What sets a luxury brand apart today? The answer is possibly anything from the quality of the product to the marketing behind it. For Trey Taylor, the founder and nose behind Serviette, a NYC-based fragrance brand, it’s taste.
What started off as a personal project and a hobby is now a full-fledged perfume brand. Officially launched in February, Serviette, the French word for napkin, is Taylor’s attempt to explore “cultural sophistication.”
“I started Serviette because I felt that the current kind of cultural landscape was kind of lacking,” Taylor told Retail Brew. “A lot of people were getting recommendations via their TikTok algorithms for things like mob wife aesthetic or these kind of trappings of like hashtag culture, that, to me, just felt very uninspired. I wanted to encourage people to kind of break out of that and help them discover their own personal taste.”
The retailer currently sells four fragrances—Byronic Hero, Ruche, Sour Diesel, and Frisson D’Hiver—each priced at $175, as well as a $40 “discovery set” featuring a smaller vial of each scent . Each fragrance—concocted in Taylor’s apartment—mixes popular notes such as bergamot and vanilla with more unexpected ones, like diesel exhaust.
Taylor, a former film journalist who also works a day job as an executive at an advertising company in New York, is banking on his storytelling skills and eye for design to keep his venture going. In the past quarter, Taylor says Serviette made $20,000 in sales so far. Stockists include NYC-based niche perfume store Stele and Luxembourg-based shop The Pépins, but it’s seemingly only the beginning for a business with no outside investment yet.
Luckily, the global niche fragrance category is on the rise, valued at $2.397 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to $2.75 billion in 2025, per Business Research Insights.
Taylor hopes that he will make a profit in about a year.
Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Taylor said that while he has received private equity interest, he’s still trying to keep the brand independent as he continues to explore his voice and customer demographic in a saturated industry.
“It takes very specific and customized high-touch customer service,” Michael Prendergast, managing director at Alvarez & Marsal’s consumer and retail group, told Retail Brew. “Independents must set themselves apart from the bigger stores and brands to make their customers feel special.”
Another differentiator for Serviette has been its discerning marketing. Taylor says all of its marketing has been organic with $0 advertising spend. Much of the brand’s Instagram and TikTok is filled with highly curated images and stylish “behind the brand” videos.
The brand has also been featured in several influencer videos alongside popular podcasts and Substacks, which have been instrumental in drumming up sales.
“I see a direct correlation between my marketing efforts and conversion, essentially,” Taylor said. “I really find it fascinating as a small brand, seeing exactly what works and what doesn’t.”
Still, while Taylor is certainly generating curiosity among customers, with the current state of the economy and incoming challenges such as tariffs, he is aware that scaling as an independent luxury business can only come with outside investment.
“Stockists that reach out to me, even independent ones I find, barely have the money to purchase the minimum order quantity of stock to have in their store, because everything is kind of month to month, or sale to sale, or whatever,” he said. “I do think that in terms of the landscape of beauty…all I see are niche fragrance brands kind of on this uptick versus the kind of maybe oversaturation of these mega beauty brands who have dominated this fragrance landscape for so long.”