Launch Date: January 2021
Geography: Phoenix, Arizona
Founder: Kelly Kussman, Founder + CEO
Notable Advisors:
2026 Full Year Projected Revenue: $2M - $5M, according to industry estimates
Primary Category: Fragrance
Funding: Self-Funded
Primary Distribution Channel: DTC
Other Distribution Channels:
Key Retail Partners:
2026 Projected Offline Distribution Points: 300
I spent over 20 years in corporate retail, building other people's brands, eventually managing over $2 billion in business for a Fortune 500 company. But in 2017, I was given one minute to live.
A ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Emergency surgery. I lost my first baby. It happened again the following year. I named my company Cayla Gray Fragrance, after the daughter we lost, as a way to turn grief into something that could bring beauty back into the world.
After the losses, I started taking perfumery classes to have something to distract me from my grief. But something unexpected happened. Every new scent I discovered uncovered a layer of myself I hadn't met yet. Grief, softness, strength, and quiet joy returning. Fragrance became the thing that actually moved me through the loss.
That's when I knew: A woman is not one thing and her scent shouldn't be either. Cayla Gray Fragrance is a layering system for all of her. Every chapter, every mood, every version she is becoming.
The brand was also built because I couldn't find transparent, clean fragrances when I was pregnant. So I built both: honesty in the ingredients and depth in the story.
Your fragrance. Your layers.
Insights: Kelly Kussman, Founder + CEO
Why now and why you?
Why now: Women are redefining what self-care means. It is no longer a Sunday routine or a product you buy and forget. It is an intentional, daily practice of coming back to yourself. And with the rise of AI and a world that moves faster than ever, the desire to slow down, to be present, to create moments that are fully and completely yours, has never been stronger.
Fragrance sits at the center of that shift. It is one of the most personal, sensorial acts of self-care a woman can bring into her day. It connects her to memory, to mood, to the version of herself she is stepping into. We are in the era of the wellness ritual, and fragrance is having its moment. Every brand, celebrity, and influencer is launching one right now. But most of them are launching a product. We are not a product. We are a story that has been lived and a system that was built to help other women find their own.
Why me: I found that truth in my own life first. After losing my babies, perfumery became my ritual before I even knew that was what it was. Every new scent I worked with helped me move through grief in a way that nothing else had. It reconnected me to myself, layer by layer.
Cayla Gray Fragrance exists to give other women that same experience. A layering system for the self, for every chapter and every version of her worth honoring.
What fuels your competitive advantage?
Our competitive advantage lives in three places: product innovation, a philosophy rooted in scent as self-care, and a founder story that cannot be manufactured.
On the product side, we are not standing still. While most fragrance brands are releasing another eau de parfum, we are creating entirely new categories. Scentstones bring passive, clean scent into the home in a way that feels like art, not air freshener. Scentcharms extend the ritual into something wearable and personal. Slumber, our functional wellness fragrance launching in 2026, is designed specifically to support rest and wind-down, meeting the growing consumer demand for fragrance that does something and doesn’t just smell like something. This fall, we are introducing a new format that prepares the skin for fragrance, creating a more intimate, longer-lasting layering experience. It is a category that does not yet exist in retail.
We are also one of the few fragrance companies that fully discloses every ingredient. Not because we have to, but because we believe a woman has the right to know exactly what she is putting on her body.
And underneath all of it is a story that drives every product decision we make. Cayla Gray Fragrance was not built in a boardroom. It was built in grief, in recovery, and in the deep belief that fragrance has the power to move a woman back to herself.
That is not something a brand can copy. It is something only we can carry.
What’s your proudest accomplishment to date?
What I am most proud of is that every single thing we have built, we built ourselves. No investors. No paid media. No personal following to lean on when we launched. Just a story worth telling, a product worth standing behind, and an absolute refusal to quit. We grew from zero Instagram followers and 100 personal connections to nearly 9,000 followers and over 10,000 email subscribers—entirely through word of mouth, community, and showing up in rooms where people needed to hear what we were building.
In an industry that is widely known as pay-to-play, we found another way. Authentic connection turned out to be our most powerful marketing channel, and the women who found us stayed because the story meant something to them personally.
We are now just beginning to layer in paid marketing for the first time, which means everything that comes next is built on a foundation that was never dependent on spend to survive. And we are entering our first conversations with investors, not because we need saving, but because we are ready to scale something that already works.
Building a brand with integrity, from nothing, on the other side of personal heartbreak, and watching it grow into a community of women who feel seen by it—that is what I am most proud of.
What is the one thing you wish someone had told you?
Trust your gut. And stop outsourcing what you already instinctively know.
I spent years in corporate retail developing a sharp sense for what works, what sells, what connects with a customer, and what doesn't. I built massive businesses on that instinct. But when I started Cayla Gray Fragrance, I second-guessed myself constantly. I hired people to tell me things I already knew. I let outside voices talk me out of decisions that turned out to be right.
The truth is, no one knows your brand, your customer, or your vision the way you do. Advisors, consultants, and mentors can be valuable, but they are working from the outside in. You are working from the inside out. There is a difference, and it matters.
The moments I am most proud of at Cayla Gray Fragrance are the ones where I trusted myself and moved forward anyway even when I wasn't sure, even when it felt risky, even when no one else had done it quite that way yet.
