Why You Need To Know About This Billion Dollar Business | Rishi Chhabria, Aéromé

For three years, everyone told Rishi he was selling air freshener

Rishi Chhabria followed a smell back down a New York street and found a business India had no name for. Ten years on, Aéromé designs signature scents for airports, malls and hotels, and he still refuses to walk into a first meeting carrying samples.

The thing about scent as a business is that you cannot show anyone what you are selling. You cannot photograph it or put it on a shelf, and for the first few years in India nobody had a word for it except air freshener.

Rishi spoke to Ragini about the client who still pays 2016 rates, how you design a smell for an airport, and where the ethical line sits in a business that works on people without their noticing.

"I don’t come with a briefcase of samples. I come to understand your brand story, and then I go back to the drawing board."

Walking back down the street

I was walking down a footpath in New York with my wife and a whiff of fragrance came onto the road. I stopped her and asked if she had smelled it. She hadn’t. We had walked quite far ahead by then, and I said no, we have to go back, because I want to see what it is.

The doors opened again and there it was. An Abercrombie & Fitch store, ground plus two, and I walked every corner of it. The same fragrance, consistent, everywhere. I asked how they did it, because nobody could be standing there spraying all day. He said he thought it went through the HVAC. That is where my research started, in 2013.

I spent almost two and a half years on the subject, travelling to Hong Kong and Singapore and meeting hotels, and realised this was a concept not being used in India at all. There was fragrance here, but it was burners and sprays. Nothing uniform.

So I approached an American company already in the business and asked for a distributorship. They said yes. Eleven months later I got an email saying sorry, we can’t. Three years of my life gone, and I had already made all my plans. I sat with that for about a month. Then I took a paper and pen and drew the logo myself. No designer, no AI tools. I drew it, put in the name, applied for the registration, and started.

Every door I knocked on said air freshener

This was 2016. I would explain that I wanted to create a signature scent identity for their brand and they would say no thank you, we use sprays. Everybody called it an air freshener. We invested heavily in educating the whole ecosystem. Please don’t buy from me, just experience it.

The first breakthrough was a car dealership group. They liked the concept but couldn’t pay what I was asking, so they offered half and told me to come back after a year. I never went back. Ten years later they are still with us, still paying exactly that amount. My team has asked several times whether we should revisit the rate. No. They gave me a chance when I needed it most.

Two clients in the first year is not a success story. There were three of us, my wife Deepti and me, and one engineer. I went home and said this doesn’t look like it is going to work. She didn’t tell me I was right and she didn’t tell me I was wrong, and in that confusion I carried on. The second year we jumped to about 100. By late 2019 we were between 300 and 400, and today we are past 4,000 installations with a team of 130.

I don’t bring samples

I have walked into meetings with very big names and the first thing they say is, where are the samples? You flew all the way to Chennai without samples? Yes, because I don’t understand your brand yet. Once I have the story I go back and start curating with notes that speak your values.

We introduced questionnaires recently and I still don’t believe in them. I would rather sit across from someone and have them talk about the brand until I have gone deep enough that they tell me they didn’t know that about themselves.

A curation takes three to six weeks. Clients tell me they can’t wait that long and I tell them it will take that long anyway. It is slow, it is steady, it is consistent.

Dancing Bamboo

Terminal 2 at Bangalore airport calls itself a terminal in a garden. Re-engineered bamboo in the pillars, natural light from the top, hundred-year-old trees planted inside. We conceptualised the scent as a forest.

Airports are not transitional zones any more. A passenger arrives anxious: check-in, security, all of it, and you are on edge by the time you reach the gate. So we open with fresh notes so you feel welcomed, move into the earthy green of the terminal with sandalwood, cedarwood and vetiver, and settle into calm. Every diffusion takes you through the cycle, top to mid to base, in ten or twelve seconds.

The thin line between ambience and influence

Scent affects mood, dwell time and appetite, and that creates a very thin ethical line. Casinos in the United States infuse an ozonic, fresh-air kind of scent. That is not making anyone gamble. It makes the room feel lighter and more awake, and what people do with that is their own.

For a jewellery brand we use comforting notes so that someone looking at pieces subconsciously feels belonging and trust. We are enhancing an environment and expressing a brand, not trying to overtly influence anyone.

What technology cannot do

A brand once asked us to build scents around memory, so we made twenty of them. Wet earth on the walk to school when it has just rained. Old books in a library. Crayons. The smell of sharpening a pencil, which we recreated.

Smell moves along with you through your whole life and you mostly don’t notice it. AI helped us organise data on our neuroscience work, but the perfumer still builds the composition. Emotions are meant to be felt. You can’t fake one, and that is what all of this comes back to.

Listen to the full conversation with Rishi Chhabria on FyndOutWithRagini.