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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And by the way, that process itself, that may take weeks, months. But let's say you push back and you say, actually, I want something that's really custom. So you know you're a sophisticated buyer. You say, don't give me a library sample. Now you're looking at like a 12 to 18 month process of going back and forth. Every time you submit notes, it might take three months for them to get back to you.
Super long process. And by the way, once you get the fragrance, you still don't know if it actually works in the application that you're going to put it in, right? So you have to do application testing. So let's say you want to launch a a skin cream and you want it to be slightly fragranced.
Well, the fragrance can't make the skin cream turn a wrong color and it can't make the scent change too much. So you have to do application testing as well. Now you've added more time. So that whole process is handled in most fragrance houses, something that looks very close to pencil and paper. and a lot of guesswork.
And so what we're doing with generation is taking each one of those pieces and applying modern methodology, and in some cases AI, in some cases just efficiencies, to make that faster and to make sure that you get something custom every time that's actually tailored to your brand. So when you submit the brief, That should be a chat GPT interface. You should have a conversation, right?
That should be available to start instantly. So we have a tool. So let's make, would you want to make a Colossus fragrance? Sure. Great. All right. So a fragrance for Colossus. What do you want it to evoke?
So what's happening behind the scenes is we're tapping into all the... tools that we've built, the olfactory intelligence that we've built over time, we will take what we've put in and we'll embed it into our map of scent.
So our map is not three-dimensional like RGB, it's about 300-dimensional, which is, I think, why scent had to wait for artificial intelligence to be digitized, is because it's just more complicated. And we'll then decode that coordinate into a scent profile. We'll show you where the scent lives in the map of like the 100 top mass market hits.
And then I'll show you the source code of the fragrance. And if we have something similar to it, we can actually go grab it and smell it. So... And this is, by the way, this is a multi-month process that we're condensing down into minutes.
The mountain peak is something you can hold in your hand, like your AirPods and your phone, that can read the chemical slice of reality, capture scent moments, tell you if you need to go to the doctor, tell you what vitamins to take, to really read scent, and then another device that can recreate it.
So that we can fill this room with, it can smell like walking through the redwoods, which like that forest bathing smell is one of my favorite smells of all time. So we're getting there. So you saw the big reader. You saw the one that we made smaller. We have to take that down by a factor of like four to eight in order for this to be something you would really say is portable.
Right now, we can move it around, we could deploy it. I don't think you can say it's portable today. And then you saw the scent printer, which is half the size of this table, right? We've got a lot of work to do to make that thing smaller. But if we've known one thing about technology is making things smaller is like a thing we can do. So let's take a look. So we've got an image. Ambition trail.
Ambition trail. All right. The marketing copy is a fragrance inspired by a timeless determination in the pursuit of one's mission, capturing the essence of ambition and discovery.
Generation is, yeah. Generation is our... business to open up Scent Design to more people and to do that faster.
Because David Senra is in your world, he has a few phrases that really resonate, which is like, the exit strategy is death. This is the last thing I want to do. I grew up in a town called College Station in Texas. Not too big, not too small. I got bit by the computer bug pretty early. So I started programming computers when I was like eight or nine.
Full-on computer nerd by 12 when I started collecting perfume. And I started collecting perfume because I noticed that people, when they put this invisible thing on them, would all of a sudden be treated differently by everybody around them, but within this little radius, right?
So like, it just, it was this magic potion spell combination that when you just say it like that, almost is unbelievable, which is, can you spray an invisible thing on you that changes how people see you and treat you, for the better or for the worse? I just couldn't understand it. I had already felt a little bit like a social outsider, and I was trying to decode that.
Like, why are they popular, and I feel like I'm on the outside. And so I looked at the clothes, but it was the fragrance that really, like... It confused me to no end at first, but then it fascinated me. And so I started looking into fragrance and I found out what these kids my age were buying.
It was Polo Blue, it was Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce, both fragrances that our master perfumer that we just passed designed many years ago. So it's completely full circle now. But then I realized there's not just two or three fragrances, there's tens of thousands. And it was like... discovering that movies exist and you can go into the movie theater and there's nobody watching the good films.
Everybody's watching the popular films. And for me, this whole world opened up a fragrance where, I mean, I remember the first fragrance that really taught me that this is an art. It was Bulgari Black, which is frankly not like a very long lasting or particularly performant fragrance. It's like, it comes in a bottle shaped like a hockey puck and you spray it on, it lasts 45 minutes.
But what it does is it unfolds in three acts, right? So the first smell is like the smell of screeching tires and rubber. And then within five or 10 minutes, it cools down to like of this vanilla rubbed on a leather chair. And then all of a sudden after like another 15, 20 minutes, there's like this smoky tobacco leather chair smoking room vibe.
Showing 941–960 of 1,050 · page 48 of 53
← Previous
Next →