Our sense of smell has the deepest tie to emotion and memory. But it's also the most overlooked. In business, that's a giant missed opportunity.
Dawn Goldworm knows how to use scent to evoke emotion and create loyalty. From Lady Gaga to Ferrari to books, Dawn designs signature fragrances that allow customers to connect with brands in a more meaningful way. A perfumer turned entrepreneur, her company 12.29 works with some of the biggest names in hospitality, fashion, automotive, and beyond.
Many years ago, Dawn helped me create the Scent of Optimism. I was excited to talk with her about what it takes to compose a new smell from scratch and why smell has the unique ability to make a brand instantly memorable.
This...is A Bit of Optimism.
To learn more about Dawn and her work, check out:
For all our senses, our sense of smell is most strongly linked to our memory. In an instant, a scent or a fragrance can transport us somewhere else, take us back in time. But scent is also the most overlooked of the senses, especially in business, which is just a giant missed opportunity. Stay tuned. When I say the word brand, what comes to mind bright colors, acute mascot, a logo, maybe a jingle. What you probably don't think of is scent, and scent happens to be Dawn Goldworm's favorite subject. Dawn is the founder and CEO of twelve twenty nine, a company that helps businesses create unique signature sense sense that build memories. She works with some of the biggest names in fashion, automotive, sports, apparel, hospitality, even a theme park or two, to craft fragrances that allow customers to experience the brand in a deeper, more meaningful way. And as you'll hear, there's a lot more to composing a cent from scratch than you think. This is a bit of optimism. Dawn, thanks for joining me on the old podcast. It's fun to have you on because I think what you do is so fun and so special. Just to give people a little context for how I know you and how we met. You and I, by sure coincidence, were seated at the same table at some event a lot of years ago, and I had heard your presentation that day about using scent for branding, and I thought your presentation was amazing. My shirts. Coincidence, we were seated next to each other at the dinner and I leaned over to you and I said, could you scent a book? Is that possible? And you went, yes, that's possible. And I said has it ever been done before? And you said no, I don't think so I said, I would like to send a book, and this became the beginning of a partnership and friendship of the two of us. Yes, and for those of you have ever read my book together is better spoiler alert because we've always kept it a secret, so it's a little surprise for people who buy it. But the book is scented. And you developed that scent for me, which is the smell of optimism.
Yes, it is the smell of you, the smell of.
Me, the smell of my personality. Right, So first of all, let's take a let's go back down memory lane. You are what is called a nose, meaning you developed sense for a living, and you have been doing this for how long?
I started in my early twenties in perfumer school, So a long time, like a quarter of a century.
Okay, so you were this, I assume for most people who are noses. Perfume is the direction you generally go in.
Yes, you can go into fine fragrance, which is perfume for skin. You can go into ansellaris like body was shampoo, etc. You can go into home care, laundry detergent. You can also become a flavorist and develop flavors, which is the same end. Most people don't know that interesting. The taste of coca cola, dan and yogurt, everything that we put into our mouth is flavored by the same people that create fragrance. But in general the perfumer school that I went to, you would become a fine fragrance perfumer for skin.
Okay, so perfumes that you buy, the traditional traditional perfume, Then what is the path? Because you worked at the highest levels, I mean you were working perfumes for names that we know.
I worked for Cody for almost ten years and I did everything from Lady Gaga to Adidas to the Beckhams, most of the mass market fragrances in the United States and a lot in the rest of the world.
Sure, So if you ever wore Lady Gaga's perfume, you were the one who developed that I did, which is kind of cool. That's very cool. Actually you developed the smell of Lady Gaga. Okay, So how do you go from what I would call a fairly traditional successful career as a nose in a perfume direction to really pioneering, because you are a pioneer in this space, reallyering leaving perfume to make sense for brands, Like, how did that? Even I've been honest with you all the years I've known you, I actually have no idea how that you went from that to the other thing.
You know, when I when I had my nose tested, I I was finishing up graduate school in London. I was an art history major and then I did a master's in art business. I thought I was going to be in the art world and it didn't turn out that way. And I interned at Avon when I was young, and then someone from Avon called me and said, hey, we have a spot you want to work for us? And I wasn't sure. But I came back to New York and she sent me to a perfumer school and I had my nose tested. I had no idea that I had this innate ability, which is by the way, like any ability, five percent and then it's ninety five percent blood, sweat and tears. After to learn how to use it, and I fell in love with it. I fell so deeply in love with it that when I started developing fragrance for skin, I was like, there has to be more. It has to be more than just applying it to skin. And so I went back to graduate school at NYU in the evening while I was in perfumery school in the morning working at Cody at this point during the day, and I started looking into the psychology behind scent, the sociology around scent, behavioral aspects behind sent anything that I could tap into, consumer identities studies, anything I could find, and then I made it into a business case. I was like, what if brands could apply scent and have that same emotional bond that we do when we apply it to our skin or to our babies or to our house and this is how it was born.
And I think people don't realize that the sense most closely connected to memory is smell.
