OUT OF THE BOX – STORA SKUGGAN

SHH The first thing I noticed when I discovered your fragrances was the complexity on so many levels at once: the composition of the scents themselves, connected to stories that read like fairy tales. The bottle as an interplay of dimensions, materials, colors and drawings. And a visual language for which you collaborate with artists from completely different fields. A real witch's brew of differences. You are a collective, is that the secret?

SS It is part of the secret, perhaps. Everyone on the team arrived at perfumery from different creative disciplines: design, art, music, technology. Every aspect of a STORA SKUGGAN fragrance is created by the collective, from the formulas themselves to our signature caps, bottle illustrations, and digital presence. We are a small team of polymaths, involved in every facet of the brand. We may not be in the business of blowing glass bottles, but if we could, we probably would.

SHH What comes first, what is the more important part of a perfume: the ancient king named Yuvanaswa, the witch who flies to the sabbath at Blåkulla to have sex with the devil, or the fragrance?

SS We, in fact, did not invent the stories behind our perfumes. They are real life myths or scientific facts that we stumble upon and collect like small treasures. Sometimes they become the first building block for a scent, and other times a wild story surfaces, fitting one of our perfumers’ projects perfectly and underlining the concept of that perfume even more clearly. Our goal with each scent is to create an unexpected combination or a head turning twist that you have not experienced before. This is why each perfume sometimes goes through many hundreds of iterations before it becomes what it eventually will be. And also why, after 11 years, we only have nine perfumes.

SHH You work with musicians like Jens Lekman and BASHKKA, with the poet Karl Holmqvist, and with the glass artist Kristin Larsson. What do these collaborations bring that a collective of six people from such different creative backgrounds doesn't already have? And once a fragrance enters the world, what do you hope becomes of it? Can music, poetry, or another person's imagination change the way it is experienced, or is the most interesting part what people discover for themselves?

SS By analogy, if you hear a piece of music or read a poem that might strike a certain nerve, of course this can change how you perceive a scent. Our olfactory memories are hard coded in our brains, closely linked to experiences. As for what we find in artists outside of the group: unexpected expressions and ideas. On the other hand, sometimes it can also happen that you see or hear an artist’s work, and you feel like they have almost tapped right into your own mind and physically realised a part of you that only existed in a dreamed up aesthetic world, which you could never bring to life yourself because you work in totally different mediums. But there is this connection, a strong artistic vision, over which you share a mutual bond. Other times you experience an artist’s work, and it is so far off from what you could ever come up with, so wild and so out there, sometimes so wrong, that you realise it is exactly the right thing to do for this perfume. The sheer oddity and beautiful madness of other people’s heads are just so fantastic and inspiring. When something is released into the world, it takes on a life of its own. Scent is something so intimate. You cannot control what another person experiences when smelling it. Of course, there are more literal ways of doing it. You can build a fragrance around a particular material or make it smell unmistakably of the thing you wish to suggest. But then again, you create something warm, full of spices, evoking a hot desert, and then the receiver thinks of Christmas instead. Hey, what can you do. Let the experience be free. Let the wearer take it and make it theirs. One of the best things, however, is, of course, if the person smelling the perfume actually smells something, or a combination of notes, they have never experienced in that specific kind of way before. When customers come and try the perfumes in our studio in Stockholm, we get to see reactions firsthand, which is really interesting to observe. We like it weird, and we like it beautiful. It is very important to all of us that STORA SKUGGAN continues to be in constant flux while also staying closely connected to its core.

SHH As a designer myself, I have found that the most interesting results emerge when different people each bring their own handwriting, when there is no single dominant voice dictating how something has to look. How does your design process actually work?

SS That is pretty much how we work. If the outside world only knew how clear and strong certain visions have been upon being first presented, and how they have then morphed and ended up somewhere completely different, upside down, after going through the STORA SKUGGAN creative meat grinding machine. This is the most exciting aspect of working together the way we do: interweaving perspectives and concepts. When it comes to designing, or rather creating, the actual perfumes, it is a different story. There is always a lead perfumer in the collective who is triggered by a myth, a raw material, or an olfactory impulse, and this person sets out to realise this specific concept. Further into the creative process, we evaluate the work together, refining its direction. This is a strictly STORA SKUGGAN process without outside involvement. Like with all creative seeds, it is something you first need to nurture very privately, without being disturbed or receiving too much input, to let it form a solid bone structure.

SHH When is a fragrance perfect? When do you know you can release it into the world?

SS It is just a feeling telling you, "let it go, this is it," after many trials and iterations. If the projection and substantivity are as you wish for them to be, then you know it is completely and fully ready. Then it is like letting your kid go to school alone for the first time: kind of nervous, but also very exciting. However, we have been doing this for 11+ years now, and our confidence is thankfully not decreasing, but some kind of tension is always there. In the end, we do things we like, staying as far away from trends and focus groups as we possibly can. When all the iterations have passed the STORA SKUGGAN high res filter, we just know that it is ready, or not.