How a perfume DAO brought the ‘scent of the metaverse’ to luxury store Harvey Nichols.

Earlier this month, a new fragrance, Metaverse Scent, was launched by iconic London department store Harvey Nichols. But this was not any ordinary smell; It was created as a decentralized autonomous organization (Dao) under the Niche fragrance house Rook Perfumes.

DAO members buy an NFT “ticket of entry” that gives them a months-long learning experience before the smell of the metaverse is created.

“They are now the perfumers of every department,” Nadim Crowe, founder of Rook Perfumes, told Decrypt. “The formula, the packaging, the design, I had to go through all the makeup removers to get the final formula—and everything involved was named after the scent of the Metaverse package.”

Rook Perfumes built on its relationship with Harvey Nichols to bring Metaverse fragrances to store shelves, Crowe explained. “They were very interested in the Metaverse scent concept – I think mainly because they liked the way it was painted,” he said. The invention's novel route was “secondary” to the department store, he said—but DAO had to approve it going on sale in the store.

“I think I'd be surprised if anyone said, ‘No, I don't want it on the shelves of Harvey Nichols,'” Crowe said. “If they all said, ‘No way, we don't want it there,' for whatever reason, I'm sure, I wouldn't have put it up there for sale.”

The smell of thought

Crowe approached Melissa Gilmore—founder of Web3 creative studio Lily & Piper—who conceived the idea during the Covid-19 lockdown—for help in bringing The DAO to fruition.

“We came up with the concept of inviting people with a passion for fragrance from different perspectives to create a fragrance with me,” he explained. Be co-owners of that scent.

“At the time, you feel like you have to bend your head a little bit to figure out how it's going to work,” Gilmore said. “We really had no idea how this was going to turn out.”

Creating the perfume with DAO “was a mix of open discussions between the NFT buyers, me and Warren the graphic designer,” Crowe said, with the team “thinking about different art forms, ideas, ideas of the metaverse that the fragrance could take inspiration from.” Those ideas then went to an “interactive whiteboard” to be voted on by DAO members.

Because scent samples are flammable and considered a dangerous good by the postal service, it was a challenge to keep DAO members up-to-date with the latest perfume makeup. As a result, Crowe himself served as the final arbiter of the decision-making process. “From the beginning we set boundaries which, in the end, will always be an interpretation of the group's contributions as a perfumer myself,” he says.

“It was my experience [that] It's as small as a hive — you need a queen bee, Gilmore said, explaining that DAOs need a “motivating force” to bring people together. “This is the thing of the ages that needs a charismatic leader,” she added.

“The diplomacy of that is complicated to negotiate,” Crowe said. “For us, it's about creating an end product that's desirable and appealing. It wasn't necessarily that every individual on the team loved the final scent and wanted it to be their signature fragrance.”

And sending samples could make fully decentralized production even more possible, he added, adding, “It's going to be harder to keep everyone happy because you end up with this soup of crap and feedback.”

Use Web3 faithfully

He dismissed perfume houses that tried to “jump over” Web3 without accepting the underlying philosophy.

“It's very easy to put the word ‘cyber' on the front of a product, put some LEDs on the label, stuff it in a box and say, ‘This is an NFT and it's related to Metadata,'” he said. “

As for the perfume, it's an “unusual” fragrance, Crowe said. Rook Perfumes' own notes describe it as having notes of “white smoke, hot sauce, digital rose and heavenly incense”. Crowe said: “It's important to me to make that world of holographic art and the smell that connects the almost synthetic materials and medium to the natural world.

That, he explained, means adapting the natural ingredients used by Rock Perfumes “to a more artificial, I guess, ‘AI' understanding of them.” A “very large amount” of rose oxide is combined with olibanum volcano gum. This, he says, brings back memories of dusting old desktop computers, the smell of hot laser printer paper and hot capacitors.

Incense, on the other hand, sets off the “ethereal, almost spiritual” feel of NFT's artwork. Crowe added: “I think smell is always a sense that gets left behind a little bit in the worlds of games and the worlds of art.

“After months, months, and now that we're in luxury retail in Knightsbridge, it's been quite a journey,” he said. “It's not easy, but from this concept of the metaverse and digital art to owning a product on the shelf to what I've always called Earthworld.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward.