On a 2024 trip to New Orleans, Maya Hall found herself enchanted with the city’s apothecaries and perfume stores, like the French Quarter’s long-running boutique Madame Aucoin Perfume. The recent college graduate, who had been collecting perfumes since childhood, wondered why her home town of Salt Lake City didn’t have its own shop for niche scents like Madame Aucoin. Hall decided she would have to open it herself.
Hall set out on a business plan in October 2024, and within months, she had a small business loan and a lease on a retail space in downtown Salt Lake City. In July, she opened Solvi, offering perfumes by Chicago indie brand Pearfat and Australian label Peosym, for example. On her first day, she had 500 customers.
“You see online all the time the popularity of [niche perfume]. But in real life, how many people are going to come and be excited about it?” said Hall. “I was shocked by how much people were excited about it.”
While major shopping metropolises like New York and Los Angeles have seen a regular influx of indie perfume boutiques and single-brand flagships, many fragheads have had to travel or turn to online shopping to discover new scents. But with perfume remaining beauty’s fastest growing category across the U.S. market, fragrance fans are opening their own niche boutiques across the country in America’s smaller cities.
Rachel Greiman first went down the perfume rabbit hole in 2022. Her son was diagnosed with leukemia and she found fragrance to be a sensorial escape while he underwent treatment. The Denver resident was regularly ordering samples online from retailers in L.A. and New York before deciding to open her own boutique in 2024.
Greiman sold her copywriting business and opened Ode to Perfume in Denver in June. She has kept the store largely appointment-based as she wets her feet in retail — up until September, almost all of her appointment slots were fully booked.
“We’ve been really lucky that it’s been profitable almost from the beginning. I think that’s attributed more to the fragrance desert that Denver is,” said Greiman. “My friend referred to it as a lot of pent-up demand. People have been waiting for something like this in the city for years. So I had a built-in customer base, just because I’m the only one.”
When Carrie Hadley sought to open a fragrance boutique in the Atlanta Metro in 2019, however, she did not immediately encounter such enthusiasm.
“When I first opened, one of the guys on the city council was like, ‘Perfume? I give that six weeks,’” said Hadley, who turned to perfume after a career in marketing and advertising. After getting tired of traveling to New York and L.A. to discover new scents and brands, she decided to open her own store in Atlanta.
Hadley opened Indiehouse in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta in March 2020. But despite opening at the precipice of the pandemic, the boutique has found a dedicated customer base. In 2022, Hadley opened a second store in Atlanta proper and now employs 20 staff members, with her stores offering regular perfume-making workshops and classes.
“It’s just such a different game once you get off the coasts,” said Hadley. “We have a beginner client all the way up to the most sophisticated niche client who literally goes on perfume-buying trips to Dubai. We kind of have to curate our selection to have enough interesting things for people. Our whole mission is just to meet people where they are.”
Meeting customers where they are often means finding a balance between viral crowdpleasers and local tastes. In Salt Lake City, Hall estimates she has sold 300 bottles of the TikTok-famous Bianco Latte from Giardini di Toscana since she opened Solvi, making it the boutique’s top-selling scent from day one. She has also been surprised to see many Utahns, a notoriously conservative demographic, gravitate towards the provocatively-named Fig Porn from Korean brand Born To Stand Out.
“Niche perfume is so trendy now, and people see the ones on TikTok that they just really want to smell. … They may get disappointed if they see that we don’t have Le Labo or Byredo,” said Hall. “It is a tricky balance that I’m still trying to figure out. If anything, I want it to be even more indie brands.”
In Denver, Greiman’s Ode to Perfume neighbors a shopping center where consumers can find many of those mainstream brands at Nordstrom and Sephora. To keep her curation distinct from larger retailers, she’s narrowed down the majority of her 21 brands to perfume made by women, people of color and queer business owners.
The Jazz and House scents from musician-turned-perfumer Zernell Gillie have been major hits with Greiman’s Denver customer base, but she’s still determining how to buy for her audience.
“Like any retailer knows, we’re all just guessing. Everything we’re doing is an assumption,” she said. “I can look at what is popular in San Francisco, New York, L.A. and Chicago, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be popular in Denver.”
But even before the perfume boom of the 2020s, fragheads have been willing to travel to get their noses on new scents. Ann Bouterse opened Indigo Perfumery in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood after a career as a nurse and a florist. In October, she will celebrate the store’s twelfth anniversary. Over the years, she has seen perfume lovers travel across state lines to visit Indigo, many of them discovering the store through social media — though Indigo itself maintains a fairly low profile, with just 4,000 Instagram followers — or word of mouth.
“Most of the time, it’s people who have traveled a long ways to get here, or have been wanting to come,” said Bouterse. “It’s people who are visiting family from out of town. For a lot of customers, it’s because somebody’s getting surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. A lot of times, they’ll bring their whole family, because they might be here for months.”
By 2025, Bouterse has encountered a new set of challenges — tariffs have become her biggest logistical hurdle — and a new generation of consumers. Teen boys are now a regular sight, many of whom, she said, are gravitating toward A Whiff of Waffle Cone, a gourmand from Portland, Oregon-based brand Imaginary Authors.
But while the niche perfume boom has cultivated a new customer base, it has also meant a spate of new launches as brands seek to capitalize on the genre.
“I’m constantly on the lookout for new brands. But it’s more challenging now, in the sense that there’s so much mediocre stuff,” said Bouterse. “I want to tell the people who are starting their lines to start off with just a few. You don’t need 12, or 10, or even six. Do quality, not quantity.”
In Atlanta, though social media has helped many brands and retailers find new audiences, Hadley said the online attention on perfume also brings new obstacles. She has seen would-be influencers use her store as a background for filming social media content without tagging or crediting the space. Shoppers, too, may turn to boutiques like Indiehouse to discover and sample new scents, but ultimately buy a bottle online from sellers offering discount codes.
“The brick-and-mortar game is definitely harder. And people just don’t understand that when they don’t buy it from the place they discovered it, at some point, they’re not going to have that opportunity anymore,” she said.
But five years into the business, Hadley said keeping afloat in a smaller market means offering something bigger that retailers, and perhaps bigger cities, can’t provide.
“It’s building relationships with people where they couldn’t even imagine buying it anywhere else,” said Hadley. “Because they know you and love you as much as you know them and love them. And that model, I don’t think it works in Manhattan, I don’t think it works in Los Angeles.”
Photo credit: Emily Wehner / Ode to Perfume
