#262 - The Greatest Aventus Clone Ever

Join fragrance aficionado Dan from Insider Parfums as we whisk you away on an aromatic expedition unlike any other. Prepare to be captivated by the essence of Insidious, a fragrance that tips its cap to the vintage Aventus charm. Our discussion unfurls the delicate craftsmanship involved in recreating the allure of classic perfumes, navigating the intricate dance between originality and homage, and the value Insidious brings to the table when measured against its contemporary counterparts. This is not your everyday fragrance chat; it's a revelation of how scents we adore are meticulously brought back to life.

Ever wondered how a perfume earns its name? We share the compelling tale of how "Insidious" was chosen, diving into the collective brainstorming that led to its christening. Dan sheds light on the mixed bag of receptions within the fragrance community, the role of a fragrance 'producer', and the resilience needed when facing the critics. Plus, we can't help but indulge in a good laugh about the cheeky moniker of a certain celebrity's candle, serving a reminder of the playful side of perfume branding.

To close out our scented symphony, we reflect on the personal narratives of fragrance creators and the conundrum of wearing their own masterpieces. We navigate the financial intricacies of crafting exquisite scents, the tightrope walk of pricing, and the ethics of the clone fragrance market. There's also a nod to the enchanting Virde Redux and its contemporary reformulation. This episode is more than a scent trail; it's a full-bodied experience steeped in passion, wit, and the invisible art of perfume. Join us for an olfactory odyssey that promises to both educate and entertain.

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Transcript

Ryan: 0:00

Oh yeah, Coffee or tea.

Myke: 0:08

I'm British. What the fuck On that note.

Ryan: 0:11

Hello everybody, Welcome to the Cologne podcast.

Myke: 0:14

I'm Mike and I'm Ryan and we're two best friends. We're going on a fragrance journey, smelling fragrances and giving you uneducated opinions, and in today's episode we're taking a look at Insidious by Insider Parfums. And we have the creator and mine behind it Dan the fragrance weirdo. Welcome to the show, dan. Thank you very much.

Dan: 0:34

Nice to be here again.

Myke: 0:35

After we had our last episode and we freaked out over how good some of the soma fragrances were, you sent us a couple and then I ended up buying a couple for some gifts for friends of mine as well whom they both loved. Oh good. And then we found out about this little gym the Insidious, which is an ode to a vintage, a Ventus. Am I correct in that? Ok, absolutely correct. Yeah, give us a little bit of the backstory where you kind of got into that and you know some of the hurdles you jumped over to make it this good. Spoiler alert it's amazing, it's really good, ok.

Dan: 1:10

OK, well, I'm glad we started there. That way I don't have to throw a fucking tantrum Stomp off. And who the fuck are these guys? No, so I have been working on Insider Parfums as a sort of side project a soma for quite a while actually, and what it's intended to be. We started with a bunch of the Tom Ford stuff which was just you know personal favorites of mine Japo, noir, amber, absolute, moss, breaches. You know, these are fragrances that you'll pay like a thousand dollars for now on eBay or whatever, and the secondary prices are insane. You can't get them for love nor money. There's no intention of the brand to ever bring them back, and so I started talking to a perfuma about this.

Dan: 1:59

Now I'll get this out of the way early on. I can't name the perfuma and there's a good reason for that, which is that they are a proper perfuma and they don't actually want their name associated with clones, which is sort of. I sort of get it Right. I do understand it, because that would detract from, you know, their primary focus, and it's difficult. I got into a bit of an argument with someone because you can't really it's what you call it. It's sort of unverifiable or unfalsifiable, I can't remember which way around it is, but basically it's very difficult for me to prove this. All I can say is look, just fucking smell the perfume. Does that smell like I knocked that up in a bathtub at home?

Myke: 2:48

It does not.

Dan: 2:49

So I got talking to this perfuma, explained the idea and they helped us create a bunch of essentially recreations to as exact a formula and specification as possible for all these discontinued perfumes, and the intention was to stick entirely with discontinued perfumes. You know the world needs another clone house like it needs a sort of collective hole in the head. But well, I mean, it's true. I mean there's so many fucking clone houses, right, and I'm sort of a bit relaxed about clones. I know people are super militant these days. I'm far more relaxed about it just because I think brands like Creed create the market. And that's exactly what happened with the eventus and it is a clone. I mean, let's be honest, it's a clone. I can't dress it up and say something Stop, right, it's yeah.

