Ep 018 – The Science of Scent with Caftari

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Shreya Aggarwal of Caftari!

Shreya is a former Dermstore Fragrance Buyer turned wellness founder. She has always been a lover of fragrance and the important role it plays in our lives. Many of her earliest childhood memories are linked back to specific fragrance notes. But it wasn't until she found herself dealing with mental health issues and insomnia that she really began to view fragrance as not just an indulgence, but a powerful tool to improve her wellbeing. That’s what led her to start Caftari – a fragrance brand that uses neuroscents to activate different areas of the brain and support your wellness journey.

Since launching in November of 2023, Caftari has already been featured in places like Oprah Daily, Beauty Independent, W Magazine and mindbodygreen.

(P.S. Shreya is also a Wayfarer client! We designed Caftari’s brand identity, product packaging and Shopify website. You can view the full case study here.)

Episode Highlights:

Some of the big challenges that Shreya faced while creating Caftari:

“The biggest thing definitely is manufacturing and supply chain. And it is so difficult to make a product in the U.S. and I had a lot of like standards. The packaging needed to be made in the U.S. I needed it to be 100% percent recyclable. I needed to have it in our brand color. We needed to have the engravings on the candle vessels.

I had a very like tight timeline and told myself ‘Okay, three months! We're going to launch this. We're going to do this.” And it's never the case. It took a year and it totally could have taken longer depending on how things went.

I think the biggest challenge was recognizing the time tax that is there when you are bringing a new product, especially when you have all these like restrictions, and just being patient with it and, and understanding how the supply chain works. Cause even though it's made in the U.S., international shipping is a lot. And our oils are made in France and that is a different process to get here. So it's a lot of things have to converge for it to happen and everything has to converge at the same time.”

How Caftari uses fragrance as a tool for wellness:

“For me, this brand has never just been about fragrance. I don't even consider this a candle brand. I think it's a wellness brand. And so when I approached the product formulation, that was at the top of my mind. And when we say it's ‘science backed’, what does that mean? We essentially have this vision of what mood we want to evoke. And mood, of course, is so heavily correlated to scents. The olfactory system is the only system in our body that's directly connected to our limbic system, which is responsible for mood and emotion and memory. And so scent is so interlinked into memory that it's really interesting how certain notes evoke certain emotions within us.

So when creating the formula, we sit down and identify which neurotransmitter it is that we want to evoke. And then based on third party research, we find the specific essential oil that correlates with that neurotransmitter.

So we use that and then go through testing the formula. It's not something that's going to immediately make you happy, but it's recognizing how important scent is in our daily lives and how directly connected it is to our amygdala and hippocampus and hypothalamus.

For example, our evening scent of Nirvana candle. It’s very meditative and relaxing and these theta brainwaves are most dominant when we're meditative and relaxed. And so this has Oud essential oil, which we found in previous third party experiments that it helps reduce hyperactivity in the HPA axis, which is an axis in our brains.”

Why Shreya is looking at spas as retail partners + tips for pitching your product:

“I mean, there's so many candle brands. So why are they going to buy mine versus others? I think we have a really unique like storytelling point, which is what is the initial touch point.

But how am I sourcing these spas? It's really scrappy. Through online research and kind of just targeting one specific area. So I was back in San Francisco over the holidays in January and Napa Valley is really renowned for its resort spas and day spas. A luxury resort spa is I feel like where [our products] do well.

And of course, it's just a name of game of numbers. You're going to get 100 ‘no’s before you get one ‘yes’.

And I know that because I used to be in that world. I know there's going to be 30 or 40 different people like me that are trying to get ahold of this one [buyer or manager]. If somebody doesn't respond, I don’t take it personally anymore because I just know how many I used to get. And that's another reason why I think brands should build their direct to consumer and build their own community first before approaching retailers.

There are so many brands that just email [retailers] with a brief synopsis and then a brand deck that is so generic. If you have any press features or something more catchy, that’s what you should include in your email. For example, we got featured in Oprah Daily and looking through our email outreach, our open rate for that email that was titled “Oprah’s pick” had like 3x the open rate and click rate of any other emails.”

We hope that you enjoy this conversation and make sure to check out and support all that Caftari is doing! You can follow them on Instagram, TikTok or go shop their products on caftari.com!