Arielle Shoshana Is Creating A Perfume Playground With Its Store And Big Personality Scents

A self-described perfumery school reject, Arielle Shoshana Weinberg made her way to the fragrance industry through a different door: By opening Arielle Shoshana, the first niche fragrance boutique in the Washington, D.C., area.

At the 9-year-old boutique located in the Mosaic District of Fairfax, Va., perfumes are arranged by scent category—fresh, sweet, smoky and oud, for example—rather than by brand to encourage shoppers to explore and get to know fragrances. The most popular section is called “undefinable,” and it includes the most experimental scents. “What this tells us is that people want to smell different. They want to smell unique!” Weinberg wrote in a 2019 Kickstarter post.

Two years after Arielle Shoshana opened, the store ventured into its own perfumes with the launch of the Saturday. Sunday was released in 2019 thanks in part due to a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $12,000. Friday and Monday came shortly thereafter, and Tuesday is next on the docket. In addition to being stocked at the Arielle Shoshana store, the fragrances are available at Taigrance and Anthropologie’s website, where they’re priced at $175.

Ahead, we speak with Weinberg and Arielle Shoshana co-owner Katri Haas about the concept behind the days of the week perfumes, interesting brands, #PerfumeTok and fragrance trends.

How did you two meet and get into business together? 

Weinberg: Katri was a beloved “friendstemer,” friend plus customer, and came in around year three. So, together, we’ve really built what was just a little neighborhood shop to what’s now an international fragrance brand, one that we’re both really excited and proud of.

Haas: The business has evolved substantially, and we’re very, very different people. Having those differences as we’ve developed the brand has been really satisfying. We both have different perspectives that we bring in developing it, and it’s fun.

Weinberg: We don’t even smell things the same. We’ll smell the same perfume, and one of us will be like, “This is a citrus,” and the other one will be like, “What are you talking about? This is warm.”

Haas: We’re both very opinionated, but after we’ve been working together now for six years, we really respect each other’s opinions, and we’re able to hash things out. It’s definitely a privilege to be working with your best friend and developing something like this.

Where did your love for fragrance stem from?

Weinberg: We’ve both been perfume people for a very long time. I had a perfume blog in college when dinosaurs walked the Earth, and Katri’s primary retail background has been in beauty. She has always been the best perfume salesperson, at the very least in the DMV, coming from Saks, Space NK and from Bluemercury.

I’m a perfumery school reject myself, so I have always loved perfume and wanted to be part of that world, and I decided the best way for that to happen is to pay a more talented perfumer than I would’ve been. So, that is what we do now. Our perfumer for all of our [Arielle Shoshana] fragrances has been Cécile Hua.

Haas: It’s cool to see, with TikTok, this new audience of people tapping into fragrance. Obviously, this is decades ago, but Arielle and I both would’ve been floating around on the same chat rooms in the early 2000s like MakeupAlley. It was an entry point to get into fragrances.

Ari and I were both those obnoxious kids showing up at the counters and asking for samples, trying to play with things and explore the ridiculousness of expanding your collection at 13. Now we’re seeing such an influx of younger buyers jumping into it, and it’s very cool to see the enthusiasm as an elder millennial.

Weinberg: It seems like this is the golden era of being a perfume lover.

How did the fragrance line start? 

Weinberg: We launched our first fragrance in 2017. At the time it was called Arielle Shoshana Eau De Parfum because we didn’t know that we would get to make more than one. These days, it goes by the name Saturday. We’re up to now four fragrances, each inspired by different days of the week, and coming from the idea that, when you love perfume as much as we do, it’s not a special occasion thing. It’s really every day. And if it wasn’t a special occasion before you sprayed it on, it’s a special occasion now.

Monday is our current bestseller, and Sunday is right behind it. Monday had to be something caffeinated. We were thinking coffee, and we ultimately ended up with a London Fog. I think the discrepancy in order comes from, well, Kari affectionately bullied me.

Haas: I did not, I never bullied her.

