The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview with D.S. & Durga founders Kavi Ahuja and David Seth Moltz now on iTunes and Spotify.
GLOW JOURNAL: Kavi, you grew up in New Jersey, but I understand that you spent most of your childhood summers in India, where your parents are from; and David, you grew up by the ocean in Massachusetts, so I imagine your respective upbringings might come into play here… what are your very first memories of scent?
DAVID: I have three, and I guess two are related to where I’m from. There’s the smell of the ocean, which you can smell right from my house- every day, around two or three o’clock, the sea breeze comes up and you can smell it. And then there’s this smell of smoky woods. There’s these woods behind my parent’s house, so in the winter time when it’s cold, the cat would come in and it smelled kind of bacon-y. So there’s that smell. And then there’s also lemon dish soap, which is one of the first things I remember the smell of because we used to play in the sink with all the different kinds of spices and soaps.
KAVI: For me, specifically related to India, I feel that I have a very kind of privileged history with flowers- with smelling beautiful flowers. Everyone knows what jasmine smells like and what rose smells like, but in India they were used so much in different ceremonies and rituals. We would go on a nightly walk in the summer to India Gate, which is this kind of promenade that you stroll in in Delhi, and vendors would sell long garlands of white Jasmine flowers, really beautifully strung together. My grandmother would twirl them in her hair and wrap her bun in them. Then, when we got home that night, we would put them under our pillows so we could get wafts of it all night. Roses and marigolds are used in wedding ceremonies, and I had tuberose on my nightstand every night because it was my favourite smell and it just kind of lights up the whole bedroom at night.
I’ve not just smelled all these beautiful flowers, I have these memories deeply connected to them. I think of India and I think of the most beautiful, exotic flowers and my memories of them in use.
DAVID: What about burnt tyres?
KAVI: Yeah! As soon as you get off the plane in India-
DAVID: – before you get off…
KAVI: … you smell rubber. Burnt rubber, burnt anything. People are just using whatever for fuel, and people are just getting rid of whatever by burning it.
DAVID: India smells like burnt tyres and flowers.
What a nice contrast! Flowers are so romantic, and then just… burnt tyres.
KAVI: Yeah, it’s true. It’s really true. It’s a very distinct smell, as soon as you land on the plane.
DAVID: The scent for me like that in Boston is boat gas. Whenever I smell boat gas, I’m brought right back to home. There’s that smell when you get near a marina and you smell the boat gas, that is such a “home” smell to me.
It’s such a cliché to talk about scent and memory, but I feel like it has to be done.
KAVI: Oh yeah, it makes so much sense.
DAVID: I think it’s a cliché because it gets used too much in marketing. Because people clutch at straws about what to talk about, and also people are obsessed with nostalgia and think that their childhood… well, everyone’s childhood seemed magical, because it was childhood, and then you go back and you see that it’s changed and it wasn’t that way. And you’ll never find it because nostalgia is just a thing in our minds.
It’s like visiting where you used to holiday as a child. You thought ‘This is the best place in the whole world.’
KAVI: And then you go back…
Away from scent, do you have any early memories of beauty in a broader sense?
KAVI: I do. Indian women are not afraid of glamour. When I grew up, I would have friends who were like “Oh, my mom doesn’t wear makeup,” or “My mom doesn’t get dressed up,” that was so exotic to me. It’s a big part of Indian culture. First of all, Indian people are very, very social. Going out is a big part of growing up Indian- watching your parents get ready for Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, Wednesday night parties and just socialising all the time and getting all glammed up with the saris and jewellery and makeup. So I’ve always loved beauty and it’s always been an important ritual. Watching my mom get ready is one of my fondest memories.
I’ve always loved the ritual of it and have always understood the value of it and how to do it- how to put makeup on and all that stuff. I never really needed to learn. I was taught at a very young age just by watching my mom.
David, any from your end?
DAVID: Well, specific to the beauty category, no, because I wasn’t aware of it. I mean, there was Polo in a green bottle and that whole thing, and Pierre Cardin and the way those bottles looked. I was interested that, and that seems like it fed into, in general, the whole vision that Ralph Lauren sold America in the 80s. This weird hunting, golden age Americana thing definitely seeped into my consciousness because it seemed like that was the way it was, but it was probably just him. Also, being from a small new England town, the guys in the town next to me literally wore red pants with no irony. There were yacht people… I know that’s not beauty though.
KAVI: It’ll be interesting to see… I put on makeup today for the first time in a while, and my son was like “What’s going on?! Where are you going?!” And I was like “Oh no, we have a call.” It’ll be interesting to see what the virus does to grooming rituals in general because I know a lot of people, including myself, and David who’s grown a beard, are just saying “What’s the point?” I can get by without a manicure for three months, or I can get by without getting my hair or anything done for so long, and you’re like “Oh, I still feel okay.” And yes, you’re probably itching to get a few grooming things done that you can’t do yourself, but in general, I think it’s just showing people that there’s no need to be so obsessive about it. You will still be you and you can still be beautiful without all the visits to the salon and the external grooming that we were used to.
That’s definitely what’s happening over here. We have just reopened pretty much everything. I rushed to get my eyebrows done, but I can’t quite be bothered getting my nails done. They are still so weak from soaking off the SNS four months ago that I’m like “I just don’t know if I’m ready to go back.”
KAVI: Totally. And you’re probably just enjoying having that change, and having natural nails for a while.
My understanding of it is that skincare is booming, but there’s not really any point putting on a thick foundation unless it makes you feel good.
KAVI: And definitely not lipstick. Sometimes I’ve made the mistake of putting on lipstick to leave the house, and it’s just getting all over my mask. So really, that was a mistake.
Kavi, I read that you studied art history before you moved into architecture, and David, you went to film school before becoming a musician- but when you were both younger, what did you think you would be when you grew up?
DAVID: I was always a music musician. I was in bands when I was a really little kid. I was in a band called Satan’s Little Helpers in third or fourth grade. We were trying to play death metal on a yellow plastic box. So I always knew that, no matter what, I was going to be a musician. And I still am, I was in bands that were signed and we toured, but never took off to grand success. And then when perfume came along and I started doing that, it took off and I switched directions. But I still… right before this call, I was working on mixing a song because I’m going to release a bunch of music soon. I still do release stuff.
Well it’s all kind of storytelling, isn’t it?
DAVID: Yeah. I do have something germinating in the back of my mind, which is the way it always works, and it takes a while to seep out. I can make perfume, yes. I can take an idea and express it aromatically. I can express it in poetic language. I can express it in music, and I can somewhat express it in visuals, like drawings. So I really would like to make something… I love the idea of multifaceted artwork that you could really get inside, but in a non-obtrusive, didactic way, where it’s like “You have to do this.” I has to be much more about exploring the world of this on your own.
If you think about Lord of the Rings. That’s one of the greatest worlds ever made by someone. It’s so rich, and so much is happening and he’s taking in so much influence from Celtic mythology and Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon stuff, and the modern problems with World War, and writing an entire world that could go off into all these different directions. I feel like that’s the way my mind works. I have this whole world that my band is a part of and I make songs with, and I can always go back and forth between scents that describe music, music that describes scent, words that describe music, you know, that kind of thing.
KAVI: What did I want to be when I was younger… I knew that I wanted to go into something creative and artistic, because that was always my interest. My parents were both doctors and, generally, in Indian culture it’s very encouraged to go into something like medicine or law or business- even though I had no idea what business meant when I was younger, so I had no intention of going into it.
But just something related to art and beauty, because that’s always been important to me.
Was there anything that either of you learned in the early stages of your creative careers, if you will, that you find that you’re still applying to your work now?
DAVID: Just the idea that you can make whatever you want. There aren’t any rules, I think. That’s kind of a quintessentially American thing of like “do it yourself.” I think sometimes we really wait for so long, until it’s going to be right. “I’ll finally release this one.” For instance, I would love to make and know I can make bar soaps that are so amazing and smell so good with all of these stories. I don’t know when we’ll do it, but the world is your oyster. You can just make it.
Our brand DNA never goes away. No matter what we do, there’s always a part of it that is really our voice, Kavi and I’s together. It wouldn’t be the same if it was just me or just her. I think levity might be the best word. We don’t take it too seriously, and we have fun with it, but it has poignancy behind it. And we’re always going to do it our way. A lot of brands that have founders at the helm are like that, where it’s your ideas rather than being like “We’re going to make perfume that’s all based on the woods.” And then you try so hard to fit, like “This one’s going to be like what it’s like under a log, and “This one’s going to be like this pine tree,” and you just run out of stuff. If Kavi and I are all of a sudden super interested in a Caribbean plant that we find, or an old record that we find, it’s totally within the realm of reason to make the D.S. & Durga version of that record or or that plant as a scent. And it won’t feel out of brand.
I love that. What about you Kavi?
KAVI: I went to architecture school, and I think what I learned there that applies to what I do now is just kind of learning to critique your own work and always step back and review- to be thorough and be careful in your work, because someone is going to find a hole in it right away. It’s just better if you can be careful about it and find the holes in your own work before someone else does. I’m not saying that I always do that perfectly, but it’s always good to just step back and try to view it differently, through a few different lenses, before you put something out into the world in a design sense.
It’s sort of being objective about something so subjective.
KAVI: It’s definitely a balance of being objective and subjective. When it’s our brand and we’ve designed it, we have certain license to do what we want with it. But now that it’s growing and it’s visible on different platforms…there’s digital, there’s social, there’s how it looks on the website, how it looks in the retail store, you need some consistency with that.
