The founder of Glasshouse Fragrances shares her elevated approach to scent—and how she built the largest fragrance brand in the Southern Hemisphere.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I stopped wearing mango body butter when I was 16,” Nicole Eckels says with a laugh as we discuss the available options for personal fragrance when she first moved abroad. The Glasshouse Fragrances founder was inspired to build her brand after discovering a huge void in the market while living in Australia. “I moved to Australia, and I was working, and I thought, ‘OK, I’m gonna go to the store and I’m going to buy some products.’ And there just wasn’t anything,” she shares. Eckels dug in, building Glasshouse from the ground up, developing a business plan, finding investors, and even making the candles in her own kitchen at first.
Glasshouse Fragrances’ home fragrance offerings include a liquidless diffuser.
Driven by passion and fueled by perseverance, her winning formula clearly resonates. “I’m obsessed with fragrance,” she explains. “As long as I can remember, it’s been such an important part of my life. I genuinely, genuinely believe that your sense of smell is the most powerful one of all,” she shares. “I set out to create this global fragrance empire.”
And that she did. Seventeen years later, the booming brand is the largest fragrance brand in the Southern Hemisphere and quickly gaining ground in the U.S. A key to its success is its fine fragrance approach to all categories, including home fragrance. “We only work with fine fragrance perfumers,” Eckels explains. “So the result is that our fragrances—particularly in home fragrance—are much more complex, rich and lasting than just about any other product you’ve ever come into contact with. So that’s what differentiates us in this market from the competition,” she says.
Glasshouse Fragrances’ sophisticated scents like Kyoto in Bloom offer luxuriously layered accords.
The cult classics quickly followed, like the Gardénia Inoubliable candle. “Gardenia is my favorite flower,” shares Eckels. “It’s very elusive, right? It comes out and blooms, and then two weeks later, it’s gone.” Eckels explains that this candle took four years to make, but the result is a sublime capture of the bloom’s ephemeral beauty. “Now it’s like you picked one and brought it into your house,” she says.
The Sunsets in Capri candle blends marine notes with peach and jasmine.
This season, Glasshouse unveils a flurry of scents, including the delicious new Tutti Frutti collection. “It is inspired by poolside, boozy tropical getaways,” she says of the range that spans from luscious lychee-lime fizz to—yes, you guessed it—a juicy mango. Yet, Glasshouse’s Neon Rays mango Bellini scent is a far cry from mango body butter, no doubt. “It is a very juicy mango,” she shares. “Everything we do is very natural—so, when you smell our mango, you feel like you’re literally sitting next to a plate of ripe, fresh mangoes.” Boasting a juicy cocktail of mango and peach mixed with rose, black currant and apricot—cheers to that indeed.
Photography by: all photos courtesy of brand