Dan: 3:39

So Insidious was an attempt to recreate eventus, the vintage stuff, because Creed's current sort of product is shitty, right, it's weak, it's grotesquely overpriced and customers are being in my view, you know, ripped off here, and you know I won't pretend like this is cheap either.

Dan: 4:02

Someone made a fair observation that you know you could buy a 500 ml flacon of genuine Creed eventus and the price per mill ends up somewhere the same as this 50 ml bottle, although you know you have to buy. I had to be honest. If you bought 10 bottles of Insidious, odds are I'd give you a pretty hefty discount anyway. So it's not a direct read across, but I take the point that this is not a cheap perfume. But the reality is you can smell the product. I had to pay someone quite a lot of money to create that and that's where we are. You know, I did it because several people asked for it and I'd intended to steer clear of stuff already in production. But it's such an obvious sort of thing, given how popular the perfume is and how shitty the current incarnation of eventus is.

Myke: 4:54

Yeah, so I'm actually on my second bottle of eventus and just like modern formulations of it and I actually told Ryan I got to a point where I was like I can't really wear this right now. I'm getting like kind of like icked out by this. It like right out of the atomizer it still smells good, but it was almost getting kind of screechy. I was almost like it kind of reminds me of a clone of a eventus and it's a. I mean, I didn't buy it retail but no, of course. But it got to a point where I was like man, it's still kind of screechy up front and I heard Tony talking about this. Then I heard Steve talking about this. How smooth it was.

Myke: 5:30

And when we, when we got it from you, sprayed it on, that was the first thing we both noticed was like wow, this is really nice. Like the one thing you expect out of a clone of a eventus is that it's going to suck for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, you know. But right out of the atomizer it smelled amazing, it was nice and smooth. And Ryan and I were both like wow, people just won't stop talking about it. And it's hard to like get on here and be so positive because I think people will like listen and go like well, obviously you guys got the bottle and you got Dan on the show, so you know it's going to be positive. But the thing we kind of said off air was like it sucks that we can't just go like raving crazy about this because people won't think we're genuine. But it shocked us at how great it was.

Dan: 6:17

Okay, I mean you guys seem unlike the sort of people who would sell their asses for for what is essentially less than a hundred bucks, right it's. You know, I don't believe it would make any sense. I mean, sure, people can sort of be cynical and indeed, you know, at least 20% of people will always be pretty fucking cynical whatever you say or do, right? But you know, you wouldn't have bothered inviting me on the show if you didn't want to talk about the perfume. You could have just not talked about it, right, and no one would have known any different. There's been no transaction here other than me sending you some perfume to review the fact you like it and you like me to come talk about it. That's cool, absolutely cool.

Myke: 7:09

But I'm not fucking paying you guys, you're going to stop trying to shake me down like this.

Dan: 7:13

Okay, we'll just cancel that invoice really quickly.

Ryan: 7:19

I do want to reiterate that point. I was talking to him past couple of times. Now I'm just like man, fuck, nobody's going to take us serious because one we've kind of we've all befriended each other just recently and you've been on here before and we've had a good time and this fragrance smells so good I'm seriously saying this to you. I think it is probably actually better than what I currently smell with a Ventus. I've never smelled, you know, vintage of Vintas, so I don't know. You know how it's comparable, but just straight up a fragrance and that it isn't that a Vintas warehouse One. It's definitely the best if you want to consider a clone that I have smelled of it Super smooth, it is so fucking smooth, nothing screechy, and it smells so good the first time I wore it.

Ryan: 8:05

I'm one of these people I do like getting compliments. So if I get a compliment on something, especially if I've just like started wearing it, that'll resonate with me. It was like red tobacco. He may hate it, but I got too many compliments to ignore that it did good. This is the same thing. I actually wore it and went to an annual like doctor's visit and all the nurses were freaking, oozing over it.

Dan: 8:26

And.

Ryan: 8:27

I'm not making this up. My doctor walked in, didn't say hi to me. The first thing they said was you smell phenomenal and it is seriously top fucking notch. And I hate that people may not take us serious in what we're saying about this fragrance, because it is seriously fucking good.