Consistency is also part of it because, in the beginning, I just kind of wanted to do what I wanted because I liked it and I could do it. But now, that doesn’t fly anymore. You have to be brand with a capital B. I think I resisted that for a long time, because we just hated the word “brand”. It sounded very corporate to us. It sounded very inauthentic, and kind of like you’re making a brand in a board room, and that was really not what we were about. Were we like “We’re just doing this organically, this way and that way.” It’s taken some time to realise all of the reasons why that just doesn’t work for a brand. And now we’ve come to embrace the word brand and realise that if you’re going to have other people involved and it’s going to be visible in all these different ways, then you need to have that consistency.
DAVID: With what you’re saying, I feel like it’s taken me a while to learn the carefulness that you’re talking about. I feel like both in music and maybe in the beginning of the perfume for me, when you’re in your twenties, it is very hard to not want to do every little thing in one statement. And so many times now, when I’m writing the story of the scent of even making the formula or in music, the more you can strip away, the stronger the actual finished piece of art. You should be able to throw away all the ideas that you thought you wanted to express so hard in what you’re making to get to the essence of what it is. It takes a non attachment to your initial ideas and it takes a lot of restraint. And I used to not have that. I would write music that was so crazy, and with so much extra crap going on. If you can say something in a shorter way, it’s much more powerful than if you try to fit every tiny little thing in it just because you like this word and this idea. Kavi’s always been better at that.
KAVI: Restraint, that’s a good word for it. And curation. We have endless ideas. There’s endless good ideas out there. We have many ideas all the time, but you have to just curate it.
DAVID: Right. Like, are you just going to invest $30,000 into each idea? It’s not possible. You have to just pick and choose what you want to do. I have a million scents that I wish I could put out so bad, that I wear and stuff, but it doesn’t fit into the line until it does. We’ve been doing these studio juices that are like drops, where I just hand make 50 bottles, and Kavi gets to do crazy, colourful artwork. It’s been very artistically opening for me because I can just do exactly what I want, and then it’s over. You don’t have to be like “Well, we’re putting into the budget that we’re making all of these.” It’s hard to bring a product to market, but we used to just hand make everything ourselves and we still know how to do it, it’s just that you can’t really run the business like that at our stage.
I love that word- restraint. I think there is so much power in restraint, regardless of what industry you’re in. So it was while you were both living and working in New York City that you met and fell in love, and it was in around 2007 that David began creating fragrances as gifts for friends. I have a few questions here. Firstly, David, what led you to start creating fragrances?
DAVID: I’ve always been interested in scents, but I didn’t know that I would go there. I was getting very interested in the plants that were growing out of the city cracks around me, and I met Kavi and we would go away on the weekends and we would go to old bookstores, and I just found this whole section of old herbals, and native American plant wisdom, and things about Elizabethan women in still rooms making their own [fragrances]. This was in the early 00s, where everyone just wanted to make everything themselves. It was a real “do it yourself” time. So I started making some lotions, I made a beer, we made a tonics, and then I wanted to make perfumes.
I’m just a rabbit hole person. If I get interested in something, I will really dig deep into it. So I started getting oils and making these things, and then we made presents for friends and they were like “Oh, I love this.” And Kavi was just like “Why don’t we start a business? I’ll make labels for it, and you make the scents.” And, lo and behold, that didn’t really happen much in the perfume world because it’s very top down, and it just took off and we were like “Oh, we can actually transition our ideas in music and architecture into perfume and packaging and brand.”
We didn’t know anything about perfume, the perfume business, or anything about business. I honestly did not understand the word marketing.
Well my next question was going to be about how you’re entirely self taught- how does one teach themselves to make perfumes? But you’ve kind of answered that, because you just did a deep dive.
DAVID: Yeah, I researched everything I could. Those old books helped because they do talk about combinations of things. It was hours and hours and hours of experimenting and writing every single thing down.
KAVI: David was a very kind of obsessive personality where he gets really into something and we’ll just go down the rabbit hole, all the way. He has like a lot of things that he just kind of started getting into and then went all the way. He’s an expert in several things, just like perfume. He became an expert in it just by just by figuring it out and making it part of his life.
DAVID: I just understand how fragrances work together. I can smell a flower and start to understand it. I’m always smelling things and making mental notes and writing notes in my phone and stuff if I need to pull them out later. For instance, we’re making this scent this summer and there’s a note in there of privet, these bushes that bloom right now, literally outside this window. To me, it smells like summer. They smell a little bit like bandaids. It’s a weird aggressive plasticky, flower smell. I’ve always wanted to use it in something. And I can, because I know how to make it happen. I do think anyone could learn it.
I think I could figure out any creative discipline, but I would never be able to build a car engine or like or something mechanical. My mind only works in this way- I could figure out how to be a sculptor, if I put my mind to it.
If only you had the time.
DAVID: Or the interest!
The time and the inclination, two very important things.
