Case study
Others try, but there is no fragrance brand like Heretic.
The parfum provocateur founded by master perfumer and brazen iconoclast Douglas Little harnesses hedonism while heralding the potency of naturals. Everything about the brand compels, seduces, draws you in. The result is an only-of-its-kind fragrance experience steeped in sex, lust, and seduction. Douglas personally engaged our founder to tell the Heretic story as no one else could.
We had to be part of it.
Everything Heretic does flies in the face of traditional, gender-conforming product development and positioning.
That ethic demands a radical transparency about how things are made, and for whom. We had to be part of it.
Antonym collaborated closely with Douglas on product storytelling, naming, brand positioning, and copy for press releases, luxury retailer signage, printed mailers, and concept ideation—delivering exceptional, evocative fragrance stories inspired by the seductive Dita Von Teese, illicit, pornographic florals, and the psychic practice of automatic writing.
Translators, extraordinaire
When you’re collaborating with a founder as visionary as Douglas Little (once, sitting in his apartment, he explained a process for developing fragrances with a medium by conducting writing sessions with the dead, questioning them about their favorite fragrances) your work is to be an exquisite translator.
We used an intimate client approach, accompanying Douglas to department store meetings, testing fragrances as he blended them, and regularly interviewing him to capture the rarity of his craftsmanship with exacting nuance, spiked with the raucous sensuality so core to his ethos.
A clean beauty problem
Clean beauty is everywhere, but people are fatigued by the conversation. They know clean doesn’t mean performance, and it’s frankly uninteresting to spend three figures on a product that’s clean—but doesn’t perform.
Our challenge was to tell a clean beauty story that educated about the potency of natural fragrances, injected with racy, raw, and rarefied language, metaphors, and visualizations.
To capture the singularity of Douglas’s vision we helped craft a tonality that shocked some, titillated others, and aroused undeniable global appeal.
Brand positioning
Website copy
Fragrance names
Product storytelling
Retail signage and education
Event and experience messaging
Campaign concept
Campaign copy execution
Press releases
Deliverables
The Antonym Effect
No one has a stronger vision than a founder. We helped Douglas gather, translate, shape, and hone his tsunami of inspiration into a best-in-class fragrance storytelling experience that is as sharply cohesive as it is relentlessly provocative.