Dan: 8:43

I don't care. I mean, what are you supposed to do in this sort of situation? This is one of things that you know. Just set aside kind of my perfumes for a minute, because you know, honestly, if you didn't like it, I'm happy for you to say that. Also, the only thing I get a bit techy about is people who dismiss it without trying it. Those are the things that bothers me. But generally, look, if you tried it and you don't like it, all right, sorry, I tried, and the fact that you do like it, great.

Dan: 9:18

But you know, nothing is in. It's not important enough to me or, I think, to most brands, to have. You know, people just fucking lie. You know this whole shilling stuff. I think we talked about it last time actually, and it is a bit of a hobby horse of mine because you know there are certainly bad people in this world doing some very bad shit. But you know, look, I appreciate you saying it's a nice perfume. I'm glad you like it. Even if you didn't like it, I would still, you know, want to be friends with you guys.

Ryan: 9:55

Well, I'm going to tell you I don't like it. I genuinely love it, and it has been since I started, I'm serious. Since I started wearing it, it's probably my number one reach right now. And I'm not just saying that, I really mean that. This is a badass fragrance.

Myke: 10:08

I know this isn't like your namesake, but you got to be proud of it though. Right, Are you proud of it?

Dan: 10:16

Well, yes and no, I mean, look, let's be absolutely honest, I didn't make it right. I just sort of, you know there's a perfumer who deserves all the credit for this who's obviously not going to get it. But they're getting paid, so that's okay.

Myke: 10:33

Yeah, that's their credit, you know.

Dan: 10:36

I didn't even come up with a name. I sort of put it open to people on a Facebook group and said guys, what do you think we should call this perfume? You know, actually, I should have said this also when you were saying, ryan, about the, you haven't smelled the vintage Ventus and stuff and how this is quite different. It is very much intended to be that way. We narrowed it down to several options, though, and then I put those out as testers to a load of people that are really into a Ventus, and, I'll be honest, some of the feedback was not great.

Dan: 11:13

This one was by far and away the most popular, but, you know, some of them were just like, yeah, no, I mean it sort of captures one dimension of a Ventus, but really it's not. I don't think it's good enough, and so some people had a real downer on it. But this was the most popular version, almost universally. So we sent out about 15 different people tried it. I had lots of feedback. Some of them didn't like any of them, but of the 15, 14 of them, I think, said this was the best one, and I knew that before I even put it out, that this was going to be the one Because I think it smells great.

Dan: 11:49

But am I proud of it? You should be, it's not my Well, okay, well, someone should be, but it's not for me to be proud of, because I didn't fucking create it, I didn't name it. My friend came up with the design for the bottle, which is shamelessly an event to strip off. I mean, my contribution really has been to pull some of the strings in the background and connect the people and the money and the fucking process.

Myke: 12:17

Yeah, You're like a producer. Yeah, you get like producer's credit.

Dan: 12:21

Yeah, exactly, or fucking associate producer or something like the lowest order of kind of credit. You know, I'm certainly not the director and the director would be the person that gets the credit, you know.

Ryan: 12:35

Well, you kind of alluded to it that you had people in a group kind of come up with names for it or vote on it at least. What made y'all settle on insidious? I am curious about that.

Dan: 12:46

It's a good question. I can't quite remember, I mean, some of the, some of the names were just stupid. Yeah, troll names, yeah, like pineapple twat.

Myke: 12:58

God, now I'm pissed. You didn't call it that.

Dan: 13:03

We definitely should have gone for pineapple twat.

Ryan: 13:05

If you make an x-strait, make it that Pineapple twat x-strait Jesus.

Dan: 13:16

So no, someone suggested insidious and I was talking to my business partner and we just said insidious. It sounds kind of cool like snakey bitey, like it. It sounds slightly evil and noir and also it it has a little sort of rhyming cadence with a ventus.

Myke: 13:38

Oh yeah.

Dan: 13:39

Cidious. You know, it's not a million miles away. I mean, eminem could probably make that fit. Yeah for sure. I don't think I could actually wrap that, but but yeah, it's, I don't know. I just I like the name and the guy who came up with the name. I said I was brilliant, can I send you a bottle? He was like, oh yeah, that'd be brilliant. So I sent him a bottle and about a week later I saw him sell it on Facebook.