DAVID: I’m always very excited when I find something that I’m not interested in. I love that, I love to just be like “Oh wow, I won’t spend any time [learning this].” Like I’m never going to try to learn anything about musical theatre, and that’s okay. There’s many of them, and it’s such a strength to know your faults, your weaknesses, and what you’re not interested in so that you don’t waste so much time.
Definitely. I think we all kind of do it in our late teens. You pretend to be interested in everything because you feel like you have to.
DAVID: Totally, that’s very true. Life hack- you don’t!
So, Kavi, it was you who said “Okay, there’s potential for a business here.” What was it about what David was doing that you saw a future in?
KAVI: I don’t know that I thought there was a future in it. I don’t think we knew. I don’t think we knew what we were doing when we started, but I knew that it sounded fun. It sounded like a project, and I probably missed that about architecture school. I had been working in an architecture office for about two years after getting my master’s degree. I went to this really artsy architecture school. It was like art school. You just did a bunch of projects dove deep into an idea, then presented it and moved on. I missed projects and making things. I thought I was going into a creative career, but the truth of architecture or working in an office is that there’s a lot of drudgery and you don’t really get to be creative until you’re at the top. So I thought “This seems like a really fun thing.”
The other thing was that our friends liked the scents that we made. If they didn’t like it we probably wouldn’t have tried it out.
DAVID: But we lived in Brooklyn, where so many of our friends had businesses- they’d make jewellery or ties or shoes, or they’d started a cafe. So it’s definitely part of that DIY Brooklyn thing. When I first moved to Brooklyn in the year 2002, it just felt like anything was possible. Everyone you met was doing something cool. I remember, within the first month of moving there, going to this way out place in Bushwick where it was just all of these artists, selling art. It felt like we were on Haight Ashbury 1968, just like the centre of the universe. It was crazy. And you could just do anything. Part of it is being in your twenties, where everything feels endless and possible too, but it was right place right time- New York City, in the 00s, in your twenties.
KAVI: It was definitely a heyday.
I feel like it’s one thing to have this great idea, and to have this beautiful product that all of your friends love and to be surrounded by creatives, but then to actually turn it into a business is another thing entirely. So where did you go from there? How did you start to manufacture on a larger scale? How did you fund it? How did you begin physically creating the brand?
KAVI: It was not easy and it evolved so much. That was over 10 years ago, and we’re still a very small, independent brand. The way perfume looked back then is just completely different. When I would go to buy bottles and people would tell me the minimum was 100 bottles, that sounded overwhelming to me. Everything was so different. I was printing things on the printer at my architecture office and hand applying them and cutting them with an X-ACTO knife. It started out very homemade and handmade. Every time we got a little bit more money, we put it right back in and improved things a little bit, a little bit, a little bit until maybe five years ago, when we were able to change it completely into what we thought was like “Okay, we can present D.S. & Durga for real,” which is the way it looks now- something that I could visually, aesthetically be proud of. So it took a long time to get there.
I think most things do. I get a bit weird when people are like “Yep, it just blew up!”
DAVID: Right. And we also had so much help. For the longest time it was just Kavi and I, and then we had one employee that helped ship, and one employee, Sarah, who is still a part of our company today, who had worked at a lot of other real companies and knew what to do.
Real companies?!
DAVID: That’s the thing, we’ve been faking it ’til we make it for so long. To this day, I think our office has 10 people. We’re super, super small. We’ve always outsourced some bigger things, like production and stuff. Perfume is very top down- you can’t just make a bunch of perfume and sell it to people, it has to go through a lot of legal ramifications, like the alcohol and fire department let alone the regulatory for safety. There’s so much if you want to do it the right way, and we always wanted to do it by the book. But we have an amazing team right now. We have a president that has done this before and knows a lot. We have a finance person. We have people in sales and marketing and digital, so that’s really helped, but we’re still super small. We laugh about it all the time. We’re still friends.
But I think there’s something nice about growing slowly. There’s the temptation to hire heaps of staff really quickly, and then you run the risk of being that arsehole boss that we’ve all had who’s bitten off more than they can chew.
KAVI: Yeah. We have a very strong, solid foundation I think.
DAVID: I mean, I was receiving pallets of boxes and was shipping and moving stuff around just five years ago, you know? So we are still doing lots of that stuff, which made things move much slower. Now we can focus a little bit more on creative and bigger decisions and collaborations, because we have the time for it.
So we know that David obviously is the perfumer, and Kavi, you clearly have really broad design skills that have lent themselves to branding and really all visual elements of the brand, as well and your architectural background. You’ve mentioned that when you first were putting together the way everything looked and felt it was a little different- so what was your initial vision for the brand?
