Projects here are files that keep changing, not case studies with the endings pre-written. Each one lists its question, its failures, and the part that is still unresolved — because that is the true state of the work.
A home and personal-care company based in Shanghai. Refillable, honest, meant to be used up and refilled rather than displayed.
- QUESTION
Why does everything under the sink look like it's shouting? Could home care products be quiet, useful, and worth keeping on the counter?
- FIRST ATTEMPT
A single hand wash in a stock bottle with a paper label. It looked like a pharmacy sample. Friends were polite about it, which was worse than criticism.
- FAILURE
The first labels dissolved in exactly the place a hand wash lives: next to water. Watching a label peel off in a customer's bathroom photo was a formative experience.
- REVISION
Waterproof stock, fewer words, a real scent direction (cypress and cedar, citron and cassia). Stopped trying to look 'premium' and started trying to look certain.
- CURRENT STATE
A small line of hand wash, dish soap, laundry and body care, sold mostly through refill events and a handful of shops that share the same customers.
- UNRESOLVED
Growth without becoming the kind of brand we started this to avoid. Nobody has solved this. We are attempting it anyway.
Pop-up refill stations in Shanghai neighborhoods. Bring a bottle, leave with it full. Also: overhear what people actually think of you.
- QUESTION
Will anyone actually carry an empty bottle across a city to refill it, or is that a fantasy people only agree with in surveys?
- FIRST ATTEMPT
One folding table, two pumps, a hand-drawn sign. Eleven people came. Nine were friends. Two were strangers, and one of them argued with me about fragrance for forty minutes. Excellent day.
- FAILURE
Event two: it rained, the pump clogged, and I had printed the wrong date on the flyer. Four people came to the wrong location, on the wrong day, and still refilled. Loyalty is strange.
- REVISION
A proper weighing station, a rain plan, and a logbook where people write what the scent reminds them of. The logbook turned out to be the whole point.
- CURRENT STATE
Monthly, in rotation with three partner shops. The regulars now know each other's names, which no marketing budget could buy.
- UNRESOLVED
How to run these in a second city without me physically standing at the table.
Notes from trying to build scents that smell like remembered places instead of like 'fragrance'.
- QUESTION
Why do most 'clean' scents smell like an idea of clean invented in a lab in 1987, and what would clean smell like if it came from a forest or a kitchen instead?
- FIRST ATTEMPT
Citron and cassia, version one. It smelled like a candle store having an argument with a juice bar.
- FAILURE
Version four was beautiful for ten minutes and then vanished entirely. A scent that gives up that fast teaches you about top notes the hard way.
- REVISION
Slowed down. Started from memories instead of notes: my grandmother's kitchen, a wet cedar fence in Vancouver, the inside of a wooden mug. Then worked backwards.
- CURRENT STATE
Two directions shipped (cypress & cedar, citron & cassia). A third direction — something like rain on warm pavement — is in version nine and still wrong.
- UNRESOLVED
Petrichor is apparently unlicensable from the sky.
An ongoing fight with physics, couriers, and my own aesthetic preferences.
- QUESTION
Can packaging be minimal, plastic-free, and still survive a courier who treats boxes like basketballs?
- FIRST ATTEMPT
Beautiful unbleached boxes with no filler. Roughly one in eight arrived as a scented crime scene.
- FAILURE
The 'improved' molded pulp insert doubled the box size, which doubled shipping cost, which quietly deleted the margin. The spreadsheet did not care how good it looked.
- REVISION
Smaller bottles ship in a padded paper mailer instead of a box. Less to look at, nothing to throw away, nothing broken since.
- CURRENT STATE
Paused. The current solution is boring and it works, which is a kind of success I am learning to accept.
- UNRESOLVED
The one-liter refill pouch. Every option is either plastic or a leak.
This website. A public filing cabinet for unfinished thoughts, built to get better as more is added.
- QUESTION
Where do observations go when they are too small for an essay and too good for a notes app that I will never open again?
- FIRST ATTEMPT
A newsletter. It lasted three issues. Newsletters demand a schedule; noticing does not happen on a schedule.
- FAILURE
A minimal portfolio site. It looked professional and felt like an empty showroom. Deleted it within a month.
- REVISION
This: an archive with file numbers, folders, and a random button. Something closer to the family computer than to a personal brand.
- CURRENT STATE
Live. Being filled. The numbering system already has one gap in it, which feels honest.
- UNRESOLVED
Whether to scan the old notebooks. There are eleven of them and my handwriting is a security feature.