Weinberg: I have receipts. Anyway, she said that this will be the third one with food in a row. Saturday’s a passion fruit, and Sunday is our matcha horchata perfume. [Haas asked,] “Can we please do a light, pretty, fresh floral?” So, that is Friday, and she certainly is very pretty. I love her just as much as our gourmands.

What are you trying to evoke with the upcoming fragrance, Tuesday?

Weinberg: Now that Monday has done so well, I cannot be stopped. More tea perfumes forever! Tuesday is a mint and a jasmine tea fragrance. It very much comes from an idea of healing. I got dumped relatively recently and retreated to Taiwan to cry in public in a beautiful new location instead of on my couch.

Every day we drank new, gorgeous cups of tea, and there’s just something so restorative about the ritual, about sharing it with the person who’s preparing it, especially. It would be wonderful to get to do something with oolong someday. There are so many beautiful Taiwanese oolongs. If that’s OK with Katri.

Haas: Arielle has the better nose and ended up getting it right. We’ve gone through a lot of versions of Tuesday, and we’re still tweaking it to get it exactly, but I know we’re going to have something really beautiful at the end of it.

With the development of the fragrances, oddly, it’s a case of art imitating life. Each of those fragrances embodied a certain energy of what we were experiencing at the time or what we thought that we needed. So, the comfort scent, Sunday, really had value. Let’s get stuff done is Monday, and Friday was supposed to be more like an innocent time of walking through a honeysuckle bush in the summer, more carefree. Saturday had all of this optimism and energy and youth to it.

We’re building out these archetypes for the days of the week and what people will need. We know that not every fragrance will be perfect and likable for every single customer, but we’re hoping one in the collection will resonate and give someone that chill they need or that it’ll have that vision that we set out to create when we were developing it. I hope that’s reflected when people experience the fragrances.

Weinberg: That is very true. They are not universal crowd pleasers. They are big personalities. Some of the reviews are not gentle, but the people who connect with these sort of unusual quirky ideas seem to really fall hard.

Haas: We think it’s way better to go with a big concept. Let’s not worry about being everything to everyone. Let’s pick something really special and distinctive that’ll just click with the right audience. Then, if other people don’t like it, we’re glad that they gave it a try. I totally understand if it’s not for them.

We want to see more color, and I hope that the colorful packaging from our designers, Wade and Leta, is reflected in the way that people experience it.

What brands did you begin with when you first opened Arielle Shoshana?

Weinberg: We started with what were pillars of niche perfumery at the time—L’Artisan Parfumeur, Maison Francis Kurkdjian—and we always had fun, small, adventurous brands. I remember one, Smell Bent, that was super cute. It was like $50 a bottle from this hairstylist in LA. What’s nice is, as the shop has grown, more brands are willing to take our emails. We have so many great lines now from all around the world. Born to Stand Out, our first Korean brand, has become huge for us. We’ve brought in some fabulous Dutch brands this year and Italian ones.

Kai was there from the beginning, and it’s still under $60, the sunny little Californian roll-on. Versatile Paris is a very fun, fabulous one. They’re very young, just launched 2022, 15-ml. rollerballs for $65 and so different and creative. They do a pesto perfume, which is actually their bestseller for us. God Bless Cola is another one. Wonderful stuff.

Haas: We like brands with a sense of fun to them. Binaurale is another that we think the world of that has that sense of fun and exuberance and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Another thing that informs our buying process is we have a really diverse customer base here in the DMV, a very global customer, and we also have this younger base. We want to have a mix of things that are accessible to everyone versus only carrying $800, $400 perfume brands. We like having the small dose luxuries that you can take home and have fun with.

Weinberg: We remember being the kid perfume lovers that were like, “Does that come in a five milliliter?” We want to make sure that there’s always a place for everyone at our shop.

Are you mostly reaching out to brands these days or are they reaching out to you?