KAVI: David mentioned that there was kind of a zeitgeist that we were part of in Brooklyn, and it seemed everything and everyone, including ourselves, were inspired by the 19th century and just having things look and feel really handmade was kind of the mood then. So we definitely had some of that. We had a lot of hand stamping and a lot of the imperfection that you proudly wear as a badge. It was a lot of referencing the past, until I got to reflect on what we were doing as we were going and thought “What do I actually really love in design? What kind of styles and aesthetics do I love?” Really, it’s modernism, especially in architecture. So we kind of just scrapped things when we were able to and started literally very clean and fresh, which is what you see in the brand today, but still with an artful touch. It’s mostly black and white, but we use colour when we can. We try to keep the packaging very minimal and simple, which is kind of a hallmark of niche fragrance.
We have a lot of fun with the marketing , and when we make candles and pocket perfumes we do fun graphics which is an opportunity to flex design muscles and actually design something. As I’ve said before, it’s boring when you create this brand and then it just seems like it has to design itself- what do you really get to do? It’s already like a prescription of how everything should look. So within a framework we’ve tried to leave some room for us to have some fun.
DAVID: [Kavi] is changing stuff all the time. She’s very restless in one way, like that. I always say she’s a self hating baker, like she’ll make the world’s best chocolate chip cookie you’ve ever had, and you’re like “This is the best thing I’ve ever had,” and she’s like “I dunno, it’s a little chewy, right?” She can’t be like “I made this and it’s awesome.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say that she’s proud of something that she made.
Self deprecating?
DAVID: It’s not even self deprecating! I’m more self deprecating, she really just doesn’t think it’s all that good and is just waiting for the next thing. I too have an obsession with what I’m working on and the next thing and just don’t look back- we both have that thing. There’s no resting on the laurels of something that we once made, for sure.
KAVI: But if I design something and I’ve put it out, I’m already like “Oh, I have something much better I could have done.” That’s true.
DAVID: Exploration would be the word I would use, because both of us are always exploring what we love and incorporating it in. So you definitely see that in the stories for the perfume, and just what I can do in perfume now versus what I could do then, which is apples and oranges. And same with [Kavi]. If all of a sudden she’s like “I’m really into stripes,” you’re going to see stripes on something.
Also, we both have punk sensibilities. We were both into like punk at a very young age. Kavi went more into goth and stuff, and then when we met I think that went underneath, like she stopped that kind of thing for a while. We lived in this weird, 19th century nostalgia- the whole world did. And when that thing ended, there was the best breath ever. “Oh wow, we don’t have to pretend we’re living in the past. We can make the world that we want right now. We can do whatever the fuck we want.” That freedom is not going away for us.
You look at the design trends. When I moved to Brooklyn, it was trucker hats. Then that gave way to handlebar moustaches, and that handlebar moustache gave way to cactus, and around cactus, I think Kavi and I were both just like “Fuck this. We’re going to do what we want and really make a voice for it.” First of all, New York is there. We both love New York. With the brand DNA, New York and its punk heyday is a big thing. And then there’s the architecture- modernism, brutalism, Corbusier, that stuff is always going to be there. That’s not going away.
It’s cool because you could have an aesthetic, but a lot of the things I’m interested in are really, really dorky and would not look cool. For instance, I’ve already talked about Lord of the Rings. You can’t make something cool about the Lord of the Rings, right? If I’m like “This is the hobbit’s tobacco!” But if Kavi made a cool looking box, and it was slightly influenced by what Gandalf was smoking in his tobacco pipe, I bet we could do it.
KAVI: It’s my job to cool-up his lame ideas.
That’s love!
DAVID: I have this song. It’s called I Know What Good Taste Is, I Just Don’t Always Have It. I know some of the things I like are in poor taste, and I wish they were cool, but I know they’re not. But at least I’m not thinking “Oh, Spiderman is so cool!” I don’t love Spiderman, but if I did… you know. There are just certain things that you have to love, because you love them. I love middle-aged music and like medieval stuff, and that’s not going to look super cool in downtown New York.
KAVI: I think that’s definitely part of what has worked, what has made us work, what has made D.S. & Durga work for so long, is just kind of knowing what’s cool. Or, if you have something that’s outside of what people might think is cool, just putting the twist on it and making it palatable to people’s tastes.
DAVID: Remember that time we made an entire line based on iron age Scotland and Norse mythology? And then Kavi made it really beautiful and minimal, and it was exclusive at Barney’s. It was like the dorkiest, mythical thing called Highlands, but she made it look cool!
But then I would argue that the cool thing is to just like whatever shit you like.
DAVID: Well that’s the true cool.
KAVI: But you’ve still gotta sell it!
Exactly, I was about to say that I guess that’s got to translate into selling a product.
KAVI: That’s the dirty part of it that’s always going to be true.
DAVID: You just have to know, I think that’s the thing you have to know. Of course, you have to be into whatever you’re into, like Kavi’s into non-cool stuff too. It’s just knowing how… it’s such a good point. I don’t know. I feel like we could digress on that for a long time.
