In Conversation with Matthew Herman, Boy Smells Co-Founder

Boy Smells creates products that, ultimately, try to get you closer to yourself. The brand started out making candles in 2015 and has since expanded into room sprays, body care, underwear and fine fragrance. It’s all intimate and it’s all intentional — without ever taking itself too seriously because what would be the fun in that?

Matthew Herman is the co-founder of Boy Smells. He graciously met the Very Polite team at Hotel June in Malibu to talk to us about the Boy Smells brand. We spoke about the things he’s learned from creating a business built on passion over plans; why Grace Jones and Kacey Musgraves are perfect representations of being genderful today; why talking about pride can feel so awkward for brands; and how you should never, never go to sleep with a candle burning. No matter how good it smells or how relaxed the scent technology makes you feel!

Kirsten Geekie:
I wanted to start off talking a bit about the origin of Boy Smells. What made you believe that this could be something? Or did you believe it could be something?

Matthew Herman:
I think a lot of brands start with some big five-year plan on how the brand is going to grow. But when we started Boy Smells, it was really just a side hobby. Both myself and our other co-founder at the time, we were both in fashion. I’d just moved to LA to work for Nasty Gal. And Nasty Gal has a strong entrepreneurial ethos. They encouraged people to have a side hustle. So, we just wanted to do something where we could develop modern and cool scents without it being some $100 candle. It felt unusual and new.

But as we were developing these scents, you overlay that with where we were personally in our own minds. I think as a queer person, you kind of go through a second coming of age, where you think about who would I have been if I had grown up in a world that encouraged my identity? And then, for me personally, it led to embracing my feminine side more. And then, not just embracing it and accepting it, but really nurturing it. And because of that, I think I have a more holistic sense of myself. That there’s not one part of myself that feels estranged from the other part. And exploring that was a big part of fragrance for me. Allowing myself to wear fragrances that had rose or tulip in them mixed with things that have an overt grittiness to them. Finding that tension in fragrance was really important to me and defining my own sense of wholeness.

At Boy Smells, we always try to kind of mix those more traditionally feminine notes with the more traditionally masculine notes. And that’s why we call it Boy Smells. We put it in the pink box, because it’s this sense of poking fun at what scent and gender means. Because there’s a lot of sexism embedded in scent notes. Women all smell like roses and flowers and fruits and things that are delicate and sensitive and fragile. And men are ‘supposed’ to be musk and wood and leather, because they’re strong and virile — because they’re tough. All of these scent notes end up reflecting the expectations of gender. And I really think that you can be tough and sensitive. You can be strong and vulnerable. You can be soft and virile at the same time. Holding these things in conflict with each other is really a much more accurate reflection of reality. And it also reflects a much more realistic view of the human experience. All of these dualities coexist. They don’t exist in isolation. At Boy Smells, we call that genderful rather than genderless. It’s like third wave gender reform. It’s not ‘We’ve got gendered, and then we’re unisex or we’re genderless.’ It feels very neutering, whereas I think we should be moving towards gender-wholeness. I think genderful is the fullness of the experience — the positive side of that experience. So that’s what we stood for when we called the brand Boy Smells and putting our candles in that pink box. And it still informs how we mix and create great products today.

KG:
It’s interesting to think about how the brand has released products and explored different categories in relation to this idea of a second coming of age — you’ve kind of drawn out the journey of getting in touch with your gender wholeness through Boy Smells. It all starts with your interest in scent, but it’s almost too close to your body to start off directly with fragrance. So, you stay close to home. Creating these beautiful, genderful scents that can be experienced in the safety of your own space. And then you move into a hyper-expression of gender: Unmentionables. And finally, Boy Smells has moved into fine fragrance — the closest connection to the body and self-expression. Did you think about that journey at all when you started with home scents and candles?