I wish someone had told me earlier that the instinct you have spent decades building is not something to be doubted. It is your greatest competitive advantage. Use it.
What would you tell your past self before starting this journey?
Get excited about the rollercoaster you are about to get on. Really lean into it.
There will be losses, more than you expect, and some that will genuinely knock the wind out of you. But every single one of them is teaching you something. Every wrong hire, every missed launch window, every partnership that doesn't pan out, every moment you wish you could take back is actually just making you faster, more decisive, and clearer on what you are and are not. You don't fail less as you go; you just fail faster, and that turns out to be its own kind of progress.
But here is the thing I really wish I had understood sooner: Please slow down long enough to celebrate the wins. Not just the big ones, but the small ones too. The first stranger who buys your product, the first retailer who says yes, the first time a woman tells you your scent changed something for her. Those moments matter just as much as the revenue milestones. It is so easy to check a goal off your list and immediately shift your eyes to the next one.
That drive is part of what makes you good at this. But if you are always chasing the next thing, you will look back one day and realize you moved through some of the most meaningful moments of your life without fully being in them.
What does success look like in the next 3-5 years?
Success in the next 3-5 years looks like Cayla Gray Fragrance becoming the brand women reach for when they want to come back to themselves. It means expanded brand awareness, not just in the fragrance space but in the broader wellness conversation where we belong. It means women who have never heard of us discovering that there is a brand that was built for every layer of who they are—not just one version of them.
It means continued profitability and expanded margins, built on a business model that grows with intention. We have proven we can build something real without outside funding, and the next chapter is about scaling that foundation smartly, increasing efficiency, deepening our product margins, and building the kind of financial health that gives us the freedom to keep innovating on our own terms.
It means finding the right investor partners. People who understand that we are not just building a product line—we are building a movement—and people who share our commitment to doing it with integrity. The right partners will accelerate what we have already proven is working without changing the soul of why we built it.
It means growing an internal team that is as passionate about this mission as I am—people who show up every day because the work means something to them personally.
And most importantly, it means continuing to create innovation that reminds women of their own layers. New delivery systems, new rituals, new ways for fragrance to meet her wherever she is in her day, her life, her story. We are just getting started on what scent as self-care can actually look like when it is given the space and resources to fully come to life.
What's one industry trend that is overhyped, and what's being overlooked?
The most overhyped trend in fragrance right now is the launch itself. Every brand, every celebrity, every influencer has released a fragrance in the last two years because the category is having a moment and everyone wants in. The shelves and feeds are flooded with beautiful bottles that have very little story behind them. Fragrance became a marketing vehicle, and for a lot of brands, that is all it is.
What is being overlooked is intentionality. The brands that will last in this space are not the ones who launched because the timing was right. They are the ones who had something real to say and built a product system around that truth. Fragrance is intimate in a way that most categories are not. It lives on your skin. It connects to your memory. It marks transitions in your day and your life. That is not something you can manufacture with a celebrity name and a public relations moment.
At Cayla Gray Fragrance, every product we create starts with an emotion, a feeling, a layer of a woman's experience that we want to honor. We are not launching fragrances because the category is hot. We have been building in this space since before it became crowded, and we will still be here when the noise settles because we were never here for the moment. We were here for the meaning.
The brands that understand that distinction are the ones worth watching.
How do you think the industry needs to evolve?
The fragrance industry is one of the last categories in beauty that has been allowed to stay secretive, and that needs to change. Fragrance companies are not legally required to disclose what is inside the word "fragrance" on an ingredient label, and most of them have used that loophole for decades. As consumers become more educated and more demanding about what they put on their bodies, that era is ending. The industry needs to catch up, not because regulators are forcing it to, but because the women buying these products deserve to know what they are actually wearing.
Transparency is not just an ethical responsibility. It is a creative opportunity. When you are proud of what is inside your product, you show it. That confidence is part of the brand story.
Beyond transparency, fragrance is long overdue for real innovation. It is a category that has largely operated the same way for decades: a bottle, a spray, a singular scent applied and forgotten. The rituals around it have barely evolved. There is so much unexplored territory in how fragrance can be delivered, layered, and experienced throughout a woman's day, from the moment she wakes up to the moment she winds down for sleep. Functional fragrance, scent systems, new formats that meet women in entirely new ways—that is where the white space is, and very few brands are doing the work to get there.
The industry needs to stop protecting old habits and start building new ones.
If you could wave a magic wand, what one wish would you make for your business?
The right investor partner. That is the honest answer.
Not just capital, but the kind of partner who believes in what we are building deeply enough to give us the freedom to keep building it our way. Someone who understands that the soul of this brand is what makes it work, and that protecting that is not a risk—it is the strategy.
What I am looking for is a partner who brings more than a check. An expert advisory board of people who have scaled beauty brands, who understand the wellness consumer, who have navigated retail, digital, and community-driven growth, and who want to be in the room thinking alongside us. Not directing from above but genuinely invested in the outcome and generous with their perspective.
We have built something real without that support system. I can only imagine what will become possible with it. The foundation is solid. The brand has proven it connects. The innovation pipeline is full. What we need now is the right partnership to unlock the next chapter—one that accelerates our growth without asking us to become something we are not in order to get there.
That is the wish. The right people, at the right table, for the right reasons.
