The most important day in Osmo’s history was the day we founded the company. The next-most important day is today. We’re launching Generation by Osmo: the world’s first and only fragrance house powered by olfactory intelligence (OI).

Generation is the beginning of a new era. With OI, we’re giving people everywhere the tools to capture their story in a scent—and to create the scent memories of the 21st century.

We’ve been building to this moment for nearly three years. We hope the impact will last for generations. Here’s why.

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‍An industry in need of innovation

Like any business, Generation exists to address a failure in the market. 

Scent is fundamental to our humanity: it connects us to our past, our present, and the people we love. 

Scent is also an art form. I’ve never forgotten the day I became obsessed. Fragrance woke me up to parts of myself and the world that I’d never perceived before.

But most people go their entire lives and never have that moment. Most of us never wake up to scent.

That’s not an accident. Fragrance should belong to everyone—but as it stands, the fragrance industry leaves a lot of us out.

Say you want to try to develop a perfume. In a media environment that overwhelms our eyes and ears, you’ve decided to use scent to distinguish yourself or your business. You want to build a connection that lasts.

To do that, you need the help of a fragrance house. Many of them are storied institutions with legendary perfumers. But for that reason, it’s very difficult to get their attention. You probably need a preexisting brand. A design language. Packaging. A contract with a bottler. A contract with a filler. You need a budget big enough to justify the work.

Say you have all that. If you’re a new customer, you’re still likely to get something off the shelf—which is to say, a premade fragrance that’s neither tailored to you nor unique in the world.

Now say you press hard to work with a perfumer who will make you something new. You’ve got the budget to work in big enough volumes—hundreds of kilograms. The wait time for your first fragrance sample is, on average, three months. Each iteration after that is months more.

It’s at this point that I need to emphasize: I’m not trying to be overly critical. I’m just trying to describe reality. Designing fragrances is challenging and specialized work. People who work in the industry are practicing a craft honed over centuries.

The trouble is, that craft has barely changed. Producing fragrance is much as it was in the 19th century: hyper-exclusive, opaque, and slow.

Generation exists because the world no longer has to work that way. Fragrance should be for everyone. Fragrance can be for everyone.

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A new era for fragrance, powered by OI

The foundation of Generation’s approach is olfactory intelligence, or OI. 

The best way to understand OI is by analogy. You’ve probably heard of natural language processing, which is what we call AI that can read and write text. There’s computer vision, which is AI that reads and writes images.

Now, there’s olfactory intelligence: AI that can read and write a scent.

Imagine you come to Generation looking to develop a fragrance. The first step is giving OI a prompt, like you would a chatbot. Text, images, audio, video—whatever captures the emotions and memories you want to evoke.

Then, the OI reads and understands what you’ve shown it. It maps the input to a scent. And with the help of a perfumer, it generates a fragrance sample on the spot—live in the lab, or shipped to your door.

From that initial sample, we start iterating together. The result is a fragrance that’s unique to you, designed in partnership with some of the best perfumers in the world.

Generation is your story in a scent. It’s 300 years of tradition, distilled into today.

We can achieve that speed by automating parts of the design process that don’t benefit from human creativity. Regulatory compliance, for example. Screening out molecules that are harmful to health and the environment. OI handles all of this from the start.

That frees a perfumer to focus entirely on their craft. Here, too, OI plays a supporting role. The technology makes it easier for perfumers to explore the universe of possible scents and exercise their creativity—much as photographers use Lightroom, and carpenters use power tools.

In this way, Generation is working at the intersection of art and science to amplify the best of tradition. We want perfumers—today’s masters and tomorrow’s novices—to have the tools to push their craft to a new level. To invent the scent memories of the next century.

This is already happening. Just ask Alice Panikian. She got in touch because she wanted to develop a fragrance from the ground up, branding and bottling it with us.

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Alice worked with our master perfumer, Christophe Laudamiel. Together, they used OI to generate the first drafts of her fragrance, then refined it into the final product. She tells us she’s obsessed with the result. We are, too.

Now Generation is working with more partners like Alice. Creators and businesses alike.

If you want to join us, you can learn more here—or send us a note. We’d love to hear from you.