MH:
I think candles were an easier thing to figure out. Once we got started making candles, we got into the larger world of fragrance, and we had to learn and be introduced into the industry and make the right connections. When we were ready for fine fragrance, we had enough of a brand platform to make that investment into fragrance, which is a little bit of a bigger lift than making candles. Like I said, when we started the business, we didn’t come with like some like five-year or 10-year growth plan. It just happened really organically. And so now that we’re in fine fragrance, I think it’s such a beautiful, amazing expression of genderful values, because it is a lot more personal. It’s close to the skin. It’s how you introduce yourself to other people.

KG:
It’s intimate.

MH:
I think that’s the thing, whether it’s lighting the candle next to your bed or slipping on a pair of underwear or putting your fragrance on for the day — those are all very intimate moments with yourself. And that’s a big difference in how Boy Smells thinks about fragrance and how we view it. All fragrance ads used to be about how do I attract the opposite sex? It was all about, “Oh, I’m going to spritz on this Dolce and Gabbana fragrance and all of a sudden, I’m going to be having all this sex on the rocks of the Amalfi with the waves crashing next to me.” The way we view fragrance at Boy Smells is more about discovering, how do I feel most myself? And how do I feel like the most genuine version of me.

KG:
I imagine creating fragrances like you do at Boy Smells requires so much creativity. Do you find you tend to create unexpected combinations in anything else you do? Do you love cooking? Are you exploring any art or creative passions outside of Boy Smells?

MH:
I’ve always been into art. I went to art school and fashion design school. That’s always been a big part of my life. I do love to cook, and I love restaurants. But for me, it’s the way things are combined in unexpected ways. I want to discover that invisible thread that connects things together and find a way to make that visible. Those are the things that are my superpower. Every scent at Boy Smells has a mood board. The mood boards are filled with ideas, and images and scent notes. They’re all quite different. But it’s about finding that tension and interaction between the ideas and images to uncover an overall vibe. That’s how I like to create.

KG:
I’d love to see those mood boards. Do you have images of architecture and fashion? Or is it just a mix of things from all over the place?

MH:
It’s all over. I think it’s the provocativeness and the tension between the images — whether we’re talking about gender role or dualities, or whatever it is — it’s the tension between them that always creates the most intriguing result.

KG:
Speaking to unexpected connections, you’ve done some amazing collaborations with Boy Smells like Grace Jones, Kin and Kacey Musgraves. How do you think that process has influenced how you approach creating scent? Collaborations seem to be such an interesting exercise in thinking about the relationship between things and how another person can stimulate your own curiosity.

MH:
Well, with Kacey Musgraves, she’s a strong, very liberal female who’s into smoking weed and psychedelics. She writes her own music and produces it. Remember with her first album? She had, “Follow your Arrow”, which is one of her songs and the record label didn’t want to release it, but she insisted on it being the single for the album. Country music is a very old boys club, patriarchal, a follow-the-rules kind of thing. And she just doesn’t do any of that. She’s been shunned by a lot of the country music industry, but she just doesn’t care. And that’s very true to our values. She’s very much a woman redefining what it means to be a woman in a very male dominated and male defined industry. She sees herself through her own lens, not the gaze of others. And so, to us, that’s very cool. It’s very much about following your own sense of truth.

And then, of course, Grace Jones is the original icon of holding the masculine and feminine space simultaneously. She’s always been there. David Bowie is no longer with us, but David Bowie had his phases, but he went more masc towards the end. But Grace Jones has always held that space with so much power. And so, for us, she’s the ‘OG’ representation of genderful.

And with Kin, that was really about being your best self. We created this scent technology to enhance moods and encourage you to go deeper into yourself. Every one of these collaborations, all of them, have really tied into our brand values. But it’s really fun to extrapolate different aspects of our brand values and explore them through the combined lens of another brand or another artist. That’s always a fun way to explain and extrapolate our core beliefs into something that is exciting — that people will get jazzed up about.

KG:
What is the scent technology you created for the Kin collaboration? How does it actually work?

