PERFUME SELECTION

SPEAK SCENTS IS OUT TO REVOLUTIONISE THE FRAGRANCE MATCHING AND BUYING EXPERIENCE UTILISING BIG DATA AND TECHNOLOGY. PUT THE QUESTIONS TO CO-FOUNDER MADELEINE PATEL.

Describe the background of you and your husband Ankit. What did you both do prior to getting into the fragrance business?

MADELEINE: We had quite different backgrounds. Mine was in advertising and marketing. While working for agencies in Auckland and Wellington I’d developed a passion for using data to deliver greater efficiencies in marketing activity and better understand how we could speak to customers. Ankit has a PHD in applied statistics, specialising in rating systems applied in the sporting, finance and tech industries. He’s sport mad, with a large portion of his PHD focused on predictive sports analytics. We met at a data agency in Wellington. We tackle problems in quite different ways but believe our varied backgrounds and approaches are a strength when brought together.

We share a vision of combining our skills to build a truly customercentric offering to make better customer decisions.

How did you get the idea for a fragrance matching and buying experience, and is there anything else like Speak Scents on the market?

MADELEINE: I’ve been fascinated with fragrance and scent for a long time, and since my teens had wanted to create a challenger brand that wasn’t centred around celebrity and unattainable imagery. It felt like none of the brands spoke to me at all, and I felt cut out of the market.

Fast-forward ten years and the more we both looked into fragrance, the more we realised how overwhelming and confusing the experience of buying this product is for most people.

We could see the power of predictive analytics being used to improve decision making in many different categories and it dawned on us that fragrance information is essentially big data. It was a category that hadn’t changed in a long time that felt ripe for disruption.

We have seen platforms attempt to improve parts of the experience, particularly in the States, but none solving the same problem as Speak Scents, using data in this way.

Explain the science and technology behind Speak Scents. Exactly how can data reinvent the perfume buying experience and is it a technology that can be applied equally around the world?

MADELEINE: The way fragrance is made and described means there are many different data points to understand. We have come to think of this as complicated, messy ‘big data’. Big data is the perfect use case for machine learning and predictive analytics – in order to sort through the masses of information quickly and accurately, models are used to find an outcome, based on a set of parameters. Speak Scents takes a customer’s preferences, which are entered as a customer builds their ‘profile’ on our platform, and uses a series of models built on a seed database of 68,000 different fragrances, to find the best scent match from our range.

We envision this technology being used in many different global markets within fragrance, and eventually in similar categories, and have built the models with scale in mind. We plan on validating demand in Australia, Europe and the US.

How hard has it been to get backing for your venture, and what difference has Creative

MADELEINE AND ANKIT.

HQ’S Incubator programme had on the acceptance and growth of Speak Scents?

MADELEINE: When we first started our fundraising journey we were very early stage and had no idea what to expect. We needed a small amount of funding to further validate our idea and help us get off the ground and found it extremely difficult to convert at the stage we were at. We were essentially selling a dream that to us, looking at global trends and similar models in the States, was a no-brainer. But for NZ Angels it was extremely left field.

Being a female founder with a B2C idea in a category not well understood was also challenging, but we’ve learnt a lot from this to take us into the next phase. Creative HQ’S connections were instrumental in helping us on this journey early stage – as were the founder community we were introduced to through the programme, and the mentor relationships we still lean on now.

What business lessons have you learnt so far? And what advice do you have for other business start-ups?

MADELEINE: Keep showing up! A mentor gave me this advice and I thought it was a pretty low bar, but realised over time that small progress is still progress when things get tough.

We have learnt many lessons starting a business through Covid – mainly around allowing way more time than expected and always underestimating the cost of shipping.

Good relationships have been pivotal to overcoming hurdles with supply chain and logistics as well as other challenges along the way.

We’ve realised people will go out of their way to help you when they believe in you and believe in your idea. We have been incredibly lucky to have the support of key people who took a chance on us and helped us along the way.

Be kind, stick to your vision and find your tribe of believers. They are critical.

What’s next for Speak Scents? What are your growth goals for 2023 and will you require any additional funding?

MADELEINE: We’re soon launching a pre-sales campaign to validate early demand and we launched the Beta ‘general access’ platform in late 2022, just in time for Christmas.

Our key goals for 2023 are to grow our New Zealand customer base, optimise our matching algorithm from paying customers, build out our supply chain more effectively and scope the Australian market in late 2023.

We will also raise a pre-seed round mid-2023 which will help us with our first hires, allow us to invest in new product development and expand into Australia.