KAVI: You make a decision at some point. There was a point where we decided “Okay, are we gonna stay mom and pop forever? And just treat this as a project and sort of do whatever we want withe no market research, no this or that, where it doesn’t matter if we make a crazy scent and we know no one’s going to like it, but we like it? Or are you gonna go for it and see if you can make this a real brand, and one that’s more well known that just what we could do just in our own?”
And we decided to go for it. And now, it’s not just ours. We have people who care about D.S. & Durga just as much as we do. Everyone’s depending on each other to make it work, and it’s not just going to be our whims anymore. We have full respect for that. There’s a lot to consider now, and it has to be a balance.
DAVID: We have these meetings that keep us all in line. Again, I have all these crazy ideas and then everyone will laugh or vice versa. It’s not just me. We all collectively come to a decision of what would be the best thing to come out with and the way to present it. And we, by the way, do have scents that we love and no one likes, like Vio-Volta. You have to keep those in there to keep a balance to the line. You have to. You can’t just say “Everyone likes this, so let’s make a version A, a version B or C.” You have to have in there, the breadth… and my goal, and this is just me, not Kavi and not the brand, but I do want to have the world’s best perfume line with the best vetiver, the best patchouli, that whole thing. And it takes time to get there and whittle it down. But I think there’s a consistency in the quality of our fragrances that you don’t have in a lot of lines.
I would definitely agree with that. Which scents did you launch with?
What we are today started in 2015 or 16. That’s when we came out with Rose Atlantic, Radio Bombay and White Peacock Lily. But when we started, the ones that are still in the line are Cowboy Grass and Burning Barbershop. Those are the real OGs. There are old ones too, like Coriander and Freetrapper, which are still old, but the two that were there in the beginning and are still there are Burning Barbershop and Cowboy Grass which, as you can tell, are very crazy fragrances. One smells old fashioned, and Cowboy Grass smells like nothing else. It’s a really weird scent.
I was going to ask if your approach to developing fragrances changed at all when you moved from doing it just for friends and family to consumers. But, based on what you’ve just said, you’re still creating the fun stuff that you want to create, but are just thinking about what is and isn’t “cool,” in inverted commas.
DAVID: Oh yeah. I have so many scents and so many things… even if I were to come out with something that I made three years ago, I’d probably go back in and remake the formula the way I would want it today.
Before I got on this call, I have this new software that has a lot of great plugins to make your music sound a lot better. I’m going to release this song that I recorded in 2007. And if you listen to it, as it was, the song is maybe good, but the sound just is kind of flat. But I can put it through this and work on it for hours, like probably put 10 hours into it, and make it sound like really nice and present and high quality. And that’s because I’ve learned how to mix correctly.
Now, the same thing- if I were to come out with something today, now I understand how things work so much more. I would re-mix them, and it wouldn’t smell so different, but I would just understand how to create the spatial relationships with much more clarity and restraints now. I’m always learning, as a perfumer. I think that I can remake anything in a much more concise way.
This is such a broad one, but the actual process of developing a fragrance is so interesting to me. Can you talk me through it, as much or as little detail as you wish? Coming up with the idea, selecting the notes, sourcing everything, how does that process go for you?
DAVID: The one thing I’ll say, if you can try to simplify it to this, all a perfume is is the difference in weight between different materials. That’s it. If you could just weigh out all of your materials and you have this much vetiver and this much jasmine, that’s all perfume is. So you have that formula, and you can just endlessly make that. And you can make it a different strength to create different effects, less or more, you know, sometimes something with less oil in it smells stronger because the way molecules work is like being able to detect things, there’s a certain range that we can detect as humans that ends around I think it’s like 26 rings of carbon, or something like that.
I’m always coming up with ideas. I have a running list of names and ideas in my phone. In my studio, I’ll always want to work on new things. Sometimes they’ll meet in the middle. More often than not, I feel like if we’re going to come out with an idea, I could just go back to the drawing board and nail it. For instance, we are going to come out with this scent as a candle for holiday, and it’s been in my ideas since we were in little bottles way back in the day. But it’s not going to be the exact same scent, because I know much more now and I can just go in, so I’ll just make a bunch of versions and then pick the best and go from there.
You guys have created a number of limited edition fragrances for other brands and other personalities, like Levis Linda Rodin, Duran Duran- such an interesting list! How does that collaborative process differ from how you would ordinarily develop perfume?
DAVID: You have to work with someone’s own ramifications. So that’s a good thing. You get restraints put on you. But I think so few people truly understand how to make a fragrance that you end up kind of having carte blanche anyway. And then when you give it to them, you might modify it down to get them somewhere, but a lot of people need direction in the fragrance department because a lot of people don’t know how to talk about scent. They don’t know how to describe what they’re smelling. So they know what they want sometimes, but they don’t.
