Parfumerie launches AI-powered fragrance discovery with 300-plus brands

What launches on Thursday?

Parfumerie launches in the U.K. Thursday with an initial shoppable assortment of more than 300 fragrance brands. Shoppers can reach the AI-powered discovery and shopping platform through Selfridges, Sephora, Space NK, Liberty, Cult Beauty and Lookfantastic. U.S. shopping, additional retail partners and direct brand partnerships are planned for 2027.

Stephanie Phair, former British Fashion Council chair and now an angel investor, has backed the startup. The luxury e-commerce veteran sees Parfumerie as a potential model for online shopping, with recommendations organized around individual taste to make discovery more personal.

Phair said in an interview: “The existing sites still look the same as they did 20 years ago. They’re catalogues of products, but the world has changed. Customer behavior has changed. People are getting inspiration from social, from bricks-and-mortar, from creators, but the enablers to do it differently for taste didn’t exist.”

She added: “It’s not about another search. That is not what people are asking for. What they want is for inspiration and discovery to come to them based on their personal signals, not just what an editor or creators are telling them.”

Founded by Shannon Edwards and Natalie Varma, the company pairs Edwards’s luxury fragrance background with Varma’s prior technology work on AI for fashion and product personalization.

• Shannon Edwards: She has more than 17 years of experience across luxury fragrance and beauty. Her roles include Parfums Christian Dior, Tom Ford Beauty, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal and Charlotte Tilbury. She founded Comtent, Parfumerie’s London-based parent company.
• Natalie Varma: Her background includes DeepMind, Farfetch and Net-a-porter, with work on AI for fashion and product personalization.

According to the founders, Parfumerie is designed to surface products shoppers might love but would not know how to search for.

How does Iris guide discovery?

Iris, Parfumerie’s AI-powered fragrance editor, works like a fragrance sales assistant: it starts from a shopper’s mood, occasion, note, familiar scent and personal signals.

Shoppers can enter requests in their own words or select a mood, occasion, note or fragrance they already enjoy. Iris compares products, offers layering advice and directs shoppers to retailers, with current pricing and stock information.

Parfumerie says Iris is powered by multiple “best-in-class” models, including Gemini and Claude. Varma said the technology is grounded in brand tone and factual product information. The company claims that grounding helps represent fragrances accurately.

Varma described a two-part approach. She said: “First, we have built a really structured understanding of the category. The second part is taste intelligence: understanding each user, their taste and preferences, and placing both our users and our fragrances within that same latent space. That allows us to personalize, orchestrate and narrate the experience for them.”

Her first layer is category knowledge. Her second is taste intelligence for each user.

The company says Iris’s recommendations will not be sponsored. It says recommendations follow each shopper’s taste, while purchases are fulfilled through authorized retailers and brands.

Why start with fragrance?

Edwards linked Parfumerie’s first category to changed consumer behavior, pointing to short-form video, fragrance communities and younger shoppers’ interest in collecting and layering scents.

More consumers, she said, are building “fragrance wardrobes” rather than relying on a single signature scent. Fragrance remains inherently sensory, which makes online discovery difficult even as the number of brands and products grows.

Edwards described the core challenge: “The challenge was a harder one: What is the right product that you’re going to love? That was really undersolved and underserved.”

Phair put the retail mechanics plainly: “Taste-based categories are not a pull mechanism; they’re a push mechanism. You need to be able to nudge your customer along so they discover things they didn’t even know they wanted. In order to do that, you need deep industry experience.”

Parfumerie positions itself as a discovery layer without its own stock. It earns affiliate commissions when shoppers buy through retail partners. The company says its taste-led approach can help emerging houses be discovered alongside established names and encourage exploration beyond bestsellers.

Edwards’s verdict on the model was blunt: “We don’t hold inventory. We’re really an intelligent discovery layer and a brand-building environment.”

For 2027, Parfumerie must add U.S. shopping, additional retail partners and direct brand partnerships while preserving its promise of unsponsored recommendations.