MH:
They take the conscious and unconscious responses to certain notes and then create a heat map. We came up with a rating system of different scents and the different moods that they elicit, and then if you combine enough of those different scents together, it effects certain mood categories. So, within each of those candles, we’ve combined different notes at different levels with the science behind it to be really good for relaxing and unwinding for example. One candle can really set the tone at the end of the day, or, I would say, help you go to sleep — but we don’t ever suggest anybody fall asleep with a candle burning! But other ones are more about tapping into the now. Another is more for energy and getting to it.

But most of the Boy Smells brand is about being very cheeky and has a nod and a wink. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. So, getting into science and scent technology was super fun. But we have another collab coming out later this summer that’s more about just having fun. And we have some other things in the works too. And we will continue to work with other brands.

KG:
Because Boy Smells started out and has always been a more of a playful brand, could you ever have imagined working with scent technology when you started?

MH:
No, honestly. When I started the brand, I was just buying stuff off the internet and mixing it at home. Not in any way going through regulatory and safety protocols and all these things that I know about now. But as we’ve been approached by the best scent houses in the world looking to work with us, and then going to them and seeing that we’re on the trend and mood boards and identified as what’s happening. It’s been really exciting that I now get to work with people that are my heroes and these people I had always dreamed to work with. So, for me, personally, that’s been the great thing about Boy Smells. I’ve gotten to work with Grace Jones. I’ve gotten to work on things that I didn’t ever think would be possible. Which has been super cool.

KG:
It’s so amazing as a creative when you get those moments where you can be flattered by the rightness of your intuition. Do you think that if you look back on the way the company and the brand has grown, are there things that you would change? Or do you feel like everything happened the right way because it was driven by your intuition?

MH:
I wouldn’t change anything to do with the brand. David Kien and myself, we both come from art school, we both worked in fashion. We’re not veterans of the beauty industry. And we’re not traditional business operators. So, there’s certain things that from systems, and finance and, like, ERP systems, and all the really unsexy back-of-house stuff that I would have definitely done differently. But even product expansion, and just from a merchandising point of view, I might have built things a little bit differently. But I’m incredibly thankful and feel very blessed with the lessons I’ve learned. And, you know, those things are good because they keep you humble. It’s life. It’s messy, but that’s cool too. So yes, I would have done things differently. But no, I wouldn’t have learned the things I learned if I hadn’t done it the way I did it.

KG:
I think that’s part of what not taking yourself too seriously allows. It allows you to really embody your brand as a character and see what happens and let it happen.

KG:
I think when considering your brand as a character and how it represents itself to the world, it makes me want to expand on your brand’s connection to gender. How a brand perceives and represents itself to an audience is such an interesting conversation, and especially when we think about how brands show up during Pride. What do you think the role of a brand is, if they have any role at all, in entering those conversations?

MH:
It really depends. We’re a brand founded by two queer individuals, and we have a lot of diversity and different gender representation in our life, and on our team as well. I always found it really awkward in the earlier days of our business to participate in that conversation, because I didn’t feel like an authority on it. Although as a part of the community, I still felt like an impostor to speak about LGBTQIA+ issues in any way. I felt like I should leave this to the experts. But I also was encouraged by people that the brand has a voice, and it has a community. But it is definitely something we struggled with in our earlier days. I think each brand has to find their own way. But as long as it’s authentic, then I think that’s important. I think customers can see through that too. To each their own, I guess. But I think there has to be some sort of tangible, actual relation to a conversation if a brand wants to participate in it. I think that’s important for brands to come across in any way, with any authenticity.

KG:
Because of how you’ve built your brand, you have the benefit of feeling authentic in almost anything you do. Boy Smells has always seemed to stay true to the path of origin and maintained this lightheartedness. I feel like people do have an instinctual sense of trust there because of how you’ve behaved in the industry and as a brand.

It’s a very interesting thing to really get into. As a branding agency, we’re constantly working with brands where we want to encourage them to make decisions that are true to who they are, so they don’t make the awkward missteps that are so common nowadays.

