He Built a Luxury Perfume Brand by Making a Short Film for Each Launch. It’s Sold Out Every Drop for 7 Years Straight

Owen Mears loves the concept of a cinematic universe—and so do his customers. The founder and CEO has cultivated a large and devoted fanbase for his natural fragrance brand Ffern by advertising the launch of its seasonal scents through stylized, highly produced short films that regularly go viral online.

There’s a catch: Mears only offers a select group of people the chance to actually purchase Ffern products. The brand operates by sending one $129 bottle per season to a private list of clients it calls ledger members. (Ffern declined to disclose how many people are on this list.)

This marketing formula has led to seven consecutive years of sold-out product releases for the Somerset, England-based company, which reports that more than one million people are now on the waitlist to join its ledger.

Mears founded Ffern in 2017 after graduating from Oxford and ran the bootstrapped business out of a garden shed for the first two years. He says he entered the perfume industry “with a bit of naivety,” setting out to recreate the rich olfactory landscape of his childhood in the English countryside with natural materials. Soon enough, he was disappointed to learn that most modern fragrance-makers use synthetic ingredients.

Wanting to do things differently, he recruited perfumers François Robert and Elodie Durande to help him create seasonal, small-batch eau de parfums made entirely from organic materials. Ffern released its first fragrance, a winter-themed scent, in December 2018. The 150 bottles sold out within a few weeks.

“We started incredibly small, but I think we did something really right,” Mears says. He used about £5,000 to create a 53-second film that featured interviews with Robert and Durande and explained Ffern’s ethos, which he published on Instagram and the brand’s website. Thanks to this, the founder adds, “we immediately connected with this audience of people for whom the idea of fragrance-making … was really exciting, but for whom the existing fragrance industry wasn’t really resonating.”

When Ffern launched its spring fragrance a few months later, it sold out within a few hours. Its summer scent went out of stock in minutes.