Perfume, made for one person at a time

How the house began

Selma Aurich smelled her way into perfume. She grew up above her grandmother's herb garden in Veldenmark, and at nineteen she left for a perfumery school in the south of France with a notebook of smells she could not yet name. She spent the next twelve years composing for other people: shampoos, candles, and now and then a fine fragrance that went out under a famous name and was never hers.

What stayed with her was the counter. A perfume is chosen in a shop in about a minute, from a strip of paper, and then worn for years. In 2014 she came home, took the lease on a former apothecary at Duftgasse 7, and opened Parfums Nadi to do the opposite: to compose one perfume for one person, slowly, and to keep the formula so it could be made again.

The name

Nadi is an old word for a channel, the way water finds its course. It is how Selma thinks about a perfume: not a single smell but a movement, from the first bright minute to the last warm hour on skin. A good formula gives each note somewhere to go.

The people at the atelier

We are four. Selma composes. Jonas Wedel runs the atelier, answers every letter and will be the one who writes back if you ask us something. Two blenders, Mette and Ida, weigh every formula by hand, look after the cellar and fill each bottle. Between us we smell everything that leaves the building.

What we will not do

We will not hurry a perfume. Every blend rests three to six weeks before it is filtered, and no order is large enough to shorten that. We do not test on animals, and we never sell or share the formulas our clients have paid us to compose. When we discontinue a material, we write to everyone whose formula uses it before their next bottle.