Oh yeah, So if you think about how you process the other senses, So if you think about your sense of sight, your sense of touch, your sense of taste, your sense of hearing. Once you get that input, it has to go through many neuropathways to get to the place in the brain and that comprehends what it actually just heard or felt or saw. Your nose. Odor molecules kind of float around the outside of your nose. They go up your nose, and at the top of your nose is the only place that your brain is exposed to air. And so the automoducules go right up to your olympic system. It's a super highway, no stopping, go, no collecting two hundred dollars, is nothing else that happens. And then once it gets to your limbic system, the only other two things that happen there are emotion and memory. And so every time you smell something, From the time you're born, and actually a little bit before you're born to ten years old, every time you smell something, you have a feeling about it. They're both novel experiences you're having, and they become linked together and forever married, floating in your old factor memory, which becomes the largest and most acute part of your memory. So later in life, every time you smell something, you're immediately brought back to that first moment you smelt it, and more importantly, that first feeling. And I often say, I'm not creating a cent, I'm creating an emotional resonance for you.
And it's so true. Right, It's like, I mean, I go into a space and it smells like my grandparents' house smelled, which was a pretty unique smell. My grandfather worked, you know, as an end and so the smell of sort of like industrial lubricant like was on him at all times. And they were antiques dealers, so there was like a mustiness and an old house, an old Victorian house, and that all came together to be the smell of Grandma and Grandpa's house, which wasn't a bad smell. It was a beautiful smell and but quite unique. So true when you talk about this, that's so fascinating, and it.
Creates a loyalty. So when you apply it as a business case to a brand. You can help create that emotional bond that the brand is trying to create through all the other touch points that you mentioned, and that's what creates the loyalty.
That's so interesting. So if I have a good experience and a store that you have scented, then I can be reminded of that experience somewhere else if I smell similar notes somewhere else.
And if you buy whatever product the store is selling and it's scented, when you're at home, all you're going to think about is returning to that store and buying more.
Is that manipulative?
So this is the way that smell works. So it's it's conditioned, right. So depending on your culture, you're generation, and your living environment, like I was saying, you smell different ingredients, different fragrances, and they're linked to different emotional experiences you're having. So the first time your mother is holding you, you feel safe, hopefully, you feel loved, hopefully, and you're smelling her breast milk, you're smelling maybe some kind of baby product, which is cultural and it changes on different places in the world. So lavender isn't a thing for all cultures to make them feel safe and tired as people think it is spray lavender on your pellor. That won't work for the entire east of the world, no kidding, Yeah, it only works for certain parts of Europe, certain parts of the United States, and some of South America.
Only because when we were baby, somebody sprayed lavender.
Now it's because there's lavender in baby products. There's lavender baby products, and it's a cultural phenomenon. Like in the south of France they use orange blossom.
They don't orange blosso makes somebody feel lack.
So it's all based on that. So when you're running on the beach as a kid, hopefully your parents put some block on you. Right, you're feeling fun for the first time, you're feeling free. That smell of whatever that some block was Hawaiian tropic, let's say, or coconut. But again it's cultural. So in Europe they use a different flower. They don't use coconut and pineapple like we use here. They will use something else and narrowly for instance, and so that would make people feel like the beach there versus here, totally different.
Wow.
And this is all based on generation as well. So products have changed every ten years and with the globalization of product that's gotten a lot mixed up, so it's very layers.
This is very interesting. So I understand the cultural element. Tell me something where a smell for one generation is no longer relevant for a different generation.
Well, with the invention of plastic, So toys used to be made out of wood, right, and then anyone that was born let's say up to definitely in the nineteen forties, post nineteen forties when you started seeing plastic toys started to make it out of plastic. And so when people would smell, would they would think of their childhood?
Not anymore? Not anymore? Tell me another one.
This is so good co two off gases My favorite topic go on. So the way that sneakers are made, everyone thinks that they're smelling leather, they're smelling rubber, they're smelling adhesives is mostly what they're smelling. And they're smelling the breakdown of all these ingredients once they're made and they're heated up and put in a box. And so when you open a new box of sneakers, a lot of what you're smelling is these off gases. And people love the smell because they feel like it's newness. And luxury, and I put it in so many fragrances.
So wait a minute, I'd have to say this again. So it's the leather, the rubber, and the glue.
It's the viatal molecules that break down once they're all put in.
It's a vital molecule.
Molecules that disperse. They don't stay inside of a product. They float around, so you can smell them.
Okay, So the reason I can smell leather when I'm not right up close to it, there's a.
Whole bunch of violet to molecules of the leather. But you know, leather doesn't actually smell like leather. What Well, it's the skin of an animal. It smells like a dead animal. We treat it to smell like leather.
What leather? So why does all leather smell like leather?
Smell the cow?
Yeah, they don't smell good.
That's where leather comes from.
Did they design the smell of leather like? Did leather smell the same two hundred years ago as it smells now? Yes?
