Milena Kroeff & Mehdi Achek

BYNOMADS was born from travel: places visited and moments lived. When you look back at those early candle and home fragrance creations, what impulse were you trying to bottle first: nostalgia, curiosity, grounding, or escape?

We started as a blend of nostalgia and escape. It was our way of sharing what we lived and bringing the world closer to people during a time like the pandemic, celebrating cultures and ingredients of the world.

When you create scents for other brands or venues, what matters more: translating an existing identity faithfully, or introducing an emotional layer the brand may not yet know how to articulate?

To create a perfume is an art and requires sensibility to translate that in a subtle and evocative way. A scent is a powerful way to tell a story and to create memories. We design a perfume thinking what story we want to tell, what emotions we want to sparkle. We think of scents in colors, shapes, animals, personas, textures. We always bring our emotional and personal layers in our creations. We connect with the ingredients as an artist connects with the colors.

Through sound journeys and olfactive landscapes at concerts and events, you work with scent as an active element of experience rather than a passive layer. What have these multi-sensory environments taught you about how people feel in a space?

People want to feel welcomed. Creating a welcoming space through candle light and good perfume is a game changer. It sets the mood and creates a sense of belonging. The flame of the candle calms the mind, the scents trigger and create new memories and are great conversation starters.

Your early creations were tied to specific places — Marrakech, Bahia, Yucatán, Dubai, Berlin… The recently-launched perfumes, however, move away from geography and toward emotional journeys. What shifted in your thinking about scent storytelling as you dove into fine perfumery?

Time is the greatest story teller. It took us two and a half years to elevate our perfumes to the level we wanted. With fine perfumery we opened a new world of customers and sensations. It is about who you become when you wear the fragrance. We want to rekindle the ritual of perfumery, celebrating the quality of the ingredients and the alchemy between the perfume and the skin. 

Your raw materials are sourced globally, often far from where the final narrative lands. How do you decide when an ingredient carries enough weight to earn its place in a formula?

Some ingredients are the main characters of the story, not only because their smell is more potent, but they are also part of the narrative. There’s also fictional characters, like an accord or an ingredient that the smell is more abstract and imaginative than tangible.For us, designing a perfume is like telling a story and we are great story tellers.

Transitioning from candles and home fragrances to personal perfumes is a major creative leap. What did working with skin’s intimacy and chemistry teach you that you couldn’t learn through space alone?

The act of smelling your own skin or having someone smelling you feels very human and animalic at the same time. There is something magical and mysterious in observing the chemistry reaction between skin and perfume. Creatively, with fine fragrance we could explore more olfactive notes, bring more depth, layers and complexity.

BYNOMADS sits comfortably in the high-end perfumery space, yet feels warm, human, and unpretentious. How do you define “sophistication” and what does it mean to you to create luxury today?

We appreciate things done with intention, respect to the craft and materials – the story behind and how it was done. You can tell the difference between real luxury and pasteurized luxury by the details, the materials, the ingredients. It’s like creating a soul to the product or experience. It takes time, patience, persistence, authenticity and knowledge to create something genuinely sophisticated.

Having visited nearly 100 countries combined, how do you continue to cultivate a sense of discovery without relying on constant movement? Can stillness be as inspiring as travel in your creative lives?

Stillness opens space for ideas and creativity. Music, art, books, movies, food, nature, all of that can be very inspiring and make your mind travel. Imagination is a powerful tool. We’d like to borrow a passage from Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa: “To travel? To travel, one only needs to exist. If I imagine, I see. What else do I do if I travel? Only the extreme weakness of imagination justifies the need to move in order to feel.”

Hospitality is ultimately about how a place receives you. How do you imagine scent reshaping the future of hotels, restaurants, and cultural venues?

Olfact is a fascinating sense and neuroscience has a solid body of research showing that smell is one of the strongest drivers of emotional memory, perception and behavior. When you add a scent made with beautiful ingredients to a place that was designed to receive, you create a non-verbal and non-visual memory code – this is incredibly powerful for hospitality and experiential design. We love to make it ritualistic and remarkable.

If BYNOMADS were a hotel, which one would it be?

Artisans are the essence of traditions and cultures and a big source of inspiration for us. When we travel we always connect with local artisans, buying from them and appreciating their art is our way to keep traditions alive. If we were a hotel we would celebrate beauty, people and cultural heritage. Dar Ahlam, in the Moroccan desert, reinvents hospitality and feeds our nomadic soul and curious minds, opening doors to experiences, with full attention to details, rituals, artisans and story telling.

Have you signed up for our newsletter yet? Never spammy, always bringing you the best and coolest hotels in the world and global lifestyle culture, all through the eyes of industry insiders and local tastemakers. Sign up here!