In 2022, when Jun Lim launched his niche fragrance brand, BORNTOSTANDOUT, he knew one thing for certain: He needed to be online at Luckyscent and in-store at Scent Bar.
So he emailed the founders. Then he emailed them again, and again, until his hundreds of cold emails never got a response. Not one to give up, Lim eventually walked into their Burbank, California headquarters and pitched the founders, Franco Wright and Adam Eastwood, directly, and it worked. Luckyscent and Scent Bar became the provocative fragrance brand’s first major retail partner.
And this wasn't just any retail partner. Lim chased them down because to have a fragrance on the walls of a Scent Bar means you have done something right. Rather than waiting for brands to generate buzz before selling them, Wright and Eastwood actively seek out fragrances that meet their own criteria of creativity, artistry, and originality.
Before there was FragranceTok convincing consumers to buy perfumes they had never smelled, prior to Sephora building out its own niche fragrance section, Luckyscent was already curating the weird, bombastic scents few other retailers were carrying—from the likes of cigarette accords to seaweed and salty metallics—in a business model that no other retailer could replicate.
But Wright and Eastwood didn't start the business to become the tastemakers of niche fragrance.
Launched in 2002, Luckyscent began when Wright and Eastwood, two graphic designers working together in Venice, California, started gravitating toward fragrances that felt different from what everyone else was wearing. They found Comme des Garçons and other unusual brands at places like Fred Segal, then began discovering California's emerging niche fragrance scene: Kai Fragrance, Child Perfume, The Sage Lifestyle, and Sarah Horowitz's Creative Scentualization, which later gave birth to Sarah Horowitz Parfums. And the more they looked, the more they found.
As Wright and Eastwood were already building websites for a living, they eventually decided to build one of their own. That became Luckyscent, which opened with only eight brands online, according to Eastwood.
They started traveling to fragrance shows and showrooms in downtown Los Angeles, then abroad to stores in France and Italy, looking for perfumes that weren't yet available in the US. Their design backgrounds allowed them to present fragrance differently online. It was at this time that the internet became a place where consumers simply hit the buy button, rather than using it to discover beauty and fragrance.
Launching niche fragrances strictly online came with some obvious challenges. It wasn't easy to convince someone to buy perfume they'd never smelled, let alone from brands they'd never heard of. The solution was sampling.
Because niche fragrance distribution in the US was concentrated in only a handful of stores, such as Barneys New York and Fred Segal, Luckyscent began pioneering online sampling. The founders also took an editorial approach to their website, bringing in writers who were, as they put it, “perfume heads,” to describe the fragrances. Instead of simply listing a bottle for sale, they told stories about what the consumer would smell.
“We thought of presenting it in a different way, not as just an item for sale. We wanted to paint a picture,” Eastwood told BeautyMatter.
That made buying sample sizes (1 mL vials that usually cost between $4 and $6) more than just a convenience. It became a tool for discovery, allowing customers to build their own selection rather than committing to a single full-size bottle. This was reflective of Wright and Eastwood’s own philosophy: They “didn’t want to smell like everybody else” and wanted to offer a “wardrobe” of fragrances that customers could mix and match.
“From the start, we wanted a wide array of choices for people to pick their own fragrance that suited them,” said Eastwood. “People talk about having signature fragrances, but that was never in our ethos.”
Today, Luckyscent carries around 450 brands and 3,000 perfumes. What began as a way to make obscure fragrance more accessible online ultimately helped turn niche fragrance shopping into an act of collecting.
But an in-person store was inevitable. In 2006, Wright and Eastwood opened Scent Bar on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, a 300-square-foot space that could fit only about eight people at a time.
Designed differently from a traditional fragrance counter, they organized perfumes by scent rather than brand, inspired by wine and cocktail bars, where bottles of different shapes and personalities are all lined up together.
It made sense for the brands selling there, too, many of which only had one or two fragrances. For customers who mostly came in looking for a particular type of scent rather than a particular brand, discovery felt more natural when florals, gourmands, and citruses were all placed separately in their own categories.
The founders even tried to separate fragrances, with a men's section filled with smoky, leathery scents. It didn't last. “Our customers at the time, for them, everything was unisex,” said Eastwood. “They were wearing everything.”
