Ellis Brooklyn Celebrates 10 Years With Their First Rollerball Perfumes, Plus How They Changed Fragrance

Forbes

4 days ago

The Ellis Brooklyn Fragrance Oil Rollerballs created for the brand's 10th anniversary
It's easy to see why Saturday Night Live used to create mock perfume commercials. The fragrance world used to be very different. 'Twelve years ago, when I first had the inkling to start Ellis Brooklyn, the story lines being told in fragrance were really exotic—and not in a good way,' says Bee Shapiro, Founder & CEO of Ellis Brooklyn. 'I mean exotic as in, wow, this makes no sense. Literally, it's a famous actress rolling in the sand in what looks like the Sahara. I also noticed that there were very few women in fragrance, which, to me, was bizarre, if you think about how much fragrance impacts a woman's life. It goes anywhere from deodorant to your shampoo; scent truly affects so many different parts of our lives, in such a functional way. And there was no representation. Honestly, I just felt like it needed change. I also was itching to have a different kind of creative outlet.'
Shapiro took matters into her own hands and launched Ellis Brooklyn 10 years ago. At the time, she was a beauty writer for the New York Times, so she had a deeper understanding of the beauty industry and the white space she was seeing. 'I wanted to try something where the boundaries were unlimited, so it was a fun exercise,' Shapiro says. 'At that point in time, fragrance was very, very dominated by very expensive niche brands and designer brands, and that was kind of it. And wow, has it changed. I love Gen Alpha and Gen Z because they're talking about fragrance in the way that I dreamed people could talk about fragrance—there's an openness to it. There's an understanding, even at a very young age, that fragrance is joyful and not a necessity. Fragrance is a dream. It's desire, attraction and joy. It's fun to see how much the world has transitioned to this very elevated, open minded approach to fragrance. There's more brands and diversity in this space, which has only fueled that whole environment and made fragrance such a fun category.'
A trio of Ellis Brooklyn fragrances
When Ellis Brooklyn launched, it was one of the few clean luxury fragrance brands. In the beginning, Shapiro had to go through the banned ingredients list with her retail partners and explain why they were different. 'We're still clean and still hold those standards, but it's become table stakes amongst certain brands,' she says. 'Obviously not all brands are clean, but I certainly think a lot more are.'
Additionally, sustainability metrics are important to the brand and Shapiro has learned about things like biotech ingredients, upcycled ingredients and green chemistry along the way. 'There's always new ingredients, but there's always new ways to get ingredients,' Shapiro says. 'That is endlessly fascinating to me, because you can be very responsible to the environment now, or at least be able to track and make choices. When I first started, it was more just about safety, and as we've moved on from it, it's like how can we also be responsible? It has to be done during the creation.'
Ellis Brooklyn Founder & CEO Bee Shapiro
In addition to setting a new standard for sustainability, Shapiro also wanted to change the way people talk about luxury fragrance. 'When we first came on the scene, a lot of the scents were described in a difficult to approach way,' Shapiro says. 'It was intimidating, frankly, and very European. The way we describe scent is pretty straightforward. Even when we write copy, we use three descriptors. We want our scents to be understandable. I don't think luxury should have to be explained. I think luxury is a feeling. So, when I'm creating, I start with a note that is understandable. Miami Nectar opens with pink pineapple. People know what pineapple is, but then it has this complex storyline. It's taking something that most people understand, but in a different direction and elevating it.'
When Shapiro considers all of the Ellis Brooklyn launches over the last decade, she believes each is a reflection of its time. 'I want to keep it modern,' she says. 'When I made Myth, there was a lot of loud fragrances at the time, and Myth was the counterpoint to that. It was one of the early skin scents.'
