Why does the word “Union” scare people and what does it have to do with perfume? Allow me to set the general context without going into minute detail.

Labor unions as we know them today started in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s during the Industrial Revolution when people moved from the countryside to cities, finding factory work. However, the new urban life didn’t always improve their lot. Whereas tenant farmers had some control over their day to day (typically they paid rent, worked the land, raised animals and eventually sold a product) industrial workers put in long hours, often in unhealthy conditions, and they lacked job security. Hence the rise of labor unions which aimed to protect workers against exploitation and better work conditions.

Why the fear then? There’s always a cost! Workers pay dues to the union who negotiates pay and benefits with the employer. If both sides don’t agree, employees may go on strike – a strategy with which the Italians and the French are well familiar. Further, workplace rules may require the employer to invest and improve conditions, while sometimes making it difficult to deal with underperforming employees.

And now let’s bring perfume into the equation.

The Union for Perfumery & Allied Trades is the brainchild of perfumer Michael Nordstrand. Nordstrand is an independent perfumer, teacher, multidisciplinary artist and founder of Mythologist Studio, a fragrance creation atelier based in New York. Nordstrand agreed to answer my questions about the current state of the industry and why now is the right time for a union.

Independent fragrance is booming, the fragrance market as a whole is expanding. What problems are becoming more common given these developments?

Rapid release cycles, speculative development, questions of perfume authorship, new technologies, and the endless perceived demand for new product are all gaining momentum, becoming more and more common every day. The issue I see is that speed, volume, and profit are dictating more creative decisions than ever before, decisions that should be driven by cultural, ethical and environmental considerations, for a start.

The rapid exponential growth of fragrance in recent years frequently demonstrates that the market has outpaced the conversations about ethics, culture, and other considerations I see as vital to the art form.

If nothing changes over the next five years, what worries you most?

I worry that the growing primacy of profit as the driving force behind perfumery will dull the creative edge of the broader industry as it has already demonstrated it does, even while in independent perfumery creativity is flourishing despite the limited resources many indie perfumers have.

Ultimately, though, there will be a bigger cost to perfumery if this is the trajectory, churning out forgettable, fast-fragrance devoid of meaning, and the market bubble will burst. When novelty becomes the product, it counteracts deeper progress across the whole of perfumery. Consumers, perfumers, brand founders and others in the ecosystem are already showing signs of exhaustion; I would rather see the industry raise the bar than simply add to the volume.

Why does growth actually make a union more necessary?

Growth makes the need for shared standards and dialogue more urgent across the entire fragrance ecosystem, not only among independents, and not even just amongst perfumers themselves. As the market expands and we are all responding in real time it is more important than ever to pause and evaluate how we interact with one another, with the wider industry, and with perfume as a commodified form of art. I want to inspire and then empower people to be stewards of perfumery, shaping its future rather than simply participating.

Many consumers know the fashion house but not the perfumer, although this is changing. Why has perfume remained one of the few creative industries where the creator is often invisible?

After its modernisation and subsequent globalisation, perfumery developed certain commercial structures that treated the perfumer as a technician behind a product rather than the author of a creative work, and that convention became normalised with time. Marketing arms of companies further distanced the consumer from the creator because they didn’t see the appeal or need to include a perfumer’s name. It didn’t sell the perfume the way Balenciaga or Dior could.

If we genuinely consider perfume a creative profession, attribution should be the default just as it is in all other art forms.

Why should someone buying a bottle of perfume care who made it?

Because every perfume represents years of learning, experimentation, technical expertise, labour, and imagination. Knowing the perfumer restores some of that history and turns an anonymous commodity back into a cultural object, something made by human creativity and ingenuity rather than simply a nice smell.

How much would credit actually change a perfumer’s career?

Credit creates a public record of authorship, and that record becomes a keystone in the perfumer’s reputation, professional mobility and future opportunity. That matters to every perfumer, whether they work independently or within a larger house, because a body of work can only help to shape a career if the provenance of every perfume is easily discoverable.

For me personally and for colleagues of mine, it means potential clients don’t connect our names to a fragrance unless they do their own research, so we miss out on potential business. Independent perfumers don’t have robust marketing budgets or PR teams as the big houses do; we rely on community and networking to develop new business.

What about the Creative Director, where applicable? Isn’t the final scent often a result of a collaboration between the CD and the perfumer?

Absolutely, and acknowledging the perfumer should never require erasing the creative director, evaluator, founder, or anyone else who helped to meaningfully shape the work. Perfumery is inherently collaborative even if the perfumer is the ultimate creator and essential to the process; good attribution should make that collaboration more legible, not collapse it into a singularity.

You argue that development fees should become standard. What does the current reality look like?

The current reality varies widely across the industry, but too much creative development is still treated as speculative labour or compensated only indirectly. If a project is validated and perfume concentrate is ordered, some perfumers follow the big perfume house model of only making money on markup to those orders, or possibly some profit share when a product reaches market. UPAT’s concern is broader than one business model: meaningful creative work should be recognised as labour and the economics around it should be systematised, transparent and sustainable.

How often are perfumers expected to produce speculative work that goes unpaid?

Speculative work is deeply embedded in traditional fragrance development, particularly in competitive briefs between big perfume companies for larger brands, but the ability to absorb that risk is very uneven in most cases. Large industry players usually spread losses for fine fragrance across multiple divisions and revenue streams - flavour, wellness, etc - while smaller studios or independent perfumers usually cannot. This practice deserves a wider industry conversation rather than being treated as standard.

