Most marketing leans on what customers can see, hear, or hold. Fragrance offers none of that. “My product is invisible,” says Melanie Bender, founder and CEO of Lore. “I’m choosing to sell an invisible product through largely visual mediums.”
Melanie came to that problem with a deep résumé. Before launching Lore with cofounders Joe Cloyes and Greg Gonzalez—formerly of Youth To The People—she helped build Merit, Rhode, and Versed, following an initial career as an aerospace engineer. Now she’s turned that experience toward a luxury scent brand that landed in 250 Sephora doors within months of launch.
Here, Melanie breaks down how she markets something you can’t see: starting with a worldview instead of a product, turning scent into story, and building the influencer engine that carries it.
On why she chose fragrance after years in skin care and makeup:
Honestly, I was tired of talking about how people look. After two skin care brands and one cosmetics brand, the world did not need a concealer from me. It did not. I knew there was something deeper I wanted to spend my time on.
What drew me to fragrance was that it was new—net new to me—and it’s changing fast. I’ve always been attracted to categories with that kind of dynamism, because anytime something is changing, that means there’s possibility. Things are going to rise and things are going to fall. That’s what skin care was 10 years ago, and it’s what fragrance is today.
But the emotional side mattered just as much. Think about the eight-plus hours a day we all spend on screens—this weird, hyper-visual alternate reality. A little sound, maybe. No smell. No touch. It leaves you feeling detached. Fragrance fires in your brain in a way that can bring some of that depth back. I wanted to make beauty that you feel, not beauty that you see.
On building a brand “world first,” before any product exists:
Every brand I’ve done, I’ve believed in building it world-first. Your world as a brand is basically how you see reality. It’s what you hold to be true. I like starting there because that’s what consumers actually love, and it’s what they actually buy. They buy into brands that have a different conception of reality, that show them a different way of looking at the world. To me, that’s beautiful. That’s compelling. That’s cultural.
So I start by immersing myself and letting myself imagine the world I think should exist. Once I have that image, it’s about articulating it: This is what it is, and this is why it is this way. Those become your beliefs and codes, and everything flows from there—the product, the packaging, the price point.
We’re a brand with community at our core, but I don’t believe in being crowdsourced. It was never about going to a group of people and having them tell us what it should be. It’s about the role you want to play in someone’s day-to-day life, and then making that a point of decision at every step.
On telling a scent’s story—the Hawaii example:
There’s a deep story behind Lore, and a deep story behind each of our fragrances. The key was letting them form whatever way was natural. My process is really just exploring every way in. I love a Pinterest board. I love writing poetry, writing narratives, playing with it all and seeing what sticks. And I love throwing things at my cofounders to see which ones perk them up. It’s not always what I think it’s going to be, and that’s the beauty of story; it’s not just what it means to you, but how it connects with other people.
Take Sublimity, the first scent I worked on. It started as a mood board. It’s a story of growing up in Hawaii, where I’m from.
It’s the story of piling into the back of a truck on the weekends, because the best beaches in Hawaii, you need four-wheel drive to get to. The white florals—plumeria, kenikeni, ylang ylang—grow right up to the sand and fragrance the air with this warmth and sweetness. The sun gets so hot on your skin that it starts to scream at you, so you dive into the water. Sublimity is that very first wave you go under. If you’ve ever looked out the back of a wave, there’s this incredible sensation that time stands still—each little drop of water moving one at a time. That’s the moment I wanted to capture.
On selling an invisible product through visual channels:
That was one of the most interesting challenges. My product is invisible, and I’m choosing to sell it through largely visual mediums. That’s where the focus on feeling comes through. We choose scents because of how they make us feel. Honestly, we choose most things in our life because of how they make us feel.
There are literal, descriptive ways to speak to a scent, and they have their place. But to me it was more about inviting different ways to tell the story.
On turning marketing into an open call for stories:
To me, Sublimity is the scent of growing up in Hawaii. But someone else will smell it and say, “This reminds me of the last vacation I took with my parents,” or “That’s this place in Mexico we went every year.” What excited me about fragrance wasn’t just telling my stories through it—it was using it as an open call for sharing stories in general.
Fragrance is so person to person. It’s personal, it’s interpreted differently, it means something different to everyone. So instead of being purely descriptive and literal, I wanted to let people discover scents through the stories they share.
On making influencer seeding the biggest line item in the budget:
Brands today are built by influencers—period. It’s the single most important channel, and it was the first thing I thought about for Lore’s marketing.
The strongest influencer programs are built on organic fandom—on people genuinely loving what you’re doing. So first and foremost, it was about putting that intention and love into the product, so that you see it once and you want to talk about it, share it, take a picture, be the person who told your friends. That’s the heart of the flywheel. And those flywheels are built through a lot of hard work.
Seeding and organic influencer relationships are the single biggest line item in our budget. It’s the single biggest team in the company, because it takes a lot of time and intention to bring the right people in. Seeding is the bread and butter of early-stage influencer programs—you’re sending product and building an experience that brings people into your brand, something they wouldn’t get just walking into a Sephora store.
On finding “the influencers of the influencers” of your customer:
You have to understand not just the influencers of your consumer, but the influencers of the influencers of your consumer—that’s how you show up in the right places. The two biggest mistakes early-stage brands make are not being specific enough about who the right creator is, and not being goal-driven enough about what they need to get out of the program.
For us, the fragrance community is huge. But we also thought about the interiors and lifestyle community. We designed this bottle to be an object of art, so we wanted people like Athena Calderone talking about it. And we wanted beauty creators who are impactful to the Sephora consumer but maybe aren’t fragrance people yet, positioning us as a gateway fragrance brand. Maybe you’re not wearing eau de parfum every day—well, with this brand, you can.
Building a seeding program is a beast. You’re putting real time, resources, and budget into those boxes, so you have to know exactly what you need to get out of it—the earned impressions, the earned media value, the earned engagements—for it to become the engine you want it to be.
On how a lean founder can start seeding without a budget:
It can be done at any scale, but you want to think about what will really position you to break through. We were fortunate to have a founding team from well-known brands, so we could approach influencers pre-launch and have them be excited to support us. If you’re newer as a founder, you might not have that same opening.
So building your organic influencer community in other ways becomes even more important. Even just reaching out to people and getting their feedback on your product is a wonderful way to start. That’s actually how we started. Before we’d even finalized the brand, I invited a number of fragrance influencers to give me their feedback—I wanted their expert input on what we were developing, but I also just wanted to be building relationships in fragrance.
So when you’re ready to send product out, it’s coming from a warmer place. It’s much more likely to be shared, and you can grow from there.
Hear Melanie’s full conversation on Shopify Masters for more on why she prices Lore as “a middle finger to the norms,” what she means when she calls luxury pure obsession, and her case for optimizing growth for decades from now rather than a fast spike.