And no. So Catherine Demnicci was the first one to create commercial perfume in Florence. She came through grass, which is the historical home of perfume, because gross was the center of leather, and they would scent saddles and they would scent gloves in grass. You know, no one wanted to smell like a dead animal right on top of another animal. It would have been very strange. And then she came to Paris, and then the center of perfume, you know, around the let's say latter eighteen hundreds began the nineteen hundreds, Paris became the commercial center of perfume, and so all leathers smelled the same because it was all done in the same place essentially.
And is that the smell today?
I actually don't know the answer to that, but I would assume it's close, but probably not the same.
So what do we add to make the smell of leather? This is so interesting to me.
So there's no ingredient that smells like leather. It's in a cord essentially. So it's these little tiny formula as we make up to make something smell like something. So I've never actually broken down their chord of leather.
Aha, I like it. I've given you a challenge.
You have now I feel like I'm going to go back.
So this is the thing that I like just to go off and I need to come back to this, but before I do, as you talk about a chord, it's the same as a chord in music.
Yes, exactly, it's exactly the same thing. So we have notes and then we have chords. So we have notes which would be our ingredients, which are raw materials that could be natural, or we call them molecules which are synthetically made by scientists, and then we make them into a chords, which are a small amount of notes. It could be anywhere between two and I don't know seven.
Because I love the way you think about you talk about scent, You say color. There's only three primary colors. That's it. In music, there's only seven notes, that's it. And it's how Beethoven organizes and combines those notes that make a symphony. It's how van Goh organizes and mixes those three primary colors that you get the magic of a van go And there's only a finite number of notes for scent, and it's how you combine them into chords or a cord words and use them that makes things flowery, magical, vanilla e whatever.
Absolutely there was when I started training, there was about forty five hundred that we had. There was a lot.
Forty five hundred, which is much more than three primary colors or seven notes.
Now there's about fifteen hundred, a lot of them and taken off the palette for a variety of reasons. The fragrance industry by natal a lot of notes. Yeah, it's sustainable, and so we take a lot of things from the earth, and we're very careful with how much we take from the earth. We constantly think about how we can regenerate. It's unlike food, where they can make mass amounts of food and kind of ruin the soil, so there's no nutrients or smell or taste in food. We can't do that. Our flower needs to smell the same year of your as close to it as we can make it. And so the soil has to say, very nutrient rich and dense so that we can produce the ingredients that we need. So we have about fifteen hundred that we use today.
Let's go back to that box of sneakers. So there's scent coming off of the artificial leather smell, which is the smell of leather. For old leather, there's the scent coming off of the rubber, there's the scent coming off of the glue in a hot box and a truck on a ship. It's been sitting in.
The cardboard and the cardboard smell, and the.
Cardboard smell as well. It's all been sitting in there.
And if there's any plastic on the shoelaces, remember, yeah.
All of that. So it's all sitting in there and being focused and condensed because it's in a box, not with no ability to escape. And then you open it and we're hit with that combination. Because new sneaker smell is a unique and specific smell.
You know, when I worked with Nike, they wanted the smell of air Force one. Okay, they didn't want Airmax, they didn't want Jordans, they wanted the smell of Air Force one specifically, which smells different than the other.
Two because of the glue. That all the combination of the materials, right, that is so brilliant because the magic of getting this new thing and being hit by it, as you said, it's not innate, it's cultural. Where we then learn that that smell is the magic of a new pair of sneakers, which means you can recreate artificially and you can pump it into a store. Did you do that for Nike? What is that?
I did do that for Nix?
So tell me what did you do? So how did Nike use How does Nike use smell so artificially produced like the way you do it, not just you know, stuffing about.
I have to say today we don't work with Nike, but we did for years. Okay, this is pre COVID. So Nike was an incredible challenge for me. Talk about challenge, and I love a good challenge. Nike was still is one of the biggest brands in the world. And so when I do what I did for you, as you know, I look very much at the target market. Who are you talking to? With Nike? Their target market is enormous, but at the time when they designed everything, it was designed for a seventeen year old girl and a nineteen year old boy, but still all over the world. So we talk about cultural conditioning China, Brazil, Germany, New York, the entire world. How do you do that? And so when I was looking at this, I was like, okay, But Nike's emotion, as everyone knows, is inspiration. Yeah, and so I was like, okay, what inspires these seventeen year old girls in nineteen year old boys all over the world. And so I worked with Nike for about two years, and I did a bunch of Nike experiences. Nike has its own soccer pitches, they have their own basketball courts, they have I designed a pair of shoes with one of their big shoe designers, Like I did so many things, and when I realized, it's the smell of sport. It's the feeling of about to play a sport that is the inspiration. And so we recreated the smell of a soccer cleat in dirt. We have a dirt molecule, a grass molecule, and the smell of the shoe, which is a mixture of metal and leather and sweat. We recreated the smell of a basketball as it gets oily from your hand. We recreated the sound of a pair of sneakers when you skid on a basketball court. The linoleum and the rubber heat up and create a very fascinating smell that everyone knows.