Myke: 14:09

You fucking bastard.

Dan: 14:11

There's no loyalty out there? There is none, absolutely none. That's incredible. Wow, good Lord, it's cool. It's cool. I think you have to have a reasonably sort of thick skin about these things. I think it's far too easy to be very brittle and get upset at everything, and it is difficult for me, I'll be honest. I can't pretend I'm so cool that I don't get upset about anything or ever offended. But you know the thing that, as I said, the thing that gets on my nerves mostly is people slagging something off, essentially based on, you know, supposition and sort of guesswork rather than anything real. Yeah, rather than having tried it. If they try it and they don't like it and they want to sell it, that's absolutely fine. You know you crack on guys. So there's almost things reasonably honest. I'm cool with it. But yeah, I think the first time I saw a soma perfume for sale on a Facebook group, I a little bit of me died inside. You just have to get used to that shit.

Myke: 15:19

Man. A lot of those are so good, though. In fact, the first episode of season five is coming out, and there's a fragrance that we do. By the time this comes out, people have already known, so we basically smell. I don't know if you've smelled this yet, but it's called this Smells Like my Vagina. Have you smelled that?

Dan: 15:39

Is this the Gwyneth Paltrow? Yes, I haven't smelled it, because and it's not because, you know, setting aside the fact that I am very much a heterosexual male I just have no interest in Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina. You're messing it up.

Myke: 16:01

It actually does not smell like Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina. I mean, I don't know.

Dan: 16:06

Would you know this it?

Myke: 16:08

could no reference point. It's so true. Yeah, here I am a hack. It's this unbased, you know, opinionated thing you were just preaching about and here I am breaking that down. But no, you should get onto fragrance again.

Dan: 16:22

This smells nothing like Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina. Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina is much more diffusive.

Myke: 16:32

Yeah, there is no musk in this fragrance. No, it's basically just a nice rosy floral fragrance and I promise you I'm linking this to you.

Dan: 16:44

I thought you were going to say something completely different. Oh, he was still talking about Gwyneth Paltrow's. I was like, no, it's rosy.

Myke: 16:50

Wow yeah, let me break down the heart note.

Dan: 16:53

So I'm very much an honor really quick, sorry, it is a pleasant enough perfume then, is it yeah?

Myke: 17:00

It's pretty good, but the thing that I kind of said was a better take on a fragrance like that is theorem, and I'd been obsessed with theorem, which has like oh my God, if I'd known that's where you were going, I would not have leant into the whole of the journey, don't worry.

Ryan: 17:22

We won't let Todd edit any of that out.

Myke: 17:25

Yeah, exactly. But so we get to the end and we're like, yeah, it's nice, but it's a roll on, it's kind of gimmicky, if you're looking I specifically said, if you're looking for an actual fragrance that I feel like theorem is in that direction, but it's better developed and it's actually more of a fragrance instead of just like something that smells good that you put in a candle and possibly roll on your skin. I mean, theorem is such fantastic fragrance and we hadn't done an episode on it, but it was one of the ones that really stuck with me and it was like very unisex. You were kind of talking about it some on the Axiom episode, how it was like your. You were kind of like I'll do this because this is a great style of fragrance. It's not necessarily like this is Dan's favorite fragrance. Let me make another one like this because I'm super into it, it's great, but I remember you saying something like that. But yeah, I was obsessed with it after we smelled the samples you gave us.

Dan: 18:31

Great. I mean honest truth. I think we've hardly sold any at all of it. It's not being wildly popular. I think it deserves better. Personally, people who have tried it feedback very positively on it, but it hasn't sold very well. In fact, from the more recent releases, it's probably our slowest seller and I've often puzzled about why that would, be given that people who try it say good things but then it doesn't sell. And I think that is simply because I think the notes list might be a bit intimidating for people. Not an intimate Sorry that sounds condescending, but people might read the notes list and think, oh no, that doesn't sound very nice based on those notes, whereas actually it does sort of work, even though it's a sort of smash together of iris and some leather and some rows and stuff. Oh it's great.

