Aeir’s Rodrigo Caula & Enrico Pietra

Rodrigo Caula: First and foremost, Enri and I are luxury designers. We come from a background of industrial design, but we've done our master's in Luxury Design for Craftsmanship, where we've spent the past seven to eight years in that space working very closely with many luxury brands that you're probably familiar with––Tesla, SpaceX, Rimowa ––to name a few. Working between SpaceX and Tesla, you're living in a factory for the future so you get to see a lot of really sci-fi things that are actually real.

RC: Aeir is really an expression of our crafts. Everything…every single element of what you experience in Aeir is how we practice design. We've worked with so many different companies in the past and we've seen so much, but we had never built our own brand. For us, it was like, how do we take all of our experiences and create our own unique perspective? We wanted to build something from the ground up, where we have full control, from the concept to what products we introduce.

Enrico Pietra: What we really love about fragrance is that it is a 360 experience––it speaks not only through materials and visuals, but through emotion.

EP: Well, it is a lot of things from our mission right down to our packaging. It is our mission to have the world’s first carbon-neutral luxury brand and we want to show that luxury can be sustainable.

RC: Yeah. And we really want to show that design isn't just throwing a logo on something––it's really holistic––it’s how you build everything from top to bottom. The circularity, sustainability strategy, the packaging, how you think about packaging, and how you create a product…that’s all really a part of what a designer's role is

RC: This is really the main innovation as our fragrances are extraction-free, and therefore 100% synthetic. All of the “ingredients” going into our juice have been bioengineered in a lab. So with natural perfume, you're always using natural oils. So let's say sandalwood trees or roses, you're always having to extract the raw material from the tree or flower itself, which can be devastating to the environment. With synthetic perfumes or biosynthetic perfumes, you're avoiding all that. Instead of starting with the oil derived from natural ingredients, we are essentially using sugar molecules as the starting molecule. You're kind of creating a bioconversion where you're actually taking that sugar molecule and converting it into scent molecules through fermentation with alcohol. Once different types of scent molecules/profiles are created, we mix those molecules together and create something unique, so the concept of our scents is how we blend these molecules together. And for the alcohol, we're introducing a carbon captured version, which actually comes from CO2 waste.

EP: We have also fully cut the use of water. Because of that, we are actually creating “extrait de parfum” or “perfume extract” not eau de toilette or eau de parfum. And because we aren’t diluting our fragrances with water, our fragrances actually last longer on the skin.

RC: And they definitely evolve with you. Wet Stone, for us, is the one that actually evolves the most just because of the way that that one was designed. If you wear it on your skin, it evolves more, whereas if you wear it on your shirt or your clothing, it's very accurate to what the perfume smells like out of the bottle. But if you're going to bed and you wore Wet Stone, the next morning you wake up, you and your pillow will smell very different.

RC: The brief for us was, “how do you ship Aeir technically and figuratively?”

EP: Yeah, for us, the packaging is not only about the aesthetic but also how can a package be more sustainable.

RC: We knew that when you experience any kind of product, everything that it comes wrapped in usually becomes waste after it's been used—“beautiful garbage” if you will. We really wanted to create different hierarchies between what you keep and what you recycle, and how to eliminate waste from every touchpoint.

RC: So say with, let's call it the “Aeir bag,” you have two different packaging systems for The Discovery Set and also for the large bottle. Everything is one piece of 100% recycled FSC-certified paper folded into a bag with glue on one seam, and the handle is knitted paper. There's no ink at all on the bag, it's all embossed and the only ink we do use is where it is necessary, like when compliance requires it. Everything is disassemblable. So when you're done with the perfume system itself, you can actually twist everything off and recycle it responsibly.

EP: And when it comes to shipping, we considered weight, so we wanted to create the lightest packaging possible to house our perfumes. We removed all heavyweight glass and moved away from rigid card paper and trays, opting for an aluminum bottle, so we reduce our carbon footprint while also giving that feeling of being super sleek and futuristic.

RC: And when you receive the package, it really feels like you've received a gift from us rather than a product you bought. Our inspiration for the aluminum packaging, specifically, was if you received a package from the future, what would it look like or how would it feel? And for us, we were inspired by where we originally started––that kind of sci-fi space grade aluminum-––so we designed an anodized aluminum bottle, introducing the material to the beauty market for the first time. We want the perfume to travel to outer space if it ever needs to.

RC: We want to give our customers access to real luxury. Working with these really big brands, you realize a lot of these experiences and secrets are really guarded because you have to have money to access them. But here, we wanted to create a product that really is luxury through and through, from top to bottom, with sustainability at the core. The price point itself is quite competitive in this space, and if you really think about the full 360 experience––from the packaging, the products, the vibe of everything––you can actually experience real luxury.