So when the squeak happens, a smell happens.
Because it warms up and it released off gases.
An off gas, and.
Then those molecules have a very specific smell. Yes, yes, yes, And you can smell when you're at a basketball game. We recreated the smell of when you're at the gym and you're sweating and your sweat mixed with that rubber on the gym equipment. Sure, and then we regain. We took the smell of a pair of air Force one when you open the box, and then we add a little bit of magic which we don't talk about. And that was a smell of niket. And what is fascinating about it? All of those smell and put them together together. They're all the chords, and we put them tonight.
I hate to say it, and I know this is a naive thing to say, but if I took my favorite phrase from a Police song, and my favorite phrase from a Beatles song, and my favorite phrase or chord from a Beta and sympony put them to all together, what I'll get his noise? So, how is all of these things, the cleats, the oily, basketball, the smell? How is that not a nasal mess?
Have you ever seen a mone Yeah? How many colors are in a point same thing? If you know how to layer sound, if you know how to layer, color and texture and aesthetic. You do the same thing with smell. There are anywhere between three and not two hundred plus ingredients in a perfume. These are the shortest formulas pretty much in the industry. I don't like to make complex formulas. But there are chords. They are little accords that all go together, and together they make a symphony.
So where would I smell the smell of Nike, because i'mdying to smell the smell.
They used it in all the Nike labs and all the private member spaces. We did scent shopping bags at one point, and I think shoelaces. But what's fascinating about Nike is we still show it today when we're working with a new client or just hanging out with someone that wants to smell. I want to smell and they smell it, and I don't tell them what it is, and they say sneakers grass, this is Nike. They don't say Puma, they don't say Adidas, they don't say Rebox, they don't say any other sneaker brand. They just say Nike, which is fascinating. And it's the air force one piece. And I used to say to people they're like, oh, I love the smell of the Nike store. I'm like, what do you think basketballs are just like giving off scent? I mean, yes, of course, there's like viotal mollic cules around basketball.
Nothing'll have a scent experience in a store. So interesting are there sense? Are there a particular sense that are universally around the world and universally around the world disliked.
Yes, there's one for each only one, only one.
We'll be right back. So there's one smell in the entire world that everybody likes.
Yes, which is what vanilla.
It is.
It is really good.
You know, vanilla is really good.
Do you know why it smells like cookies? No, there's a lot of part of the words that don't eat cookies. Vanilla is the chemical sister of an ingredient called vanilin, and vanolin occurs in breast milk, and if you weren't breastfed and you had formula, they reproduce that smell for formula.
So whether it's natural breastmoke of formula, you get something that is close to vanilla. So, which is why we all love in vanilla because it's basically babyhood.
It reminds us of being coddled and safety and comfort and cookies and joy and cookies and mommy and all the good things.
That's so good.
So you know what bad smell is, I don't.
I mean, it's got to be it's gotta be something putrid, like what I mean, the most putrid thing I can think of. I mean, like the list of putrid would be like sewage, running things, running meat things like that.
Like, well, if you work in a meat factory, it's not going to be a bad smell for you. You're conditioned if you work in the sewers. In India, for instance, there's a whole case of people that do cast excuse me, of people that do. It's their daily lives. Remember, this is all conditioning. So there's one smell that everyone has to have the same visceral reaction to, which is the smell of a decaying body. The smell of a decaying body body human or human, just a.
Human decaying body smells different than a dying cat than a dead cow. Yes, I guess that makes sense. Well, we eat dead, but I get it because the things that make up a cow are different than the things that make up a person. Wow, So that is that is a that is a Universally, people love vanilla and hate the smell of a.
Body, human body. So the Defense Department trains people against the smell of a decaying body so they don't freak out once they start, once they go into war or into battle, because it's so horrible, because it's so bad, and they can't have them like all of the sudden, all of you know, the army or the navy or the seals or whoever it is, you know, starting to have the vistual relaction and getting sick. They need to just go right through it, and so they get trained affectively. They also use it as a weapon of war. They just spray.
It and make people feel.
Sick disoriented because you get disoriented, you have a really visceral reaction to it. You don't know what to do because you want to get as.
Fine as I meant I smelled. I mean, we used stink bombs when we were kids. Not me, of course, but I was around them.
Of course you didn't.
No, I actually was a good goody. That actually is not an exact that's actually not sarcasm, actually, but I have been around them and and it's rotten eggs you know. That's the traditional child stink bomb is rotten eggs, and it's gross well, and it makes you run in the opposite direction because it smells gross.
But in Greece there's whole islands of Greece that smell sulfuric and they don't think anything of it, and they take the food and they bake it in the sand, which, by the way, if you've never done it, is so good. The vegetables come out so delightful. But it smells like sulfur. No one thinks anything of it.
I have to tell you a funny smell story. So when I was a kid, I lived in Hong Kong, and I used to collect stickers, and my sister and I had a bunk bed and I had the bottom bed, and so the whole inside of my bed was my sticker collection. So I would stick my stickers all inside my bed, and I had some scratching sniff stickers. People would give me the stickers and I never put them randomly, and somebody gave me skunk scratch and sniff stickers, and the space that I had was like right by where my face was, and I'd never smell the skunk. My whole life, because I'd never lived anywhere where skunks existed. There's no skunks in.
Hong Kong, and there's no skunks in Hong Kong.
I don't think so, at least they weren't back then. Fascinating, so I never So I'm nine or ten years old, and I'd never smelled the skunk my whole life, So I have no idea if this sticker is accurate or not accurate. Right, So, I, as a child would scratch the sticker and fall asleep next to the skunk sticker, and then I'm moved to America. We moved to America when we were when I was ten and living in suburban New Jersey. For the first time in my life, I smell the skunk and everybody else was holding their nose and it was found it futrid, and I thought it was delightful.
Thought it was great because it's the smell of childhood.
And it was. It was a beautiful memory of me lying in my bunk bed in Hong Kong. And to this day, the smell of a skunk not only does it not bother me, I find it quite sweet actually, see, and so it's all cultural.
It's cultural generational because you had scratch and sniffs. Stickers exists anymore. And so by the way, the sticker was exactly the smell.
It was exactly correct.
It's the exact smell right, exactly. And it's also based on your living environment. So if you live in an urban or a rural living environment, so like the smell of cow, for instance, cow dung, if someone lives in a royal environment, they don't think anything of it. And so if they would go to Central Park for instance, and they would smell por stung or horse maneuver, they're like, smell of my child, right, but other people are like, oh my god, what's that smells.
The smell of garbage I find the unoffensive, but the smell of cows absolutely awful. Yeah, exactly.
So it's all culturally appropriated, except for those two spells on exact.
Except that's so interesting. So if you want to give a gift to somebody who lives in a foreign land a candle, for example, if you want to say thank you for letting me stay your house, make sure to buy vanilla. You're more likely to get warm gratitude if you give them vanilla, yes, as opposed to you guessing I'm going to give them this lavender one. It's nice and relaxing, and they might find it.
They might, or they just don't understand the smell. And that's the interesting thing with smell. So if you don't have an experience with smell the first ten years of your life, and then you smell it later in life, you'll automatically reject it because you don't have an emotional reaction for it, so you just push it away.
Okay.
And so the way we create signature and smell as we well, the way I say it is, we create like this hallway. The signature is at the end, and I create all these little doors for different cultures and generations and people to walk through, so they feel safe because they know that smell, and so they can walk down the hall and get to the actual signature of the scent, which is where the emotion is and where the loyalty is.
I want to talk more about the brands you've worked with. I know you can't talk about all of them because your current contraction not allowed to. But let's just say that there's some brands that have some amazing smells in their facilities and stores and places that we go and we have magical experiences because of these smells. But you can't talk about it. I get that. What are some of the ones you can talk about?
What can I talk about?
What? What are some of the brands you've worked with where you like, I know you've worked with cars. What did you do for Ferrari or Porsche?
What did we do Ferrari We scented some of their shore rooms for some of the new cars that were launched. Oh, Porsche was interesting. So Porsche when they launched the mccan, they launched it in the Middle East. I think the first launch was in Dubai, and then it was in Qatar, then Abu Dhabi, and then it went to other countries in the Middle East, and so they wanted to create the scent of the mccan for these launches. Why it was so interesting was not I mean, we've done that before for other brands, not just car brands, but other brands all over the world. But the Middle East has the most sophisticated, most beautiful, and you could say healthiest in terms of strength of anyone in the world. And so everyone's fully scented. People smoke out their clothing, they oil their hair. They apply oil to their skin and perfume on top of that to your skin, so they are walking full fragrance. Let's say you have hundreds of men in a room for the launch of a car, and we have to scent that room. How are we going to work with all that smell that's already in the air. Versus Americans who, unfortunately a lot of us don't wear perfume. It's much easier to scent an environment.
Here because we're because we have a little one, little sprits enough we.
Go exactly well, we're fully scented. I mean our toothpaste, our shampoo, our body lotion, our laundri detergent, our shoes. I mean we're fully scented anyway, but we don't give off as many of those biotal molecules, whereas the Middle East they really want you to smell them from a distance. It's the way of recognizing each other too. The women, depending on the country, you know, they wear burkers, but some of them wear their full face covering as well, and the way they can tell who their wife is is by her perferse. So everyone's fully scented. And so how do you scent an environment? That's already fully scented. And so the brief came out of the UK, and I said, well, do you want it to smell English? Do you want it to smell Western? Do you want that? And they said, and I said, that's the only way it's going to stick out in this overly scented environment. And so we made a Western smell unfamiliar in the Middle East.
Yeah, oh, very good. Went into that smell. What notes?
We used a lot of clean wood notes, so I remember, we used a very clean cedarwood. You can have more of a smoky cedar what if it's from Morocco, or you can have a cleaner ceay, what if it's from the US. From Virginia. We use a very clean cedar wood, a very clean sandal wood from Australia. We used a lot of citrus notes, really bright, juicy citrus notes, which is very Western in a perfume and in very aromatic.
In a room that smelled of the our world, this Western car stood out so interesting. So interesting do you smell? Do you send stores?
We sent Valentino stores, so.
If I go into Valentino, it is sent it to smell a Valentino. And you design that.
So the Valentino scent is based on the history of Rome, which is based on a lot of religion, Catholicism, based on blood, it's based on sensuality. It's based on death and life and everything in between.
I mean, it's lash of chaos.
And just a dash of chaos exactly, but the beauty of it all. You're walking through Rome and you look down and the streets are dirty and it's all cobblestone, and then you look up and you literally think you're looking at Heaven with all the gold and the sky and how much people revered God. And so that contrast is in the scent. It's the beauty of the scent of Valentino. We did it with at the time, with Pure Paolo and Madigrazia. Madigrazzia is now at door and Pure Pallo has left Valentino, and these were the creative directors for anyone that listens that's in fashion, and their vision for Valentino was the future of Valentino because mister Valentino had just left, and they really wasn't it based on the history of Rome. It's super fun going through the archives and understanding the history of Valentino and then of course digging into the religious and social history.
And this has pumped through the air conditioning. Yes, okay, changing tax I haven't opened this little magical book of mine in quite a long time, and it is perhaps the favorite book that I've ever written. It was written the time where it was getting frustrated that the world was getting more digital and analog was getting left behind, and I wanted to make something that could only exist in the analog world. So there's no digital version of this book. There's no audio of this book. It was inspired by children's books. I remember spending lots and lots of time in the children book session and bookstores reading tons of little children's books. This book is for adults technically, but it is designed to look like a children's book. And when I met you and I said, I want to design a cent What is more analog that I cannot recreate digitally or audioly than scent. And so in this magical, magical little book there is a scented page. And I know you created a technology for me where it's not scratched the sniff, it's rubbin sniff. So I just to gently rub my fingers over the page. And for those who are listening. This technology is amazing. It lasts for ten years right now. I remember you had a long conversation with me. You interviewed me and asked me a lot of questions, and from those questions you were able to discern the notes and a chords that would make the smell of optimism. Can you tell me what is in here and how you got to those?
So the first question I asked you is what is your color?
Right?
Orange, which is exactly what you said at the time. I said, well, why is it?
Orange's the color of optimism.
Right, It's bright, it's confident, it's confident, it's fun color, right, And so based on that, so I did global research on color and smell, and what I found when I gave people a color board and gave them different ingredients or a chords or finished fragrances, is that everyone with about ninety seven percent accuracy, smells the same colors. If you give them a color board, they will all choose. They will all pick out the same color.
So if you give somebody a cent, most people ninety seven percent will proceed the same color of that scent.
In the whole world, there's no cultural conditioning generational conditioning, living environmental.
An example, So if I smell, I mean, if I smell a lemon, I guess say yellow. But if I smell, give.
Me an example of galbanam? What you have no idea? What galbanam is a resin that comes from a tree. Everyone smells green, dark green, with a little bit of brown black, and maybe a touch of yellow or red. If your nose is really good at discerning the.
Sandalwood sandalwood, can I recall the smell of sandalwood. Sandalwood is brownish yellow.
It's kind of a light brown cream color. Yeah. Vanilla, Oh that's cream colored, right, But vanilla itself is brown.
That's true.
Vanilla is brown, But everyone does it as a creamy white. Yes. And so this happens with all ingredients, all the chords, all smells for everyone, all over the world. And so what's interesting about that Brands first and foremost identify with color. And so the first question I asked you is what's the color of your brand?
And you're back pedaling. When you take the color, you can get to the smell. So when I said orange, You're like, okay, I can so this smells like the top oranges but.
It smells the color smell like the color arms.
Okay, keep going, So what else? What else did you make? How did you make this?
So the next question was what is the texture of your brand?
Smooth?
Right? So what you said was the you said Mac at the time, a new Mac, the brush steel of a new Mac. And you said worn in leather. It was a contrasting. You wanted the smooth comfort of worn in leather, but with the smoothness that sounds the new Mac. Yeah.
So that was to mention that I made the cover of this soft to the touch of skin because I wanted to be human. I forgot that. So going back to myself, how you inteligence?
So your shape? I asked you what your shape was? You said it was a handwritten circle. This exactly, Yes, hand drawn circle the size of a grapefruit. So great. So when you design fragrance, you can design it in a shape. Is it round, is it square? Is it triangular? It depends on how the molecules move, right, So I wanted them to move in a circle. So if you notice with your scent, you go deeper and deeper into it, but you're always going back and back and back to the same signature. It doesn't delineate like some perfumes do, like a triangle would, So that's the shape. And then of course the emotion was optimism, So the scent has to evoke that sense of inspiration, confidence, strength, brightness, freshness, feeling of potential and hope. And so that's what the scent does. And then I asked you to go back into old factive memories, which I only do with people and I not brands. And I don't ask brands what they think about smell because it's irrelevant because they're not their target. But you are your target. So I said, you know, give me some old factive memories that have deep meaning for you. And you said, the smell of a fire after it's gone out from a fireplace. And so what we started with is we created the accord of the smell of a fireplace after it had been blown out and what that smells like, and then we built layers around that. The scent of all those other things that I just mentioned.
It is dark, and it is I think the way you discord it was light and dark combined.
The middle is very dark, but dark in the most comforting feeling of safety and warmth, and there's something in it that you're like, I know this, I know it, you know, and it makes you feel confident.
We'll be right back. Why don't more companies do this? Because it seems the power of setmel to create loyalty and memory. It seems that this should be a standard thing. Like everybody, every company starts and says, we need a logo right and by the way, for good reason, and companies like we need we need our company colors for good reason. Some go as deep as having their own font are their own sound? Oh, they're in sound right. They have Jingles, Apple, Microsoft. They spend a fortune of money to make that chime when you turn on the Macintosh, you it's always you know that Macintosh that app sound every time you hear that chime, and it's changed over the years. Why is it that more companies don't do smell considering that it is way more powerful for connecting the brand to the person and to the memories that they have in the experiences they have. It seems like this should be basic. There should be thousands of companies like yours doing this work, but there aren't. There's only a precious few. Well.
The first reason is is your sense of smell is fully developed before you're born. It's actually fully developed at about sixteen weeks instead of your mother, and that's the beginning of your taste preferences because odor is the only thing that passes through the amnionic fluids. Or as your mother's eating, you either really like what she ate when she was pregnant once you're born, or you hate it because she overindulged. So once you're born, your whole world is smelling emotion, and your other sense is try to catch up, right, And now they are catching up, your ability to talk about them is also growing, and so they're connected. So your sense of site, you have a language for site, You have a language for hearing. You have a language for taste, you have a language for touch. You have no language for smell. Smell and language are not connected in the brain. And so when brands just say that they want to communicate identified differentiate themselves against other brands or for the world, they never think about smells. And when you tell them, they go rational. And when you tell them how powerful smell is. And sometimes I show them if I am sitting with them, but you know, I haven't sat with every brand, and I don't want to say it's divided by the sexes, but it general is. Women are very comfortable tapping into their intuition and into their emotion. It's something that they naturally do. So if you tell a woman smells in importance, she's like, I know it is. I have children, or I was a child, or this or that, and they tell you all these spaces. You tell a man and he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. Smell doesn't even matter to me. I don't wear perfume. I'm like, I can smell everything about you right now. I can tell you if you brush your teeth or not. I can tell you if you put gel in your hair. I can tell you what laundry detergent you're using. You are fully scented and you don't even know it. Just because you don't spray a hydro alcoholic fine fragrance on your skin doesn't mean you're not wearing perfume. And they're like, oh, I was like, what about the smell of your shoes? You like that smell. What about the smell of your dog, the smell of your kids. Those smells are fundamental emotional moments in your life that make you feel like you're grounded. Why wouldn't you do that with your brand? And most of these boardrooms are full of men, and like, that's the last thing we need as an emotional touch point for a brand. We just need people to spend more money.
Yeah. By the way, that's the same in my work, which is women intuitively understand my work better than men. I explain my work, whether it's why or one of the other concepts, and women go, yep, got it, and men go, can I see the case study?
Right?
So is your nose good enough? You and I are sitting what about three feet apart from each other, three or four feet apart from each other?
Sure?
Can you smell me?
Yeah, of course I can smell.
So what do you know of me?
That's unfair, though, I mean, I know too much about you. Like I know that you don't use shampoo, and I can't smell any shampoo, And yeah, I can't smell a hair product you. I know that you have a cat. I can smell your cat right now.
He's need the best. You can smell how wonderful he is.
I can smell how wonderful it is. I can smell that you drank coffee I did.
I can't tell what flavor the coffee was.
Uh No, I wanted to say hazel, not but no, it's hazel.
Oh it is.
Oh, there we go.
Well play Just from talking to you, I can.
Smell it you're you're talking to me. I can smell that you brush your teeth before that. Yes, I can smell.
That wasn't that doesn't require intuition. When I woke up in the morning and I came and had a cup of coffee.
Yeah, but a lot of people have their coffee back teeth.
That could be a good guess, it could, But can they give you that one?
But I can smell like the.
You can't tell me the brand.
No, I can't tell you the brand. But I can smell the the experiment winter green, whatever it is that is off of the Yes, nope, I can cinnamon. Yeah, but what it says on the packaging is not necessarily what they used in the formula. And I can tell you that because I sent this. So the.
