A Deodorant Brand Bets on The ‘Aesop Effect’

How much would you pay for a deodorant? A new brand, To My Ships, which launches on September 26, is hoping it’s a product shoppers will splash out for.

The line, which was founded by Aesop veteran Daniel Bense, sells a £35 ($46) deodorant, which it is positioning as an elevated alternative to drug store options.

Bense recruited Céline Barel, a perfumer who previously created fragrances for the likes of Loewe and Jo Malone London to craft its scent. Scented with a plant called polygonum odoratum, a relative of Lily of the Valley, the formula uses naturally-derived ingredients such as fermented lactic acid to reduce the bacteria that cause body odour.

He’s hoping to capture a piece of the small, but growing, premium personal care market, and use it to establish To My Ships — which takes its name from Homer’s The Iliad — in more categories. The full collection, called Of The Gods, also includes a hand and body wash, £39 ($51) and a perfume, £170 ($222).

Bense said when deciding what direction the brand would take, he considered other parts of the body before landing on deodorant, which it offers in two refillable formats, a roll-on and a non-aerosol spray. He said it was “the natural choice because it’s something you don’t walk out the door without using.”

Rather than positioning the deodorants as secondary to the fragrance or hand wash, or as impulse purchases, To My Ships is hoping to enter consumers’ routines through a more narrow opening, and build a bigger brand from there — perhaps not unlike another great tale from ancient Greece, the Trojan Horse. For now, it’s a lean company, with only two full-time employees, and £1.5 million ($1.96 million) in funding raised from a broad group of angel investors.

He said the brand name and concept was intentionally whimsical.

“Look, [we’re] dealing with dark and smelly functions. You want to have a bit of humour in answering it,” he said.

However, premium deodorant is still a nascent space. According to market intelligence firm Euromonitor, the segment makes up around 3.2 percent of the overall deodorant market, with sales in 2023 reaching $842 million. There’s room to grow, though: Between 2018 and 2023, its compound annual growth rate more than doubled that of the standard market, growing 5.2 percent.

Despite its small size, there’s no shortage of competitors – or buzz. The likes of Curie, Hume, Salt & Stone, Akt and Get Fussy all offer more modern versions of deodorants, from creams and balms to “whole body” deodorants for under $20.

Bense said To My Ships’ point of differentiation is being a cut above even the other premium options. “[To My Ships] has elevation to it. There’s not many brands in that elevated space,” said Bense, adding that its customers would be more “mature, unconventional… not Gen-Z”.

Grassroots Beginnings

In building To My Ships, Bense is leaning on his network and learnings from his time at Aesop, where he worked for over a decade managing its wholesale and DTC businesses, launching Aesop’s US business, its e-commerce site and helping inaugurate its UK presence. He said a fragranced product was a natural choice because of his contacts in the perfume world, and a former Aesop colleague, Dr. Kate Forbes, is the brand’s consultant scientist and was involved in the products’ formulation to ensure their efficacy.

It’s Aesop’s commitment to branding that Bense thinks set the brand — which sold to L’Oréal for a record $2.5 billion in 2023 — apart, and he’s keen to replicate that playbook.

“They had a very defiant way of doing business with a real conviction to values and principles,” he said. “I learnt a lot about the brand versus the commercial, and then how to execute that.”

To that end, To My Ships is focusing on smaller community events to publicise its launch, rather than heavy influencer gifting or out of home advertising.

A launch event is planned at Shreeji News & Magazines, a newsagents and event space offering a hand-picked selection of fashion tomes, located on London’s plush Chiltern Street, opposite the restaurant and celebrity haunt Chiltern Firehouse. It previously hosted events for London-based luxury label J.W Anderson and jeweller Tiffany & Co., as well as the artist Tracey Emin. A similar event is planned for Paris Fashion Week at a Japanese concept space called Ogata.

The launch is about targeting the right channels and geographies, said Bense, adding that he was in conversation with retailers such as big-name Dover Street Market, Liberty and Mecca, as well as cult stores like Egg in London and Bluemercury in the US.

The Case for Luxury

At a time when consumer discretionary spending is slowing, and aspirational shoppers are starting to trade down somewhat, an expensive deodorant brand might feel incongruous.

However, Bense believes the appeal of the brand goes beyond just beauty aficionados, and reaches a lifestyle connoisseur. “Those first movers are looking for something that’s new, distinctive, and interesting … they want a change in their bathroom,” he said.

That appetite for premium sundries is clearly not abating — one can buy Chanel nail polish remover and Hermès AirPods cases, while candles have become a popular luxury flex, with brands like Loewe and Fornasetti’s distinctively packaged versions among the most coveted. A halo effect from the brand’s associations with fine fragrance could also be a boon, as the category continues to grow.

However, no matter how wealthy consumers are, when it comes to deodorant, they need to be convinced of its efficacy — something not all shoppers are when it comes to natural deodorant. On social media, natural deodorants users often joke about their at-times poor performance (“This natural deodorant got me smelling like lavender and onions. At this point just give me the aluminum [sic]” reads one post on X; another one simply reads: “Please wear the deodorant that gives you cancer. Thanks.”)

“For some people, any deodorant, natural or otherwise, just isn’t going to be enough,” said Dr. Julian Sass, a science communicator and product development consultant.

Bense is confident the formula — and the brand — can go the distance.

“It’s about being a new brand that’s doing something interesting, and has a point of view … that can grow in many ways,” he said.

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