“Brazilians are passionate about perfume. Our country is the second largest market in the world by value and the first by volume, with consumption in litres per capita almost three times higher than that of France. Despite this, we are still lagging behind in terms of innovation and consumers have a poor knowledge of olfactory journeys, ingredients and essences. We want to contribute to the education of Brazilians in the field of perfumery,” explains Luciana Guidi.
An online platform for training and choosing one’s perfume
For consumers, choosing a new perfume is a real challenge, and not only in the case of online purchases. "Who has never regretted its purchase after having discovered that the initial scent of a fragrance had completely changed half an hour after testing it in store? It’s because we didn’t have time to understand how the perfume evolves. The top notes evaporate very quickly and the fragrance that will come with us for the rest of the day is not the one that was smelled at the time of purchase,” explains Larissa Mota.
To facilitate the choice, the two co-founders have created an online platform that assist and educate consumers. As a first step: customers have to answer a questionnaire on their preferences, their profile and behaviour. Based on these answers, an artificial intelligence then suggests a trial kit consisting of 7 ml miniatures, test strips and online access for a training session to finalize the choice of the perfume.
The next step takes place once the samples have been received and tested by the customer. It is necessary to reconnect to the platform, where additional information on the perfumes is available, with videos of perfumers explaining how they chose the ingredients, and much more. To facilitate understanding, Amyi fragrances are associated with colours, textures, sounds and memories. “We help consumers identify the ingredients and the olfactory paths that they like or not,” explains Luciana Guidi. Once the perfume has been chosen, it is sent at home in a 100 ml version.
“We seek not only to innovate in the way of choosing and selling perfumes in Brazil, but also to transform the market itself. This is just the beginning. We will continue to help Brazilians get to know perfumery better so that we can create truly personalized fragrances for each of our consumers, with the help of artificial intelligence,” emphasizes Luciana Guidi.
Promoting Brazilian perfumery
The perfumes are designed by Brazilian perfumers from major international houses, such as Givaudan, Takasago or Symrise, but with great creative freedom. "We firmly believe in the potential of Brazilian perfumers," says Amyi co-founder. “There are few perfumers in the world, but 20% of them are in Brazil. We want to give visibility to these great artists and make Brazilian perfumery a global reference in terms of trends,” she adds.
Amyi’s fragrances are gender neutral, vegan and made with ingredients that are not common in Brazil, such as Egyptian jasmine absolute, aged oud wood, rhubarb and black iris.
Towards a new in store experience?
The Brazilian DNVB raised around BRL 400,000 from private investors for its launch in 2019. In 2020, it received an additional investment of BRL 1 million, which enabled them to expand their product range.
Launched as a 100% online business, which has been successful so far, the brand plans to meet new consumers by opening a kiosk in a shopping centre in São Paulo. “We believe in diversifying sales channels to reach more people, but we will only take this step if we manage to transpose the educational and sensory concept of Amyi into a physical point of sale. We are not a usual perfumery brand”, concludes Luciana Guidi.