Ryan: 19:36

I actually want to ask a question kind of moving a little bit past the insidious here. We were looking to website. We noticed that you have another fragrance Is it an Aventus inspired one called D'Ambur Absolut. What is that?

Dan: 19:50

No, that's a good time for it.

Ryan: 19:52

I'm sorry, d'ambur, absolut, absolut. Where did this name come from? I freaking love that.

Dan: 20:01

It was a fucking. I hate it so much. It was a stupid fucking joke. My business partner's initials are DW and we were sort of toying with what could we call our Amber Absolut copy, clone, retread, whatever. What could we call our Amber Absolut? And he just put his initials in front of it. Right, that's now D'Ambur Absolut. This is the stupidest fucking name. It's childish. Yeah, it's the equivalent of a dog pissing on things. It's like this is mine.

Myke: 20:40

It's like the game where you say like bam-ba-lam, banana-fan-a-fo fam, sort of a thing.

Dan: 20:45

you know you exchange the first letter of the word Exactly that, interestingly, people don't refer to the second word of it, so they just refer to it as D'Ambur, and D'Ambur on its own sort of sounds okay, anyway. Yeah, it's stupid. It's the last time I let him name anything here.

Myke: 21:06

Yeah, he's been demoted to some other role for sure. Yeah, not naming. So did you run into any hiccups or speed bumps when you kind of made this, or did you feel like it came together pretty smoothly?

Dan: 21:20

I mean, the difficulties were, you know, without sort of going too much into the individual, convincing them to actually play was a little bit tricky because, for the same reasons that I'd essentially mentioned, the initial project was to revive discontinued classics. So, moving squarely into what, you know, most people would reasonably call clone territory, it took a bit of arm twisting. This was our most expensive project by a long way, so just putting together the money took quite a bit of effort. And then just the process of going through so many iterations and sort of like that's not quite this or it's not quite that, let's say, getting it down to three finalists. All the hard work was done by that point because almost yeah, I'll be honest about this At the point that I put those three finalists out, I already knew which one it was going to be, but I kind of wanted a bit of it was more validation of my decision, rather than me genuinely saying hey guys, why don't you pick and tell me which?

Dan: 22:26

I knew which one was best, because the other two were good in other ways but did not hit the mark of this one. Not by some way, in my view. So are you?

Myke: 22:36

wearing it.

Dan: 22:39

No, no, I have a real weirdness about wearing anything that I've produced.

Ryan: 22:47

I can understand that.

Dan: 22:48

Oh man, I beat the opposite. Well, I did it first, but I mean, there is a. I was trying to explain it. It's nothing as pompous as, like you know, musicians not listening to their own music, but I guess when I spray anything that I've been involved in producing, I can still smell like 20 different iterations of it.

Myke: 23:13

Oh, that makes sense.

Dan: 23:14

And it always gives me that little pause for like, did I get this quite the way I wanted it? And it's more of a head fuck to wear it. I mean to be honest at the moment. This will please you, no doubt, I'm sure, but at the moment I'm wearing this. I don't know if you can see that that is Theofenol Thecent and this is about 15 pounds Wow.

Myke: 23:37

This is.

Dan: 23:38

It was a women's perfume originally. It's discontinued now, but it was by Christoph Lordamiel who did the original Amber Absolute. Our team it wasn't me, but the other guys on the podcast interviewed him and they were saying, oh, we've spoken on the podcast about how much we love Theofenol Thecent. You did that one. And he was like, did I? Oh yeah, he couldn't even remember doing it, which was like the guys had been like wanted to ask him questions about hey, why did you do this? And it's pretty heavy on the sort of cumin why did you decide to get? It's like he couldn't even fucking remember doing it, which was but it's a great perfume.

Myke: 24:21

I guess it'd be like if we said Dan on episode seven, you said blah blah, blah blah. You'd be like, oh, okay, yeah.

Dan: 24:32

I did. Probably Whenever anyone says to me anything like Dan, do you remember you said? I just say no. I don't remember no sorry, no idea. It's easier to just deny everything, right?

Myke: 24:49

Yeah, we recently ran into a thing Ryan had said hey, what was that? Was that season three? Or I was like I don't know. Like God knows, they all run together. I can't imagine. I'm sure these guys, I'm sure there are some perfumers that absolutely love the craft, but there's got to be some. That's like they clock in, they made the fragrance, they clock out and then people are like, but what about the patchouli? And they're just like oh my God, leave me alone. You know.

