Small Title
Where essence becomes presence.
Brand strategy and identity for a Mexican perfumery house on a mission to repackage "inspiration perfumes" as a category worth buying for the brand, not just the price.
Client
Year
Role
Scent Savvy
(founder: Hugo)
2025
Brand Designer & Strategist
Scope
ContraBrief · Brand strategy · Visual identity · Brand book · Packaging · Label system
Referral
Referred by Dos Fuegos (previous client)Referred by Dos Fuegos (previous client)
The challenge
Scent Savvy sells perfumes de inspiración, fragrances built to closely match the olfactive profile of luxury house releases (up to 99% similarity), at a fraction of the price. The product is excellent. The category is loaded.
In the Mexican market, "inspiration perfumes" sit under a label most consumers translate, fairly or not, as "dupes" or "clones." That single word, clon, does damage. It anchors the category to bargain hunting, undercuts the perceived value of the bottle, and competes only on price.
Hugo, the founder, came to Scent Savvy through his own life: a difficult chapter where fragrance became a way back to himself. The brand's emotional truth — fragrance as a way of becoming present again — was real and personal, anchored in the song "Pajarito Colibrí" by Natalia Lafourcade. But none of that emotional truth was visible in the product.
How I thought about it
01
A CONTRABRIEF, THEN A REAL CATEGORY AUDIT
I began with a ContraBrief, a research document that responds to the founder's brief with market evidence rather than preferences. It surfaced one structural insight that shaped every subsequent decision: Inside the dupe / inspiration-perfume category, no Mexican brand had yet built a credible aspirational identity. The white space wasn't more shelf or more virality, it was editorial elegance applied to an accessible category.
02
SIDESTEP THE COMPARISON, DON'T FIGHT IT
The core repositioning move was to refuse to engage with the "dupe vs. original" frame at all. The line that anchored this and ultimately became the brand's core concept: "Donde la esencia se vuelve presencia." / "Where essence becomes presence." "Essence" is what's in the bottle. "Presence" is what happens when someone wears it. By moving the value claim from what's in the bottle to what happens when you wear it, the brand stopped competing in a comparison it couldn't win.
03
THE HUMMINGBIRD AS EMOTIONAL ANCHOR
Hugo's personal connection to the Lafourcade hummingbird gave the brand an emotional symbol with three useful properties: specific to the founder's story, universally legible across Latin American cultures, and visually adaptable as a single line illustration. I drew the hummingbird as a continuous-line illustration: minimal, fluid, almost calligraphic. One drawing, every surface.
04
ITERATE OPENLY
Before locking the final identity, I presented a Visual Concept DoC, three directions with reasoning, mockups, and trade-offs explicit. The chosen direction won not because it was prettiest, but because it was the only one that held up against the strategic North Star: editorial elegance applied to an accessible category.
The system
LOGOTYPE
A custom-built typographic mark where "scent" sits stacked over "savvy" with shared, interlocking baselines. Thin, elegant, fluid strokes — the kind of typography you'd expect on a high-end perfume bottle.
ISOTYPE
A single continuous-line illustration: a hummingbird mid-flight, drawn with the lightness of a signature. Used as a debossed mark on perfume labels, as a stand-alone stamp on packaging, and as a recurring graphic asset on social posts. A botanical line element complements it for ornamental moments.
COLOR SYSTEM
#FFFFFD
Bruma clara
#FFF8CC
Rastro de Luz
#444218
Bosque Profundo
#584434
Tronco vivo
#343434
Sombra perrene
TYPOGRAPHY
Manifiesto
Hay fragancias que se desvanecen. Y hay otras que permanecen. En Scent Savvy creemos en perfumes que no solo se huelen, sino que se sienten, se llevan y se recuerdan. Somos la esencia que se convierte en presencia. Lo invisible que se hace tangible. El detalle que te define antes de hablar. No buscamos adornar, buscamos revelar. No seguimos modas, creamos identidad.
Application
What the project actually did
*
Built a complete strategic foundation that reframes Scent Savvy out of the "dupe" category and into the "aspirational accessible" position — a positioning none of the nine competitors I audited credibly occupied.
*
Designed a visual system that scales from a digital-first DTC brand to physical retail. The label and packaging are built to live on a shelf next to luxury houses without looking out of place.
*
Produced a brand book the founder uses both as internal reference and as an external sales asset when negotiating retail placement.
*
Project was referred to me directly by a previous client (Dos Fuegos) — the most valid kind of professional signal: the work generates its own demand.
What I learned
The hardest brand work is repositioning a category, not redesigning a logo. When the challenge is a category perception ("dupe = cheap"), no amount of visual polish solves it. The fix has to be conceptual.
Esencia → presencia did that.
Borrow language from the product world, not the marketing world. Naming colors after olfactive moments (Bruma Clara, Rastro de Luz, Bosque Profundo) made the brand book read like it understood perfumery, not just design.
An aesthetic register isn't just a mood, it's a strategic decision. Pulling the visual register up to editorial perfumery while keeping the voice register close and conversational kept all three target audiences. One register would have lost two of three.
Next project
CONNECT.
LET'S
Great brands start with
a conversation.
Made with friction / Designed to feel