Someone like Linda [Rodin], she really knew what she wanted so it was very easy. She would bring me bottles and say “Something like this,” and I could copy and we could work it out, and she was really meticulous. With Levis, they had this great idea of Einstein’s jacket and what it would smell like, and I could smell the jacket and recreate it. I always say this when we’re about to collaborate with someone- I’m more interested in collaborating with other artists that I respect, where they do their thing and I do my thing. We don’t have time for me to just do a tonne of private label stuff. We do it sometimes when it makes sense, but I want someone who is an artist and thinks like an artist so I can translate their ideas into scent
Yeah, that makes sense. Kavi, is that the same for you when you’re looking at how one of those fragrances is going to look- having those kinds of restraints put in place?
KAVI: Those collaborations are tricky because I’m used to kind of just doing what I want to do visually for us. When you have other people and you have to be consistent with their brand too, it gets a little tricky. But the graphics and the palette that we use is so kind of simple and minimalist anyway, it seems to work. We just try to keep things really simple. It’s just like the easiest way to do it.
You’ve both talked in past interviews about how the perfume industry is usually dominated by these French sensibilities and your brand is quintessentially American. Two questions. Firstly, why do you think so many brands want to include some kind of French element into their fragrances? And secondly, what does it mean to you to be a “quintessentially American” fragrance house?
DAVID: I think that they want to be French because it was the birthplace of fragrance as we know it today. And so, somehow, it’s like telling the consumer that it’s high quality or premium, or like French means better. That just makes no sense to me, because it’s a lie at this point. So much great perfume in made in New York and New Jersey. I love France by the way. I absolutely love French culture, so it’s not a knock to that. I don’t like what I see as a pretentious suggestion that…
KAVI: I think that in America, for sure, we have this idea that we don’t think that French necessarily means a better or higher quality, but probably in a lot of other parts of the world it foes indicate something of value. I’m just guessing as to why France is still so dominant in terms of perfume. Of course the schools are there and it has a lot of history and [has made] so much contribution to it, but I think that’s something that we’ve always wanted to go against anyway.
DAVID: It’s very fake a lot of the times though, it’s not really French. Something like Chanel, no one’s messing with Chanel or Dior. Those are great, great French perfume brands. But if you’re made in, like, Iowa and you’re calling yourself Le Tu De something, why? Why are you doing that? It seems very untrue to what you are. And for not a good reason. It seems inauthentic to me.
KAVI: But it’s changed. Since we started, it’s changed. When we started, there were not as many American perfumers and perfumeries, and now there are many, many, so it wasn’t always this way. It’s changing rapidly.
On things changing rapidly, we’ve definitely seen a rise in the prominence of like niche fragrance houses in recent years. Why do you think consumers are really celebrating brands like yours and are happy to invest in these smaller-batch made scents?
KAVI: Authenticity, I would say. There’s just something interesting about our story, in that it’s created by actual people. There’s so many people with specific tastes, and a big corporate perfume brand isn’t going to appeal to certain types of people who want to know more about where their perfume came from and what’s behind it. People are more interested in the story of anything they buy now, I think, and especially right now in America, in New York, people really want to know who they are supporting with the money they’re spending. What kind of people are these? What kind of values do they have? Everything behind a brand matters so much more now than it ever has. What kind of people are you supporting when you buy from a brand? I think people are really interested in that now. So it’s become more important than ever to showcase who we are, what we’re about, what makes us different, what our story is and what drives us.
DAVID: Yeah, and I think we were doing that anyway, in a real way. Not because we are trying to market and pretend something. We’re not. We always have been talking about this stuff.
Basically no one can name perfumers, right? And that’s changing. If I ask you to name a chef, you can name a hundred, a musician, a painter, anything, but perfumer? People haven’t been talking about it as an art. If you get interested in painting, you wouldn’t just go and be like “I love the paintings in the Louvre.” You’d be like “I like Rodin.” You’d talk about who they are. Because I’m the perfumer and I own the brand, you are actually just smelling what I wanted to make. But there’s a middleman in most brands. Most brands are made by the same hundred perfumers that make everything, at 10 fragrance houses that make everything. I myself work with the fragrance house, but I’m the perfumer. So that’s entirely different than probably three or four brands that I can think of. Otherwise what happens is someone, maybe a creative director or a founder, is like “I want to make something that smells like the Greek coast.” And so they go to their fragrance company and they give them a piece of paper and say “I want it to smell like this.” The perfumer has maybe never been to Greece. They might not even know this person. He or she can make something that they like, that works for that piece of paper, and they give it to the person. Now that person is selling it. They like it and they decided on it, they make the name and the copy. Maybe the perfumer actually gave them a scent that’s based on this place that he had been in the west coast of Oregon, and it just so happened that he was Greece. So there’s such a disconnect between the person who made the art and the person selling the art.
I’m making the art and selling it. So if I’m going to make it smell like Big Sur After Rain, it should smell like Big Sur After Rain. We are actually like artists selling our own art. Niche brands are much more about the artistry of perfume than just the consumer aspects of a fragrance. That’s not to say there’s not a tonne of terrible niche brands and that’s not amazing mass market brands. Because, like I said, they’re all made by the same people. I mean, I love Chanel perfumes. Who could love perfume and pretend they’re not important?