Dan: 25:18

Fuck you, it's five o'clock, buddy, I'm going home.

Myke: 25:20

Yeah, I'm off the clock now.

Ryan: 25:22

Yeah, just to kind of go back here just a second. So you said this was like the most, I guess, the most expensive project you've done, and I guess so that. So is that part. Hopefully I'm not getting too in your business here. You can tell me to fuck off, but is that?

Myke: 25:38

Fuck off, get out of my business.

Ryan: 25:39

But does that kind of tie into its price point? Because we do notice that that is the most expensive fragrance that you have on your side.

Dan: 25:46

Yes, okay, 100%, 100%. It cost way more than I would admit to my wife.

Ryan: 25:54

He just looked over his shoulder.

Dan: 25:59

No, it did cost a lot more and I think that is down to I mean, I like to think it's in part down to the quality of it, but I think there is a reality that our perfumer also knew what they were producing and it was like well, this is reflective of what hopefully would be the level of commercial success. Therefore, the fees are much higher and we have to pay upfront for a load of development on that stuff. So, yeah, it is expensive and for a clone, I'm aware it is expensive. We are, and we have quite a lot of people ask for this. So we are doing 100 ml bottle soon and the price will be substantially lower than 250 ml bottle.

Dan: 26:45

Awesome, in the same way that you know most perfume sort of scale in that way. But also, I mean, there is also a reality that we made most of our investment back now, so we can afford to put 100 ml bottles out and reduce the price and we'll be able to do more kind of promotions, like I think we did a 15% off for Black Friday or something. So we'll hopefully be able to do a little bit more of that. I don't want it to become one of those brands that's always in sale. Right, you know, you know those brands where it's like, hey, this sale has been extended for another 52 weeks, but you're a long sale.

Ryan: 27:27

Get it now.

Myke: 27:32

In Texas it's always truck month. You know, if hey go buy a truck it's truck month.

Dan: 27:39

You know, I could get behind truck.

Myke: 27:43

I'm like wow is June truck month again.

Dan: 27:49

Wasn't it just truck month before?

Myke: 27:50

Christmas.

Dan: 27:54

So I don't want it to be that, but I don't want to take the piss either. I think I told you before that perfume is not my day job, Right, and if it's going to become my day job, I'd rather that it was Soma that became the day job.

Ryan: 28:08

For sure the side.

Dan: 28:08

it was always like a side project, doing some you know and you can call them all clones. I won't get offended, but I never really wanted to make a load of money out of clones. I'm sort of relaxed about them as a business model, but I don't see myself as a big sort of clone in Presario getting wealthy on the back of other people's work.

Ryan: 28:30

Well, two things real quick. First question how far down the pipeline do you think it is for you? I will have a hundred ml bottle, but then also, if we want to consider this a clone house type thing, I will have to say and go to bat for you on this I feel like this is a very serious take because, like I said, this smells so good. I find there's real quality versus what we have smelled of clones and we've smelled stuff that've gotten close but it's screechy shit like that. But this smells like a serious take to where I really almost don't even feel like it's like clone worthy to me One, because I've never smelled original Ventus, so I have nothing to compare it to, but it just smells so fucking good.

Dan: 29:04

Okay, so I'll take those two questions in reverse order. I appreciate what you're saying there and in terms of cloniness, the intention here was to put as good a product as humanly possible. So if you look at the big sort of Saudi whatever clone houses, these guys make millions of bottles Like well, if not millions, hundreds of thousands. We have made like 500, something like that, a few of them, 500 bowls. This is not a vast production run. It is not a gargantuan commercial enterprise. We just wanted to make a really good product. But we will make more. And the 100 ml bowls, well, they will be here just as soon as Chinese shipping allows, because we have to get our labels and such from China. And at the moment there's a bit of trouble in the Red Sea, as you may have heard, and that's slowing down all the shipping. So the honest answer is fuck knows when we will get our labels and such.

Myke: 30:09

Yeah it's past your control.

Dan: 30:11

It is but it's yet another reason to hope for peace in the Middle East. Right Is 100 ml insidious.