Though the values of Ellis Brooklyn haven't changed over the last decade, the scents themselves have. Initially the perfumes were typically subtle and muted, but the perfumes have gotten bigger, more floral and juicier. 'My first five years I treated them almost like editorial projects,' Shapiro says. 'But, I had to take a step back, because as the brand grew, it's like raising a child. When the brand is very small, you're caring for it and putting your own imprint on it because it's your brand. As the brand grows, it starts to have its own personality, and it's a reflection of the era. Especially from COVID on, we've thought about fragrance as escapism. Fragrance needs to have that jolt, that feeling that makes you feel so good right when you smell it.'
Ellis Brooklyn Miami Nectar and Guava Granita
Embracing bigger, louder scents now follows current trends, but Shapiro says that also mirrors her personal journey. Over a decade ago, when she was working at the Times, she was afraid to wear a strong scent because she thought she'd be judged in the elevator.
'The culture has changed,' she says. 'We certainly aren't post-feminism, but we are in a completely different era where you're not judged on your scent as a match to your intellectual prowess, which is so bizarre. As I've gotten older, I've come more into my own too. In the beginning, I was making scents for my life at that point in time, [when] my career was still on the up and up. It's not that I was trying to hide myself, but it wasn't that era either where the super loud scents were considered work appropriate or everyday life appropriate. Because I was looking to romanticize our everyday lives, I was looking to make the scent that people would wake up in the morning and want to reach for.'
As Ellis Brooklyn has evolved as a brand, their stature has too. They have international distribution now, including at Mecca in Australia, Space NK in the UK and Sephora Canada. They've been growing about 80% YOY this year and had 200% YOY growth on social media engagement. Shapiro credits that success to their new VP of Digital Marketing and E-commerce.
The Ellis Brooklyn Fragrance Oil Rollerballs
'We learned so much in the last two to three years,' Shapiro says. 'We had a couple years where we were growing, but it was such a struggle. The problems are smaller as you're trying to scale. There was a lot of mistakes I made, and I learned on all those mistakes, and a lot of that gelled together as well on the marketing side. Our era is not a traditional era; there's always a new media channel and a new way to reach. For a brand, what works efficiently? Because you can't do everything. It's a lot of mistake learning that led to this, but also being able to add key staff.'
To celebrate the 10th anniversary, Ellis Brooklyn is releasing their first fragrance oil rollerballs later this month. The quiet scents are reminiscent of their first perfumes, making it a full circle moment for the brand.
'In our early years, the scents were more muted, but I would also argue that the scents were more unisex,' Shapiro says. 'There's something very Brooklyn about that. I wanted to create a nod back to our history, which is the musks and unisex scents, but also to make them modern and effortless. I am obsessed with Milk Wood. Milk Wood is this creamy, clean wood, and I made it with [perfumer] Frank Voelkl. It's so Williamsburg from my era of living there; it is a little walk down memory lane. Blonde Musk is like a cousin to Myth. It's a white musk that is different and new. Vanilla Santo was my attempt to blend the current day with this would be unisex palo santo Brooklyn vibe. It has a vanilla up top, but it's not this super sweet vanilla. It is very woodsy, a tiny bit smoky. I wanted to do the rollerballs at a lower, approachable price because it's something that I could see in everybody's bag.'
Ellis Brooklyn Banana Milkshake Hair and Body Fragrance Mist
Shapiro hopes the next 10 years of Ellis Brooklyn allow her to continue to grow the brand and become a better manager. 'One of the most challenging aspects of running a company is understanding that your role is to be a great leader as well,' she says. 'When you're growing fast, fast, fast, it's really hard. It can be chaotic. You just want to make sure people feel good too.
'The other part is I want to continue launching, since that impacts a broad group of people. Once I realized I needed to let this brand be as big as possible, the fun part of it now is how many people can I get onto Banana Milkshake? I remember when we were presenting to Sephora, everybody was saying banana was the challenging note because not everybody likes banana. Banana has outsold the other two milkshake scents by double. My favorite part is to create with the perfumers I work with, but also to take something so ordinary as a banana and really elevate it. If I can find more moments like that in the future, that's what I'm looking for.'