Our perfume line is here

yay!

For the past year, I’ve been mentioning, here and on Twitter, that I’ve been working on a perfume line. That sounds like the kind of thing I would just say. But it is a real project, that is now extremely real — our perfumes are launching this week.

The line is called Scout Dixon West, named after the creative director, my dear friend and now co-founder, Scout. You know how Christian Dior worked with some other guys, but you don’t know those other guys, you just know Christian Dior? I am the other guys, along with Cate, who plays an important advisory role. Scout dreams the beautiful dream, I do everything I can to build the bridge into reality, Cate does the business equivalent of making sure we don’t step on rakes.

If you like to shop for perfume in person, they will be available physically at Ministry of Scent in San Francisco, Scent Bar in LA (as of the launch) and NYC (shortly after), and Arielle Shoshana in DC. 

If you like to buy perfume online, and you join the mailing list here, you can get early access on Thursday. Your tasty early access incentive: if you’re one of the first 25 people who buys a full bottle, Scout will send you a personal letter in the mail, and she writes good letters. Also, a purchase of a sample pack gets you a 10% discount on a subsequent full bottle purchase.

Finally: we will be doing a LAUNCH PARTY in SF, at the Pacific Heights location of Ministry of Scent on September 14th. Come by at 4 PM to hang, smell the scents, learn more about the line, say hi to me, meet Scout, and have a spritzer. It will fill up.

The perfumes are exceptional. One is a dark and lustrous incense-y vanilla, one is a fresh coniferous aromatic, one is a nostalgic and fucked up gourmand. That is all I can say on this particular day—we are not revealing any more specifics quite yet. In the coming days, on her TikTok, there will be videos describing each of the scents, and on Thursday, I’ll send out an email containing my detailed thoughts on them.

But why do a perfume line?

Perfume is an odd industry to be in, here in the Bay. Sure, if I were still living in LA, land of aesthetics-maxxing, it would be utterly normal. But here, everyone here is working on something in AI, or neurotech, or psychedelics, or doing something that can only be understood when you are on psychedelics. Sometimes I meet someone at a party and I tell them I’m working on a perfume business, and they look at me like, what else, waiting for me to mention some exotic property of the perfume we’re selling, like it captures carbon or reverses aging. No: our products just smell good.

Upon the revelation that I’m simply working on a beauty project, I am sometimes then asked: why that? I want to say: because good smells are good? We are not close to capacity when it comes to excellent smells in the world. Perfume is a mature art form at its height that I am eager to help push forward. I would like people to experience olfactory bliss, to touch each other’s wrists with their noses in crowded corridors, to entrance each other in dimly-lit rooms. That is a legitimate concern that doesn’t require justification. 

But this rejoinder is a little pat. It’s true that if you look at my life history on paper, “perfume CEO” is not the obvious thing you would expect of me at this age after everything has gone before. Also, before considering the perfume company, I was thinking about working on things that are more “impact-oriented,” as they say—I’d talked to friends working on AI risk, bio-risk, and climate intervention, and they all seemed like plausible options. In a slightly different life, I might have become an advocate for one of these worthy causes.

However, I have come to realize three important facts about the projects in my life.

The first is that you can broadly divide them into two categories: those that come from a place of I ought to do that so I should make it happen, and those that come from a place of, this is an odd thing to do, maybe, but all the puzzle pieces are here in front of me.

Here are some projects from the first category:

• Writing a serial online novel about vampires

• Learning how to be a software developer

• Becoming involved in government policy

• Starting a pharmacy in Próspera

• Founding a meditation research center

• Making a second full-length musical album

Here are some projects from the second category:

• Working in the fine dining industry

• Writing a spate of blog posts about my adventures in self-therapy

• Moving from normal-ish copywriting to weird-ish coaching

• Quitting my bartending job and leaving Toronto without a real plan except “find things and write about them”

• Writing a book about being bad at chess

If you have observed my life at all, you will notice something about this latter list: it contains projects that actually happened. The projects on the first list were all eagerly investigated, and some were pursued for a time. (Have you read the whitepaper I co-authored about career paths for researchers in academia, which will not excite most of you?) But nothing came together in the end. Thus, the next important fact: the projects I feel I ought to do, do not happen.

But the third fact is the most interesting one of all, to me, which is that the projects on the first list still feel more reasonable. It is odd. There is a part of me that continuously discerns what feels sensible to do, on an aesthetic level—it detects whether a given venture is the kind of activity a serious, reasonable person would get up to. That part of me has rebelled at the outset of everything I end up doing well. It has a poor sense of what works for me.

Over at one of my favorite blogs, Common Cog, Cedric Chin writes that there is a style of thinking that is reliably exhibited by successful entrepreneurs. It is called effectual thinking, and it’s the type of improvisatory, reality-based thinking that follows the question “what effects can be produced with the spread of resources in front of me?” He contrasts this with causal thinking, which is the opposite pattern—looking towards an ideal outcome, and then trying to work backwards to derive the actions required to eventually bring about that future.

Let’s look at the perfume company, and the resources that were in front of me last year:

• One of my best friends is extremely talented, with a wild charisma level and a razor-sharp curatorial instinct, and she can’t stop coming up with fragrance ideas

• My wife is extremely talented and eager to provide advisory input to a non-eggheaded project devoted to making the world prettier

• I’ve been a fragrance fan for over a decade, and arguably became obsessed in the last five years

• I’ve done copywriting for clients ranging from Proctor & Gamble to fun Swedish galleries

• I am a scrappy generalist who finds it fun to learn how to perform many small tasks, in the manner required by a CPG company

My effectual thinking self looks at this list and says: yes, obviously do the company, it’s staring right at you. What else do you need to see! My causal thinking self still feels like “and then I did a perfume company with my buds” is a somewhat odd-sounding thing to append to my biography. But my effectual thinking self, at this point, regards that as a positive signal, so here we are.

Nobody chooses their ecological niche, but you can choose to strive for a perfect fit.