refill order.
Estée Lauder Companies will integrate the technology into its fragrance portfolio by end of 2025, adopting the design of the device to suit the aesthetic of its fragrance brands like Le Labo, Tom Ford, or Jo Malone. “We could not have asked for a better partnership; it's been a beautiful journey since then for us. The endorsement of somebody of the stature of Estée Lauder is great. But in particular the New Incubation Ventures group really wants us to be successful as a company in our own right, they are our advocates within Estée Lauder's business,” Abhishek comments. “There could not have been better timing because the focus on innovation in this industry is at its peak and the leadership and brands at Estée Lauder are all ready to push the envelope. We wanted somebody who can think beyond what's happening today and like a leap head into the future.”
Its founding team sees educating the consumer and industry on the multiple levels of disruption through its technology as the next upcoming challenge, which is where ELC will provide a vital helping hand. Killion adds, “It's always been an ethos of the company to have it be this high level of craftsmanship. It takes somebody like an Estée Lauder that says, ‘No, we understand the value of luxury and why that's important.’ We have talked about the idea of the Paul Mitchell model; you don't necessarily need to know why the shampoo is the best, but if you go to the hair salon and the expert who does hair every day says, no, this is the one you need, then you can trust them. It's that way with perfumery. Most of us are laymen when it comes to fragrance, but the folks that have that skill can recognize the difference.”
The road ahead for Exuud Inc. is paved with ambitious intentions. “We want to think that we are giving birth to the olfaction technology industry. It may sound like a bold statement, but it really does not exist,” Abhishek states. “If you can control the fragrance with the precision that we now can with this technology, as it will evolve, the impact is going to be beyond home, fashion, or immersive entertainment.” Over the next two years, those plans will continue to unfold, much like the notes of a fine home fragrance wafting through the air.
