A fragrance house built by perfumers, not marketers — composed at 142 Wythe Avenue, bottled in micro-batches.
Lina Osei and Marcus Velez left corporate fine-fragrance desks to open a studio where every scent is built by a trained nose from a 1,200-ingredient palette. This is how that studio works, and why your home smells like nothing else on the shelf.
Lina Osei · Master Perfumer & Co-founderMarcus Velez · Scent Designer & Co-founder
Lina Osei and Marcus Velez left the fine-fragrance industry in 2019 to compose scents on their own terms.
Lina spent eight years developing fine fragrances for a Paris house. Marcus spent six as a scent designer for boutique hotels across the Americas. Both were tired of watching the same mood-board scents get white-labeled under different names — every brand carrying the same three oud profiles, the same salted-caramel candle, the same generic "linen" diffuser that smells like nothing in particular.
They opened Azht — a word pulled from an old perfumery term for a balanced chord of three notes — inside a 1,400-square-foot former print shop on Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg. The first year, they poured 1,800 candles by hand, on a single bench, for a list of 212 customers. They have not scaled that bench.
What has scaled is the team: fourteen full-time staff today, including three master perfumers, a glass-blowing partner in upstate New York, and a refill program that has kept 8.2 tons of glass out of landfill since launch.
“We didn't want to build the next big candle brand. We wanted to build the next good one.”
— Lina Osei & Marcus VelezFour steps. One bench. No shortcuts from a 1,200-ingredient palette to a bottled batch.
Every Azht scent moves through the same four-stage process before it reaches a shelf. We do not accept white-label templates, contract manufacturers, or shortcut distillations — and fewer than six percent of new formulas pass on the first cold-throw test.
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01
Composition
A perfumer builds the formula on the bench from a 1,200-ingredient palette of naturals, absolutes, and IFRA-compliant synthetics. Average build time: 38 hours over six weeks. Average revisions before sign-off: 11.
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02
Micro-Batch Pour
Approved formulas are hand-poured in batches of 200 units or fewer in our Brooklyn studio. Each vessel is dated, batch-coded, and signed off by the perfumer who composed it.
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03
72-Hour Cold Throw Test
Every candle is lit in a sealed 12-by-12 room for 72 hours and rated by an independent panel. Fewer than 6% of submissions pass on the first attempt; the rest go back to the bench for re-balancing.
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04
Hand-Finish & Pack
Cotton-core wicks are trimmed, vessels are wiped, labels are applied by hand, and each box is packed in FSC-certified, unbleached paper. No plastic film. No unnecessary inserts.
“Independent perfumery is not a marketing position. It is the daily practice of refusing the easiest formula in favor of the right one — even when the right one costs us a bench week, a batch, or a launch date. The home is the most intimate room a perfumer ever enters. We take that seriously.”
Lina Osei & Marcus Velez · Brooklyn, Spring 2024
1,400 square feet of bench, glass, and afternoon light off the East River.
The Wythe Avenue studio is small on purpose — small enough that every batch is poured in the same room where it was composed. These are the working spaces behind every candle, diffuser, and room spray we ship.
Scaled craft, verifiable receipts.
The studio has grown without losing the bench. These are the figures we publish, audited and updated each quarter.
- 2023 NYCxDESIGN AwardObject Design · Home category
- Brooklyn Museum 2023Design Marketplace, permanent collection
- Leaping Bunny CertifiedVegan & cruelty-free since 2020
- IFRA CompliantPhthalate-free, cotton-core wick, 55+ hour clean burn
- Carbon-Neutral ShippingOn every order, domestic and international
- Lifetime Scent-Memory Guarantee12-month cold-throw replacement, no questions asked