Kavi, I’ve read that you aren’t a big believer in the idea of having one signature scent, which I feel is something that is pushed on us, but you prefer to pull from a fragrance wardrobe. What would your advice be to anyone who is looking to extend upon their fragrance wardrobe and find a new fragrance? Because I feel like there are so many beautiful scents out there that it can be super overwhelming for people.
KAVI: Yeah, it can. What we recommend most is to put it on your skin, because you might think you won’t like it, you might read something or hear a note and be like “Oh, I don’t like that.” People are very judgemental and stuck in their ways about that kind of thing. But if you just put something on your skin and wear it a couple of times, you will be surprised. There’s many things that I haven’t liked at first. David, one of his favourite things to do is just chase me around and test things on me.
DAVID: It’s my least favourite! Least! I hate doing it.
KAVI: That’s because I don’t really love it. He’ll put something on me and I don’t like it. And then a week later, he’s like “What do you think of this?” And I’m like “Oh my god, this is so good.” And he’s like “You hated it last week.” It happens very often.
DAVID: What you’re talking about is something very specific. It’s because people love what they’ve once smelled before. So you can trick someone. You spray it, they’re like “I don’t like it.” You go back in a couple of days and they say “This smells familiar. I like this.” It happens all the time.
KAVI: So we always encourage people, in the store, if you’re not sure just put it on your skin and walk out. So many times, they’ll come back later that day or the next day. It’s the best kind of sale, really, when you know that someone has tried it, liked it and come back for it. That feels good.
The brand has existed for over a decade now. In that time, what have been the biggest changes you’ve seen within the beauty industry and, probably more specifically, the fragrance industry?
KAVI: There’s so many brands now, it’s insane. In every space, there’s so many. I love colour cosmetics so much, and we thought one day it would be great to go into that. Now, when I think about it, I don’t know what we could really add. You have to be able to contribute something, and there’s already too much out there, I think. It’s really hard right now to find your voice in anything.
DAVID: I think that’s what we could contribute, by the way. Our voice. Because I know nothing at all, nothing about beauty or makeup, so I feel like it could be really interesting. I see colours all the time for fragrance and music. To go the route with it, I think we’d make something rad.
I think you would.
DAVID: I do think it’s strange though, that people who wear makeup, you mostly all wear red to pink lipstick. There’s a whole spectrum of colours, but for some reason it’s only red or pink.
KAVI: Mostly. There are some people who don’t. It’s a look.
DAVID: Well there’s mahogany, which is red. I guess there’s some purple. And then there’s like teal for one in every a hundred thousand people, maybe.
KAVI: There’s something there. There’s a study to be done.
What changes do you think we can expect to see over the next few years?
DAVID: SO much. Everything is out the window. It was all going to a point, and then with COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement, and then the Black Trans Lives Movement, everything is changing. So you have to be true to who you are and up on your game about who you support and how you do it. Not in a restricted, PC way, but you have to be careful not to offend someone because we all have to make a collective change to include everyone. You have to be inclusive, and then you need to make sure that it’s a safe environment to shop in, in a COVID world. Until we have a vaccine, the practices of retail are so, so, so different. We’re making drastic changes. One is super exciting. We’re not sure, but we’re going to open hopefully sometime in July, but with digital and non touch… it’s been going that way for a long time anyway.
We’re all going through such different changes, socially and politically, that retail and beauty will have to follow suit. One thing about our brand is that it’s always been the voice of two artists and their ideas, and that’s not a trend. Trends come and go but we’ll always have something to say, artistically and aromatically, regardless of what happens.
KAVI: One very specific response we have to COVID is, since we don’t feel it’s quite safe to shop in a perfume store yet, we’re not opening our store yet and we’re making a mobile…
DAVID: It’s this really crazy thing, we haven’t talked about it yet!
KAVI: We’re making a fume-truck. We’re going to be driving around the city, selling perfume to people. It’ll be in New York City, parked in different places for the summer. It’s going to be a much safer, open, perfume shopping experience. And we’re really excited about it. That’s starting July 1st.
My last question. You’ve just sort of answered it, but what is next for D.S. & Durga?
DAVID: This feeds into what you were saying. We saw a huge uptick in home care stuff, so we’re going to keep making more home care stuff and maybe push some of the fragrance launches that we were going to do out.
We have the hand sanitiser and it’s done really well, so we’re going to make another one, probably. We’re doing really interesting texture items that I don’t think we can talk about yet, but fun stuff.
KAVI: Three months ago we would have said more stores, more retail, and now things are different. We’re in the middle, as every brand is, of trying to recalibrate plans and figure it all out. But it’s surely going to be different than what we thought a few months ago.
To listen to the full interview with D.S. & Durga founders Kavi Ahuja and David Seth Moltz, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify
