One question I’m always asked is how I choose the brands that I stock at Sainte Cellier. The honest answer is with great anxiety. It’s difficult to appreciate the work of small, independent retailers until you’ve been in the position of investing thousands into stocking a brand and hoping that other people see in it the same things that you do.
DanLo exemplifies so many of the things I look for in a fragrance brand: a concept executed with aspiration, skill and originality that translates its North Star legibly while also leaving space to dream and stamp with your own personal impressions and experiences.
The five works composed by perfumer Kaiwei Hsieh also offer much-needed innovation and expansion into an olfactory category, gourmand, that in Western hands has become almost comically narrow: the same vanilla, the same tonka, the same caramel, the same “cosy bakery” pitched at you from a hundred different bottles. DanLo’s gourmand vocabulary draws on pineapple cake, bubble tea, pounded Hakka tea grains, roasted peanut candy and sorghum liquor. Flavours rooted in lived culture, not marketing mood boards.
The most glaringly ironic thing about overproduction in the industry is that the more perfume there is, the more everything smells the same. 85% of Western brands flailing in their flop era, chasing the same trends and validation from the same voices. East Asian houses like DanLo are bringing a much-needed wave of fresh air, fresh ideas and fresh structures into what has become, frankly, an incredibly stale bakery.