MH:
Totally. And I think a lot of marketing agencies look at every single day on the calendar, like international this day, and world that day. You’re like, “are you going to participate in every single one of these?” So, I do think it’s about knowing your brand tone of voice, know your audience, know yourself and figure out what’s right for you. But there’s even things around sustainability and clean that our brand very much participates in. But you also have to choose your priority and what you stand for. While we use American Forest and Paper Association papers and soy-based inks, and cleanly formulate — it’s not what we lead with. Because genderfulness, our sense of irreverence, being at the intersection of our product and culture, being on the pulse of what’s happening, and what’s going on with how people are viewing identity is more what our brand stands for. Being made in LA or clean or environmentally friendly, those almost become secondary messages for the brand versus primary.

KG:
Well considering your packaging, it has become such a definable representation of your brand and genderfulness. And you use colour in a really intentional way across your identity. We obviously have the iconic pink box. And then for the Kush line, there’s a more natural palette. And some of your collaborations and collections express colour through gradients and metallics. So, you always come back to colour — in some ways as a statement and a message and in some ways as a categorization tool. How do you think about colour in terms of the brand?

MH:
Well, our Chromesthesia collection was all about a kind of synesthesia: when you smell something that makes you see or feel a colour. And then that collection turned into our HyperNature collection, which is about playing with new and old, like existing natural ingredients and new molecules and combining them together to get these like Bjork-esque, kind of trippy fragrances.

KG:
That would be a great collaboration by the way.

MH:
It absolutely would be!

And then with our Fantôme collection, everything kind of fades to gray, because it’s all based on smoky scents. And then the Kush collection has these very distinct colours that are more primary. And then, of course, pink and black is kind of like our black and white. It’s really the core of the brand. It’s where genderfulness really shows up. That’s obviously very intentional with calling the brand Boy Smells but putting it in the pink box and playing with that provocation and misdirection of indicators.

KG:
I read this article years ago by Jo Barraclough Paoletti, “Clothes Make the Boy”, in Vestoj. It addressed the whole conversation of pink and blue, and how boys, initially, wore pink. It’s so interesting how that changed and how these colours are now completely culturally defined this way.

MH:
Well, the blue and pink thing happened at the same time gender roles started to become a lot more defined, because it was really about metropolitisation where higher populations were rural, and now a higher concentration is metropolitan. So, when people moved out of the country and into the cities men went to work, and women stayed home. There were these really defined gender roles. Whereas in a rural community, everybody pitches in. That’s when blue was invented for boys. There’s also a lot of commercialization around gender roles and marketing and selling to them, and all of a sudden, girls were in pink, and boys were in blue, and women stayed home, and men went to work. And then Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and all of that kind of stuff. So, it was marketing really. Now luckily, with Boy Smells, we get to market a different version. Our branding is our marketing. We now get to market for the pendulum shift forward, something that’s new and almost post-post-modern.

KG:
Then what’s next for Boy Smells? You have a fun collaboration coming up!

MH:
We have a fun collaboration coming up. Fine fragrance is the fastest growing part of our business. We entered Sephora in September of last year.

KG:
That’s amazing. How’s that been?

MH:
Good, really good. And they’re planning the business out with 70% fine fragrance and 30% candles. So that’s our first big box retailer that’s getting behind fine fragrance in such a big way. And our fragrance Woodphoria, was nominated this year for the Universal Prestige Fragrance of the Year from The Fragrance Foundation. It’s nice to be recognized from within the fragrance industry itself for the work we’re doing there. So that’ll be a really big focus for us: fine personal fragrance and growing that category.

KG:
Congratulations! It’s amazing for you to be recognised in the industry in such a huge way. Especially considering fragrance is more than a business but an actual passion for you.

MH:
It is! And it’s great to go into Sephora and see black-owned brands, queer-owned brands and female-run brands. It feels good to participate in big box retail in a way that is genuinely embracing diversity and different voices.