Myke: 30:21

Yeah, that is. My prayers and thoughts will be sent out now, knowing that this is hanging in the balance.

Dan: 30:29

Yeah, sorry for the record. That is in no way intended to trivialize what's going on. No, that is the reason that we're all. We're all fucking waiting for stuff, because shipping is all screwed up at the moment.

Myke: 30:41

Well, I know I have about 25 ml left. Brian has about 35 ml left of his. We'll be giving these to Patreons so that they can experience it. We both had a knee jerk of where we didn't think we were going to do it. We kind of didn't want to give them away. We've really enjoyed wearing them because they were. It really is so good. I just want to talk about so much just really quickly. I know the episode is about this, but, god man, every fragrance we smelled and it probably is why this is so good to I just feel like the take that you have on it or at least you're you know your name is assigned to it and you have some production strings you're pulling and all that I can tell you really give a damn.

Ryan: 31:25

Yes, for sure.

Myke: 31:26

The quality is there. I think we said this. It might have been off air or on a different episode, but if we were involved with that, we would be so proud of how high quality and professional and amazing that stuff is turned out.

Dan: 31:41

Well, I mean honestly, guys, I'm genuinely flattered by that. I mean, I think it has been a labour of love. As I say, I am proud of what's been accomplished, but I always feel like I am more like a best on the guy with a nose who sort of says, yeah, I like this.

Myke: 32:03

I don't like that you know.

Dan: 32:05

That's, that's the extent you know. I provide a sort of a brief and I smell things and I say what I like and don't like about them. That's about the sum of it, right, and there's no training there. I don't claim to be a train perfumer, unlike some people who are clearly lying about that shit. But you know, I don't know. Yeah, I feel like I should be more in the background of it, but I am extremely pleased that you like the perfumes you smelled and hopefully other people like them too.

Ryan: 32:35

I would definitely say people definitely need to check it out. You had given me actually and forgive me for pronouncing wrong, but the Verde Redux, I believe is that's pronounced yes, that one smells. I actually spread it. I put on yesterday again, man, that one smells just very high in it's right at my alley. It's high in old school, very old school feeling to me, and it is so loud. I love that fragrance. When I smelled the first time on the little samples you gave us, I was like that's the one for me. I was obsessed with it. So again, thank you for sending that. By the way, that one is so fucking good. No, I would definitely. So can I tell you a little story about this.

Dan: 33:10

Yeah, this is how fucking amateurish we are. So initially that perfume was called the read, which was a sort of riff on, I think, the Latin for green, and it found its niche. It was very. It was much heavier on the old school side of it. The Redux version has a has a more kind of, I guess, modern sort of side to it.

Dan: 33:32

But it was initially called the read and then we updated our branding and we changed the name to Verde VIR, and the reason we changed it was because I fucked up the label. I swear to God, I just spelt it wrong. So I had these, I had these like 2000 labels show up. What the fuck. That is amazing. So that's how we, that's how it became Verde and then Verde. We couldn't produce it anymore because there was slight change in the availability of ingredients. So we ended up having it reformulated by someone else and the brief we gave them was to give it a modern twist. And that's how we ended up with the Redux version, which, yeah, I mean, personally I prefer it as well. It's sort of barbershoppy, old school. It's just got a little bit of kind of hembroxen, he sort of pep to it, if you like, and yeah, I think it's very cool perfume.

Myke: 34:42

Yeah, we sent. We sent the samples that we use for the episodes we actually sent to a patreon named Harley James, and that was his pick too. Really, yeah, wow.

Ryan: 34:52

Yeah, it is it is seriously really fucking good and I love old school and loud and that hits those marks for me, so I'm like in love with it. But I will have to say again I'm kind of reiterating what we said in the beginning I'm so mad and angry that, no matter what praise that I give this, this fragrance today and see which, I promise you guys, is incredible. But as other stuff as well, I do hate that. It will be, you know, kind of fall on deaf ears. Yeah, it'll be taken with a grain of salt, but I love what you're doing, so keep going with it.

Dan: 35:23

What are you going to do? Yeah, what are you going to do? Say it's shit just for the sake of like rising people? I mean, I've had this discussion with people on Instagram as well, you know. Would you want me to do? Say a perfume is shit, I like it? What the fuck you want?

