Perfume lovers now have an easy and affordable way to access a supply of over 350 top designer fragrances, including Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Hermes, Gucci and Marc Jacobs. By subscribing to Scentbird.com, they will receive a new fragrance each month “in a sleek and beautiful purse-sized spray,” the startup promises.
Subscribers can choose their fragrance based on suggestions from Scentbird’s “TruScent Recommender,” which leverages a database of thousands of scent profiles and hundreds of thousands of user reviews. Or, find their match searching by brand, mood, occasion or personality.
Behind ScentBird are three Russians startup entrepreneurs who now live in New York City.
According to ScentBird’s website, CEO Mariya Nurislamova devoted her life to applied mathematics, computer science and ballroom dances before realizing her “passion for perfume.” Previoulsy, she co-founded Beta Week, a Moscow conference gathering Russian and US startup entrepreneurs and investors.
Startup entrepreneur Sergey Gusev, who defines himself as an “expert in growth hacking and gamification,” previously co-founded Russian social commerce site SocialMart.
Andrei Rebrov, “a coding Ninja,” spent 6 years as senior developer with Luxoft and other large IT consulting firms prior to joining ScentBird.
Launched in September 2014, the New York-based startup has just secured $650,000 in an investment round led by TMT Investments, a fund with Russian connections traded on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange. Dominion Capital, a New-York based investment firm, also participated in the round along with unnamed individual investors.
Scentbird is not the only startup in this business. It competes with such companies as Getbergamot.com, Olfactif.com and Pinrose.com.
“However, these are focused on niche and artisan perfumes, which is a very small segment,” Gusev told East-West Digital News. “Our market is much broader, since it includes such brands as D&G, Versace, Gucci and so on.”
Beauty subscription boxes such as Glossybox – a German startup which is also active in the US market – are another kind of competition, but their assortment includes a wide range of beauty products.
