Monia and Philip had been following each other's writing on Substack for months before they finally connected. Since that first chat, the conversation never really stopped. Foresight was common ground, and fragrance, it turned out, was another. Rather than a shared blog post or a one-off piece, they decided to do one better, and that collaborative ambition set the tone for the whole project.
New Olfactory Worlds grew from there into the structured, ambitious project it is today. It's been collaborative from day one: two complementary skill sets, each pushing the other forward.
The strategy architect
Monia is a beauty futurist and foresight expert advising major groups such as Clarins and Unilever across beauty, wellness and luxury, with a background in marketing and branding.
She tracks trends and goes further upstream, reading weak signals at the fringes of science, technology and culture. Her Innovation Compass maps how they move from adjacent industries into beauty, so brands see where change is coming from and what to do about it.
Her lens is cross-cultural by design, shaped by years working in Tokyo and Paris and ongoing field research across Asia.
She also writes Beyond Beauty, a newsletter on the future of the beauty industry, and works through her consultancy, We Out Wow.
The Creative Dreamer
Philip is a cultural researcher, foresight strategist and writer. His recent work includes research and cultural intelligence for Protein, On Road and Canvas8.
He previously founded a fragrance brand, giving him a working knowledge of both sides of scent, commercial and creative. Rather than specialising in one category, he tracks the forces remaking culture, from consumer technology to climate.
His foresight work brings a world-building and speculative fiction sensibility that turns present shifts into futures a brand can picture itself in.
Underneath it all runs a cross-cultural, multinational outlook, and an ease with straddling worlds, real or imagined. He brings everything together through his consultancy, Exophilia.
/ let’s build what’s next
work with us
For teams who want to stay close to where fragrance is heading. Tell us what you’re working on.
LET'S CHAT
sent