What would you consider a fair baseline for compensation?

I cannot say for every individual what is fair, only that perfume development should have a compensatory structure that reflects the time and expertise it requires to become (and remain) a perfumer. I also firmly believe nobody should be working for free, or for some uncertain future potential return on investment. Imagine telling a film director or an actor they will only be paid if the movie is a success? Asking a perfumer to create a perfume for nothing is just as ludicrous and should be done away with. It persists largely because it's occluded from the public, I think.

That brings up a provocative thought: Should the perfumer be liable if a fragrance isn’t successful?

A perfumer’s responsibility is to deliver the agreed creative and technical work with professionalism and rigour; commercial success is the product of a much larger system and many choices beyond the perfumer’s work alone. Often in my work with brands, the final choice of mod is up to the founder or creative director, not to me. Once I decide which versions of a creation to submit, it often leaves my sphere of influence.

Turning now to UPAT, why call it a union rather than an association or guild?

I chose union partly because it speaks to labour and collective representation but just as importantly because it speaks to unity. I see this as something more grassroots - a collective turning of the mind across a fragmented ecosystem - rather than following any specific extant model.

Do you envision collective bargaining eventually, or is this primarily about professional standards?

The immediate work is to initiate dialogue, champion education, and advocate for better professional standards around authorship, compensation, transparency, technology, and other key considerations. I do not want to decide in advance what every future mechanism must be; the organisation should evolve in response to the people it actually serves. That is how it has been shaped thus far and it is my hope it continues that way in the future.

How will you recruit members?

We are beginning as a community beta, and our first wave of outreach will happen in the form of meetings, events, town halls, even Zoom panels to involve folks around the world who have expressed a desire to help or participate. We have also recruited a number of ambassadors to represent the different fields and positions that exist in the perfumery ecosystem, and that small group of people will work with UPAT to champion the core values of the organisation and open new dialogues.

How do you balance representing perfumers while also welcoming evaluators, brands and suppliers? Don’t they all have different professional objectives?

They do have different professional objectives, but that is precisely why the organisation is not conceived as a perfumers’ lobby. UPAT is meant to bring together the different parts of the fragrance ecosystem so they can speak honestly about where interests and concerns diverge, understand their interdependence and identify practices that strengthen the economics and culture as a whole.

Are there mentorship or apprenticeship programmes you’d like to see?

Yes - especially mentorship that combines sensory and technical education with the less visible realities of practice: contracts, pricing, sourcing, client management, evaluation, and regulation. Apprenticeship remains one of the most meaningful ways to transmit the craft without flattening it into information alone. The union, I hope, will have resources for people seeking such opportunities, but first we must organise.

How will you measure success?

I think I will feel some edification when practices that currently require advocacy begin to feel ordinary: attribution is expected, development labour is respected, contracts are fairer, and technology is discussed critically rather than adopted reflexively. I will also count it as success if perfumery becomes more connected intellectually; i.e., less fragmented between creators, brands, media, suppliers, consumers, et al.

What arguments do you expect from people who oppose the union?

Some will hear the word union and imagine a policing body, an adversarial movement, or a fixed list of demands. What we are actually building is a forum for difficult conversations and a set of considerations for the betterment of all perfumery. I also expect some pushback from anyone who currently benefits from outdated or unfair practices, which is par for the course, but I invite anyone reading this to start a conversation.

Are there misconceptions about what you’re trying to build?

The biggest is probably that I want to dictate one correct way for everyone to work or exist in the world of perfumery. I don’t. I am much more interested in connecting people and furthering meaningful discourse on the numerous topics that affect us. Then it’s about letting better-informed people build better practices from their new understanding of how interconnected we all are.

What’s one industry practice you hope people will find unbelievable ten years from now?

I personally hope it seems extraordinary that a perfumer could spend months or years creating a fragrance and still be asked to work speculatively or remain publicly anonymous. I would like future perfumers to inherit a profession where authorship and creative labour are treated as basic rights rather than privileges to be negotiated.

UPAT held its first event on August 28th at Stèle in New York City to introduce the union and some of the ambassadors in a community setting. More events will follow along with more ways people can get involved. For more information visit the Instagram account @perfumersunion

Main image by Jake Eshelman of Feast Day Studio

A note from our founder, Silvio Levi

“Given these issues, discussed in this interview by our Karen Marin with Michael Nordstrand, regarding perfumers and the supply chain, it is important to create opportunities to guarantee the most interesting creatives, who are not backed by large groups, financial resources, or marketing structures, a network of local retailers and distributors that allow small and medium-sized brands to reach an increasingly informed, interested, and attentive audience, attentive to the truly artistic and original aspects of this art and its capacity for communication and emotional involvement.

For this reason, in addition to the demands and objectives set by UPAT, we must do our best to promote all those existing and emerging retail businesses, which offer highly original brands that lack an international presence and communication support, we must provide the opportunity for them to be appreciated by a select and demanding audience.

This has always been one of the goals of Esxence and Essencional, which for many years have given voice to these realities and encouraged meetings between operators to share projects, experiences, and develop a logistics system, still decidedly limited, to make it easier, faster, and more economically viable to procure small quantities of product for each brand in each country, drastically reducing the additional costs of transportation and customs clearance and speeding up restocking times.

We will monitor the developments of the UPAT and will continue to do our best to promote awareness of every commercial distribution and retail reality that supports the most authentic creative originality of artistic perfumery.”

Silvio Levi