I should tell people why don't use shampoo? I'm not because I'm dirty. I have to have this. Now. You forced me to go off topic. I'm sorry, I have to do it now. So I do not use shampoo. That is true. And here's the reason. I was at a dinner, and I'm not very good at these dinners, so I sort of sit by myself and stare at the wall, and I was I was a CEO dinner, and there were two CEOs sitting next to me, and I was listening to their conversation. They were talking about this guy who made billions of dollars. He built a company that sold shampoo and conditioner, very famous hair care brand, and they were talking about this founder CEO of this brand. And one says to the other, you know his secret, right, And so of course I lean in, and the other one goes, yeah, I know his secret. And the other one says, he says, shampoo is a pile of shit. You don't nobody needs shampoo. He says, the natural oils in your hair is you need to keep your hair clean, and you just need hot water. You don't need shampoo. And he made billions of dollars selling people shampoo that he doesn't use. And so I thought, hm, and so I from that next day, that next morning, I didn't use shampoo and I just used hot water and just wash my hair. And does my hair look greasy, though, yeah, it looks lovely, thank you. I haven't used shampoo in probably ten more than ten years.
And what's even more amazing to me about that is that your hair smells good. My hair smells It doesn't smell like apple or some artificial ingredient, which is about often what we use in shampoo's not that's I'll.
Use it occasionally if I go like four days without showering, I've been wearing a baseball cap and it's been really hot out and I've been exercising, and it's gross, And I'll use it occasionally. But I probably shampoo my hair maybe three times a year.
Wow. See, I shampooed my hair once a week.
Right, So I don't know if it works with long hair. You'd have to do an experiment.
I do go without soap. I don't use soap. I don't think my body needs it. I don't have a very well I don't have a very strong smell.
I don't soap is a wedding agent. It it actually lifts dirt up the skin. That's actually how soap works. It combines with water molecules. Actually it actually does a thing. But my arms don't like I get to touch any maybe you don't have to, yeah.
Really touch I don't. Funny thing is I used to make a lot of shampoo and body wash for brands. That's hilarious.
What's one brand you would love to scent that you never have? You've done fashion, done sports, You've done cars and banking, banking, cruise ships. I mean you've done a lot of things. Like what's what's a category that that you think would be really fun to scent that you haven't?
I would like And this sounds like a kind of a general talk.
About the bank in a minute. I just heard you say bank is like the scent of a bank, the sentence get me here, that's the scent.
You know, we did a headspace of money once, you know in a headspaces, So a headspace's technology. It used to be done with a glass what looked like a bell. Now we have special plastic for it, but essentially put like a glass bell on top of an object. Let's say, let's for fragrance terms, we say put on top of a rose. And what we do is then we put a needle inside that records the biotal molecules around the rose. So essentially we get the.
Bottom sneakers, the smell inside.
The would smell, and then we take the needle back to a lab and we synthetically reconstitute it. So we did that with money. We did it with a dollar bill because we wanted to see what would come off of a dollar bill. And if you think about money and doing a headspace of money, what would it smell like? It would smell like.
Money, Yeah, I mean a new dollar bill has a smell, right, It smell like ink, ink and paper.
Right, it actually smells. It smelled like marijuana, cocaine, human sweat, and a little bit of ink.
So it smells like investment banker. But thump, no, no, I wasn't a joke. Yeah, I do appreciate that investment bankers and money smell the same.
Potentially they do. I haven't done the research on that, but all you know, I would like to create a smell, regardless of the industry or application, that allows people to feel joy. I think, not to get too serious, but the state of the world is in a conundrum. People are feeling very unsafe. They're looking for comfort, they're looking for safety, they're looking for simplicity, and I think we have simple moments of joy in our everyday life, and I like to recreate those with people so they can find that safety when they're looking at the state of the world and not really knowing what the answer is, and how can they take that anxiety and bring it back to a form of nourishment and comfort. Take their garbage and make it into flowers.
Make a candle of that, please.
Yeah, I'm working on it.
Have you sent it? Like a children's wing of a hospital, so we.
Have talked about it. This was pre COVID and since COVID, the hospital systems in general are a little bit overrun and overloaded and we haven't been able to but we did do a children's book in lieu of that. Yeah, as you know very well, and children love it and it essentially it's about you know, the color research I was talking about, So it allows children to understand smell, emotion, and color from a very early age. And kids love it, and we made it so they could put it in their mouths and it's their favorite book that often falls apart because they want to read it every night. And I get so many videos from kids from a very young age to six years old reading this book and it bringing them so much joy. They have those little children giggles that we were talking about, and that makes my heart like burst. It doesn't matter how many cool luxury blah blah blah sinse I've done, but a child reading a book and smiling because of you know something we created magic.
Yeah, Dawn, I hope that you make the smell of comfort and joy in this world that we are trying to make sense of. No pun intended. Thanks so much for coming on. Absolutely fascinating, so cool, and everyone should go check out your book, The Smell of the Rainbow.
Thank you, thank you.
If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts, and if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website Simon Sinek dot com for classes, videos and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by David Jah and Greg Reiderschan and Henrietta Conrad is our executive producer.