Ryan: 35:35

me to say Right, exactly.

Dan: 35:37

Would it make you feel better if I just said everything was shit? You know Well why would I imagine? Your listeners will probably know that you are straight shooting guys and hopefully, if they've ever followed my Instagram or indeed my podcast, which I won't mention, hopefully you know I'm a straight shooter too, so you know the worst thing you could do is try it and make your own mind up, absolutely.

Myke: 36:04

And if you're a Patreon, you're going to get two shots at it, because we'll send each one out to. If you're the luckier one, you'll get Ryan's, because he's got a little bit more in it.

Ryan: 36:14

I have just been completely dousing myself in this until it gets shipped, I'm going to be spraying the holy dog shit out of it. So it may not be that lucky getting it from me.

Myke: 36:25

Well, dan, as always, we so much appreciate you for coming on. What can you give us a little hint as to what's coming up? Are you working on anything secretive? You can give us a little tidbits.

Dan: 36:38

There's a couple of things that have just released. So we've just released a Halcyon Oud yes, halcyon has always been our best seller for so much and we've released an Oud version, which at the moment is just limited to a hundred bottles, which we've done with these like nice little handmade wooden boxes, and that is going down really well and actually I am wearing that. I'll show you, I'm wearing that in an oil form. I do tend to wear that a bit, so I literally took the oil and just put it in a little bottle and I've been dabbing that and actually thinking Do you know what? I am uniquely happy with that, so that's good. We've done one with an Instagram guy called Oda Gerino. I don't know if you've come across Gerino, but we've just so we just done. He sort of curated a perfume called oblivion, which we've just launched, which is a sort of slightly floral, fruity tobacco.

Dan: 37:33

It's very nice, pretty happy with that. On insider, we got the hundred ML bowls. I think I'm gonna do an Italian Cyprus as well. We tried to do that about a year ago and it wasn't very good, but it looks like our guy has now cracked that problem. I think that's mostly it for the moment. I'm sure we'll have more things coming in the summer. The one thing I do want to do is just tidy up the collection a bit, because there's a few which are now discontinued. So the original three, blonde, nocturn, tempest, all of those we basically just had a big clear out on over Christmas. So I need to sort of tidy up the catalog a bit, and just because otherwise we end up looking like we've got thousands of different perfumes. You know we only ever have about seven or eight a time. But yeah, that's it.

Myke: 38:23

It's keeping me busy. How's the podcast going? You guys are back in first with the new season.

Dan: 38:28

Yeah, we are, we are. We just recorded two nights ago. Episode should drop in a few days and yeah, it's very good. It's very time consuming, though. I mean, you know you guys do this really punchy short format for five minutes. You know, wham bam. Thank you, man. My guys will talk for like three fucking hours, like I swear to God. You know, we will start recording at 7pm and at like 11 o'clock. Guys, I've got to go to fucking bed.

Myke: 39:02

We typically it's just the two of us, you guys, you got a pretty large group over there, so you know there's a lot more things to say.

Dan: 39:09

So we got yeah, there's four of us, yeah, four of us, four opinion. Well, four people, 18 opinions.

Myke: 39:16

Yeah, for sure. And if you're listening and you haven't checked them out, I'm sure you already have. But if you haven't checked them out, les Oderince is on all your streaming platforms. They're amazing. They're better than we are. Yeah, says our own listeners.

Dan: 39:28

So that's not even true but thank you, I'll take it.

Myke: 39:34

And Dan, thank you so much again for joining us. This has been great. We appreciate the work you're doing, not only in the podcast platform but in the perfume world out there, so we're grateful to know you and happy to have you on the show, yeah.

Dan: 39:47

The pleasure is all mine, chaps, I really appreciate it. I will absolutely keep you posted with new developments and I'll have to make sure that there's 100 ml bottle in the post for it. Maybe, yeah, also the shilling checks for saying what a great perfume is. They will be in the post as well. So you will be driving, driving Lambos.

Myke: 40:09

I'm sure, real soon, perfect, yeah, yeah, we're looking forward to those most of all, yeah.

Ryan: 40:16

All right, we appreciate you guys. Thank you for listening to the show. Dan, thank you for coming on and until next time spray it up y'all.