Alex Wiltschko
speaker
1,050 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 21 Apr
Alex Wiltschko’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Then you start making progress bit by bit. And the first scents are like dumb. They don't work or they don't smell right. And then like you come back four weeks later, you're like, that one was really good. Holy crap. I think it's working. And then they all start to work. And then you start to go talk to customers and they start to accept some of your scents for products.
And then it's like really starts to roll. And, you know, bit by bit, you just, you know, keep going. Yeah. You know what StockX is? They have a problem with fakes from Timu. I want you to hold this in your right hand and smell inside of it. And I want you to hold this in your left hand and smell inside of it. And I want you to look at them. Can you tell the difference between these?
You can't work at StockX. But it's more pungent, right? It's more pungent, right? So the difference is the counterfeiters are really good at visual identity, but the smell of the shoe is basically the fingerprint of everything that ever happened to make this. What we've been able to do with StockX is show that we can take those really big sensors that are in the lab,
cut the right corners, make them smaller. So it's actually, the sensors are about the size of these two shoe boxes together. That's one right there. And what we do is we can take the thumb hole of the shoe box and basically insert it into a sniffer. And it will, within 20 seconds, it'll tell you real or fake. And we just have to show it a few reels, a few fakes.
Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. But then whenever a new SKU shows up, we grab some of the fakes, we grab some of the reels, we train it on the new SKU. And then now there's a device that can tell them apart.
Yep, there already is an arms race. And so this I'm sure is gonna be the next frontier because we're about to really stem the tide.
The first investor prospectus that we made, the double-edged sword was like, okay, so like we have this entire space to ourselves. Now the risk is, how do you focus? This is kind of like a piece of history here, Plum 1.0. This was the first scent that was teleported. So the first scent to be digitized and then reconstituted in another place.
And what we've done with this, and I will show you the vial here, is this is the essence of a fresh summer plum. And in this vial, this kind of clear liquid is probably thousands or tens of thousands of sniffs worth of this one moment of biting into a fresh summer plum. And what we're showing here is literally everything, the source code of that memory, of that scent experience.
So I want you to smell it. So I've already dipped some in the vial, so I just put the blotter into the vial. But close your eyes and think of biting into a fresh summer plum.
Right? Did we get it?
So this is, I think, a piece of history. And we only made 100 of these, but I'd like you to have one. Oh, wow. Amazing. It's important to me, what we've done. And I think, you know, it's just a plum today, but it's a lot more that we're doing in the future. So one thing that we're doing... is we're launching a new kind of fragrance house called Generation.
And the idea is to take all the technology that we've built, but also all the humanity, the people, the perfumers, the noses, and to combine that in a new way of designing scents for people who might not have been able to have access to designing a new scent or haven't been able to do it fast enough. And so that's called Generation, and that's something that we're just now launching. So
What we're doing with this scent is this is a scent that we custom designed for a creator. So someone who has a very large active audience on Instagram, has like a really great rapport and a brand, frankly, but what she doesn't have access to is a way of creating her own product that is resonant with her values, but also just straight up beautiful.
And so what we're able to do is take all of our technology, take our perfumery, and what we've done in very short order is design her a fragrance and we're going to help her launch it. And so part of the value proposition of generation is do you want to launch a fragrance? Do you have a place to put it in front of people but you're missing all the pieces?
Because we can now automate lots of this and we can bring humanity to the rest of this, Like, let's work together. Let's build you a fragrance.
So let me tell you how it's done today and then how we're changing it. So the way that you get a fragrance design today, and I'm not even talking about launching the full product, like literally just the smell. There's more that you have to do to launch the full fragrance. you submit what's called a brief. So a brief in other industries would be called a request for proposal or an RFP.
And it can be anything. So it's actually very, very free form in this industry. That itself could be revolutionized. So let's say you write a Word document and you describe your brand. You're going to describe what you want it to smell like, who you are, what you want the brand to be resonant of. And then at the bottom, you'll usually specify two pretty important things. What's the benchmark?
So is there a scent that you want to beat? And usually that means I kind of want my thing to smell like this, but make these changes. And then what's the price you want to pay? So how many dollars per kilo, which can be as low as like, you know, 10 bucks per kilo. It can go for fine fragrance, can go up into the many hundreds of dollars per kilo. It just depends on what you want to launch.
You submit that brief to a fragrance house. And again, this is the traditional way. Somebody receives that, and in their kind of weekly meeting, they read the brief, they read the volume that you want to make and the price, and they decide whether or not they want to work on it. And here, you haven't paid the fragrance house anything.
They look at the brief and then they say, okay, we want to work on this. Usually, 90% of the time, they go to their library and they say, oh, we've already made something for somebody else. Let's send Patrick this scent that is from our library. And then you'll get that and maybe you like it, maybe you're done. But 90% of the time, sometimes more, you aren't getting a new custom sent.
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