A Team of One

From the outside, HoM Haute looks like a small company. People write to “the team.” They picture a studio, a few sets of hands, someone on the perfume and someone else on the photos. I understand why. The truth is simpler and a little stranger: it is just me. All of it. And I have made my peace with how that looks.

I make the fragrance. I bottle it, label it, pack and ship every order, design it, shoot the photos, write the words, post the social, set up the offline events, run the admin, handle the business, and build every part of this website you are reading right now. There is no one in the next room. There is no next room.

But please do not picture someone working himself into the ground. I am not. I still have a life, I rest, I keep my evenings. I do things efficiently and I build everything to be simpler for me, not harder. Doing it alone was never about proving I could suffer. It was about keeping the whole thing calm, and mine.

There was a moment that made the strangeness plain. The first time HoM Haute showed its products offline, every other brand at the event brought at least three people to their stand. I came with myself. That same day I also set up Hutan Aromantika alone, and lent a hand to House of Medici, who actually have a team. HoM Haute was, literally, one person doing the work of a small crowd. From the floor, it must have looked a little insane.

From a customer’s side it does not quite add up, so people simply assume there is a team. The work looks like a team made it. That is the whole illusion, and it is not really an illusion: I lean hard on systems and on the newest tools, so one person can do the work of several without the seams showing. The technology is the rest of the staff.

I will not pretend it has no cost. A team of one is much harder to scale. I cannot be in two places at once. When I take a holiday, the brand takes one too, because I am its only moving part. Those are real flaws, not modest brags. Some days they are the whole problem.

For now, I still enjoy it this way. The work suits the life, and the life suits the work. But I am not romantic about it forever. At some point I want at least a small team, so the house no longer rests entirely on one person, and so a holiday does not mean the lights go off. We will see. That is honestly as far as the plan goes.

Until then, if you write to HoM Haute and a real human answers, quickly and personally, that is not customer service doing its job. That is just me, at my desk, glad you wrote.

One honest apology, while I am here. If my reply comes back short, please do not take it as coldness. Keeping every conversation going at once, alone, only works if I keep each one brief, and there are usually more of them than you would guess. When something really needs explaining, I have most likely written it down already, so I will point you to the product description, where the real detail lives. The shortness is not indifference. It is the sound of one person trying to answer everyone.