That original store eventually grew into today's Scent Bar, with locations in Los Angeles and New York and a new Brooklyn store that opened in 2026. But even as the stores have grown, the underlying model of hypercuration has stayed the same.
Wright still plays a central role today in deciding what comes in and what goes out, changing the assortments four to five times a year. “We edit within the edit,” said Wright.
Depending on Scent Bar’s various locations, each store’s fragrances are uniquely shaped by its neighborhood and clientele preferences. Some fragrances may not sell particularly well but remain on the shelf because they provide an important reference point. Others are pulled when they stop feeling relevant. There's no particular formula to it, but more so the idea that Scent Bar’s selection is never static.
“Anytime you're dealing with a single brand that sells fragrance, and they have their own retail outlet, they don't change,” said Eastwood. “Whereas with our stores, that's the beauty of it. Anytime someone comes in, there will always be something new for them.”
The experiential model Scent Bar created isn’t easily replicated in a department store, Ulta Beauty, or Sephora, where fragrances are still largely organized by brand. Testers are everywhere, bottles are secured to counters, and the retailers themselves aren’t built around fragrance alone.
Yet as the niche category has grown, so has the pressure to scale. More investment is flowing into brands that Wright and Eastwood encountered early on, and more of them are looking beyond the independent world. The question is whether a niche brand can grow without losing what made it special in the first place.
“There are more people out there that see potential to go niche to explosive successes that maybe you didn’t have before,” said Wright. “I don’t think anyone got into it early on because they’re like, ‘This is going to be us. I’m going to be a global brand.’ A lot of the impulses that people have are creating really good perfumes out of a real passion for just doing it.”
At ScentBar, the concern is less about where a fragrance is sold than what happens to the experience around it. “It starts to feel more commoditized,” Wright says. “You see these brands that we’ve sold for many years that did start out as niche, and then you see them in [mainstream] environments, and I’ve always wondered, I’m like, that doesn’t work?”
That tension is built into the idea of niche itself. If rarity is the initial appeal, then placing those fragrances everywhere inevitably changes the category's foundation and the experience itself.
Luckyscent and Scent Bar are now navigating a similar tension. In January 2026, Monogram Capital Partners took a majority stake in the company, allowing the retailer to expand Scent Bar’s physical footprint and operations. The plan is to open one to two stores per year, with a Dallas location slated for the first quarter of 2027, followed by Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco. These expansions are deliberate for Wright and Eastwood.
“We’re constantly looking for opportunities, but we have to find the right spaces for our stores because it is such an experiential process,” Wright said. “They need to be in the right neighborhood with the right adjacencies and square footage. So it’s not easy for us to just roll out 20 stores at once.”
The investment also gives Wright and Eastwood room to step back from the “many hats” they once wore and build out a larger team. This means bringing in more inventory and staff while also developing new projects, including a proprietary fragrance line and an online subscription sample service.
Scent Bar is expanding at a time when the niche category itself is also becoming increasingly crowded.
With thousands of new fragrances arriving every year and social media helping turn obscure brands into mainstream successes, Wright attests they’re facing the “inverse of the original problem."
Their job now is less about seeking out new fragrance and more about filtering it. For Wright, it's a waiting game. He watches brands develop over time: how long they take to make a fragrance, how they approach new releases, where they choose to sell, and what happens as they grow.
Along with the category changing, the scents themselves are changing too. Wright and Eastwood have watched niche move from the outlandish compositions and architectural designs that first attracted them to simpler vanillas, gardenias, and other white florals they claim made up 80% of their business in the earlier days. Now their attention is increasingly turning toward Asia, where younger houses are bringing new cultural references into fragrance.
Wright cites d'Annam, for example, translating foods like rice, milk, and traditional Vietnamese pastries into gourmands that don't feel like the overdone cupcake or caramel formulas. Matcha and tea are becoming increasingly interesting to them, too.
“You end up getting a lot of derivative stuff coming from the traditional markets where they’ll see something that sells, and then they try and reproduce it,” said Eastwood. “But with these Asian brands, it feels like the old days.”
There is still room for experimentation, says Wright, particularly as perfumers work with new aromas. For him, skin scents, musks, and mineral notes are “in,” as are the amber, sandalwood, and rum-like scents that feel completely unfamiliar because the molecules themselves are new.
That is still Wright and Eastwood’s goal: to find what feels like it hasn't been done before. The difference is that there is simply more to sift through now.