Case study
There is no other fragrance brand like Heretic. The parfum provocateur founded by master Douglas Little harnesses hedonism while heralding the potency of naturals—delivering an only-of-its-kind fragrance experience.
Steeped in sex, lust, and seduction.
The Lexicon
Seductive, Illicit, Titillating, Alchemy, Wild, Psychic Practice, Luxury Fragrance, Evocative.
Douglas personally engaged our founder to collaborate closely 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.
Evocative stories
The clean side of dirty
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 on the potency of natural fragrances, injected with racy, raw, and rarefied language, metaphors, and visualizations.
Deliverables
Shock and awe
To capture the singularity of Douglas’s vision we helped craft a tonality that shocked some, titillated others, and aroused undeniable global appeal.
Bringing out the dead
When you’re collaborating with a founder as visionary as Douglas Little (we once sat in his apartment while he explained how he was going to develop fragrances in collaboration with a medium, who would conduct automatic writing sessions with the dead, questioning them about their favorite fragrances), your work is to be an exquisite translator.
The Antonym Effect
We accompanied Douglas to department store meetings, tested fragrances in his studio as he was blending them, interviewed him at length—all to ensure we captured the rarity of his craftsmanship with exacting nuance, spiked with the raucous sensuality so core to his ethos.