How HoM Haute Was Built

I came in from the outside. No mentor, no lineage, no laboratory waiting for me — an economics graduate who spent years in corporate jobs, where all of this began as nothing more than a side-hustle idea. I fell, hard, for the way a smell can hold a memory, and taught myself almost everything I know about perfume — usually by getting it wrong first. This is the story of how HoM Haute was built: one underdog year at a time.

The beginning

In 2019 I co-founded my first house, House of Medici — experimental to the bone, built on a single dare: experience the impossible. Then the world stopped. Through the lockdowns of 2020, a small wave of independent Indonesian perfume brands found their feet, and we were among the pioneers shaping a market that barely existed yet. By 2021 the whole scene was electric — the romance of it felt like butterflies in the stomach, a young community falling for scent, release by release.

Loved by the crowd, doubted by the experts

By 2023 the “Scent of Indonesia” had become a bazaar of mass-market fragrance, and House of Medici was genuinely loved by the crowd. But to the fragheads — the obsessives who live and breathe the craft — it stayed underestimated. That stung. And the sting became fuel. I founded HoM Haute as a one-man house, still solo today, to make something that had to be taken seriously on its own terms. The first focus was Memento: fragrance built to hold a memory.

The artisan turn

From there I pushed deeper, toward genuine artisan perfumery — ultra-limited runs, real materials, slower hands. The artisan-fragrance heads began to notice. And still, as an underdog, I was underestimated by many. The answer never changed: keep improving. The same year, 2024, I co-founded Hutan Aromantika — a fully natural, Indonesia-centric house, and another way to learn the craft from a different direction.

The year the work changed

This is the part I'm most grateful for. In 2025 I stopped composing in isolation. I began gathering inputs and honest discussion from the Jakarta Fragrance Club — and the work improved exponentially. Suddenly the difference was night and day:

An outsider with no support system suddenly had one: a cult of open-minded young fragheads who love to dig, to argue, and to champion the things they believe in. It was also the year the house found its name and its reason — Harum Oleh Memori, fragrance through memory — and earned real trust.

On par, still proving it

Now the focus is modern classics, every release reaching for haute quality, held together by the Fragrance Matrix and this site. The honest challenge is still here: as a local brand, some collectors rank it below the established international names, even where I believe the quality is already on par — and still climbing. That gap doesn't discourage me. It's just the next thing to close.

What's next

The aim is simple to say and hard to earn: a reputation that travels. Respected at home in Indonesia, recognised internationally. None of it would exist without the people who saw it early — and the gratitude I feel toward them is hard to overstate.