Since acquiring the fledgling perfume line Commodity in 2019, Vicken Arslanian has taken a somewhat ad-hoc approach to running the perfume brand. The same goes for the launching of its first store, which opens to the public in New York’s Soho neighborhood on Saturday and attempts to translate Commodity’s digital origins into a brick-and-mortar space. Consumers will decide whether or not that strategy has been successful.
“We’ve never done retail, so it’s a big mystery how many people are going to come in. I’m an optimist, but I know when I don’t know something,” said Arslanian. “Our break-even point is about $600,000. I’m grateful for anything above that.”
As the founder and CEO of fragrance distributor Europerfumes, Arslanian knows how to get perfumes into consumers’ hands, having introduced niche perfume brands like Xerjoff and Matiere Premiere to a U.S. audience. But opening a mono-brand store is a new venture, and one that offers a chance to talk to Commodity’s consumers without any intermediaries. “There’s never been a time that the 360-degree holistic approach to building a brand has been more important,” he said. “It’s the pop-up, it’s the retail store, it’s the online, it’s the wholesale partner — it’s all of it.”
In opening Commodity’s first store, Arslanian chose a 1,000-square-foot storefront on Soho’s Crosby Street, in part because the $15,000 monthly rent was a bargain for New York City retail space. But it also has a nostalgic element. The block was home to the now-shuttered Min New York, a multi-brand perfume store where Europerfumes launched many of its brands and which longtime fragrance fans will remember as a destination for new and unique perfumes in the 2010s — back when niche perfume was truly niche.
Today, niche perfume is big business. Crosby Street is adjacent to Nolita’s “scent row,” anchored by Scent Bar, Le Labo and Aesop outposts on Elizabeth Street, with D.S. & Durga and Diptyque stores around the corner off of Prince Street. Elorea, the Korean-inspired perfume brand, opened a scent store and café on nearby Spring Street in 2023. The retail environment as a whole has become far more competitive in recent years, as well, with pop-ups and stores like Glossier’s — which opened its Spring Street flagship in 2023 and expanded its blockbuster You fragrance with two flankers this year — drawing long lines and crowds on a daily basis.
Crosby is also one block away from bustling Broadway, home to mega chain stores like Nike, Bloomingdale’s and Sephora, the latter of which has been a crucial partner for Commodity since it reentered the retailer in 2022. Up until now, Sephora has been the exclusive brick-and-mortar retailer for Commodity, but Arslanian maintains that the brand’s standalone store will act as a complement, not a competitor to the beauty giant.
“[Sephora] is amazingly run to teach their vendors and brands how to be successful — because they realize that, if we’re successful, they’re successful,” said Arslanian. “I’m not sure what will be great here [in our store] will be the same as [at Sephora]. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need this store. So it’s important for us to find an alternative way of winning here that doesn’t compete with them.”
Part of that differentiation is the chance to offer consumers an immersive introduction to the Commodity brand — without competing for shelf and olfactive space with the numerous other bottles housed at Sephora. To bring that world to life, Arslanian enlisted his wife Rosette D. Khorenian, founder and principal architect of RDK Architect, to translate the feel of Commodity’s website into a physical space.
“In the digital world, it’s all about communication and getting the product out there with discovery kits and all that,” said Khorenian. “So, the concept was to try and replicate that in a 3D form, in a physical form — not literally, necessarily, but somehow within that framework.”
Commodity is a distinctly online perfume brand. In its original iteration, it began through a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 and built a dedicated audience online before abruptly shuttering in 2019. When relaunching the brand in 2021, Arslanian trimmed down Commodity’s offerings to a handful of scents and introduced its scent space concept, with each scent offered in three different degrees of strength and projection. The new store takes inspiration from a museum, with simple black and white signage guiding customers through Commodity’s collection. There’s also a display box holding scents that have been revived from Commodity’s archive thanks to consumer demand.
In the week leading up to opening the doors to the public on Saturday, Commodity will host a series of in-store activations with events welcoming perfumers such as Christelle Laprade, the nose behind the brand’s top-selling Milk perfume; perfume influencers like Demi Rawling, founder of the Sniff perfume app; and longtime customers in the tri-state area.
“It actually represents the entire ecosystem, which is: a perfumer makes a product and a brand markets the perfume. We use influencers as our megaphone to talk about the product [and leverage] apps like Sniff that you can discover on,” said Arslanian.
Commodity will broadcast those events online, to give its customers around the world a chance to experience a piece of the store. Arslanian hopes to expand Commodity’s brick-and-mortar footprint beyond New York and into cities like Miami and Los Angeles and even to Europe.
“If your objective is to have one store, then you could justify a continuous loss,” he said. “We’re not interested in that. The interest here is to replicate this model elsewhere.”
But first, the New York store needs to pull its weight and — hopefully — recoup its $600,000 investment.
“The first year, the first six months, is the honeymoon phase,” said Arslanian. “The real work comes later on.”