Weinberg: I’d say both. We do the trade shows as. I’ve read that there are over 2,000 perfumes being released every year now. There really are so many amazing new perfumes launching every day, it can be a little hard to keep up. Our customers are really good at bringing us cool new stuff to try, also. That’s how we found Born To Stand Out,

Haas: We found Bianco Profumo that way, too. Our customers are super well-informed, so sometimes they’ll tap into something that we hadn’t heard of. I remember Arielle saying, early on, opening the business, you kind of had to fake your way into getting a couple of the brands.

Weinberg: That may be somewhat accurate. I’d be like, “Hey, X brand has just signed on, we’d love to get you, too.” And to X brand, “Y brand has just signed on.” It worked once or twice. I think they called it out a couple times, but we’re big fans of shoot your shot, email them and see what happens and move on from there.

How did you connect with Hua?

Weinberg: We connected through the internet. She slid into our DMs. In the spirit of shooting our shot, it was International Women’s Month, and I posted on Instagram about female perfumers that I really admire and Cécile commented on the post being like, “This is so nice, thank you.” And I was like, you are trapped in our web now.

Haas: She’s probably exasperated with us for Tuesday, going back and forth, back and forth. We know, at the end of it, we’re going to have something really, really beautiful. So, she’s stuck with us, at least for the rest of the week.

What’s the marketing strategy for your brand and store?

Weinberg: Strategy is a very generous word. We work with an amazing digital advertising team, Maison MRKT, who also works with D.S. & Durga, who are 100% role models for us. On TikTok, mostly we just post very dumb videos about interesting things that happen around the shop. We once had an attempted scammer send us a box of potatoes in an alleged return of a $900 order. There’s always fun stuff to tell people about.

We do also nerd out about perfume. There’s a much bigger audience for that than it used to be. You can be on TikTok these days and say, “I’m going to talk about my favorite Jérôme Epinette perfumes and people will not look at you like you’re a lunatic.” I really love the perfume hyper fixations that we see on #PerfumeTok.

Haas: One part of our social media strategy is making sure that there’s still a sense of fun and no rules. I know this is not new as a trend at all, but when the shop first opened, Arielle had said unisex, unisex, unisex, and now it’s taken for granted. A couple of brands discovered like, oh, we don’t have to tell people things are for men or women or with this sort of male gaze element to it. We like seeing things being more inclusive with a sense of fun.

I know Arielle referred to the TikToks as dumb little videos, but she’s downplaying oftentimes the amount of time she puts into the educational elements that customers really respond to.

Where is the fragrance category going next? 

Weinberg: This is already present, but we will move even further away from the idea of a signature scent and more towards the fragrance wardrobe, where you have something you spray on for certain occasions or certain outfits or even just how you’re feeling when you wake up that day. You wouldn’t eat the same meal every day, you wouldn’t wear the same outfit every day. Because there are so many great perfumes now at every price point, you really can develop that wardrobe.

Haas: We’re seeing a lot of interest in layering, so definitely stuff that you can mix and match seems fun for people to customize and make it their own.

We’re seeing a little more with guava, so maybe we’ll see fruity fragrances make a resurgence. A couple years ago, if someone had said pistachio was going to be trending, we would’ve been not believed you. One of the best parts of the job is that you’re constantly surprised and delighted with whatever new crazy thing is coming out.

Weinberg: Speaking of pistachio, definitely gourmand perfumes have had the perfume industry in a chokehold for quite a few years now. We expect to see weirder gorurmands like how DS and Durga’s pistachio and Kayali’s pistachio explored a nutty element that definitely hadn’t been done at that scale before.

What are short-term and long-term goals for your store and brand? 

Haas: I’d definitely like to see our brand go more global. I would like us to expand into Europe and Asia. It’s very challenging with a smaller line, getting all of the red tape and the logistics, so figuring out that part of the puzzle is definitely one of the big things on our list.

Weinberg: Because of perfumes’ high alcohol content, it’s considered a hazardous material to ship. So, it can be a much more complicated product to get overseas than some others. And we’ll definitely be finishing out the week.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.