I should explain the pace. HoM Haute releases a lot, and often, and I know how that can look. Some will read it as restlessness, or as a house that cannot sit still. I respect every view of it. But there is a logic underneath, and since this house has never hidden much, I would rather just tell you plainly.

It helps to know where the work comes from. I have a great many ideas, and I create almost every day. Beyond that daily flow sits a deep archive: after five years on this perfumery journey, I have almost a thousand finished ideas and frameworks behind me, each one ready to be finalized, and even refined further, whenever the moment is right. So the pace is not me rushing to invent on the spot. It is a steady stream of new work meeting a reserve that already exists.

This is a solo project, made entirely in-house, and that matters more than it sounds. Think of the mass-market local brands you meet in a mall kiosk or a weekend bazaar. Most of them do not actually make their own juice. They buy a ready-made fragrance concentrate from a fragrance house, and that comes with a minimum order of several kilos at a time, enough to fill thousands of bottles, before a single one can be pressed. I do not work that way. There is no minimum order quantity to clear, no warehouse to feed. It is the same privilege that lets the artisan and semi-bespoke corners of perfumery release freely and in their own time, the way the small semi-bespoke lines from houses like Roja do. No minimums means I can follow the work instead of the forecast.

I want to be clear about what the small quantities mean, because it is nearly the opposite of what the market has trained you to expect. I am not manufacturing scarcity. Most of what I release now is not limited. It can be made again, and you can pre-order it. A few pieces are the real exception, kept rare only because the materials behind them are no longer available, and where I can, I am now shifting toward materials that could be scaled up in the future, so the work I believe in need not stay scarce forever. The batches stay small for an unglamorous reason. The materials are genuinely expensive and bought in tiny amounts, so I would rather make a little well than a lot thinly. That is the real difference between a house like this and those mall-kiosk brands working with a stock fragrance concentrate at high volume. Theirs costs far less to produce and is made by the thousand. Mine is dearer and made by the handful.

I am also mindful that this pace can put people off, and I understand why. So I will not ask you to take it on faith. Try the work first. Let a scent sit with you and see whether it resonates before anything else matters. That openness runs both ways, which is part of why I show up in person and join community gatherings whenever I can. A fragrance means more once you have met the hands behind it and smelled it on skin rather than on a screen.

I will be honest about the field this house competes in. Other brands have real marketing budgets. They hire many content creators, send out PR packages, and host exclusive offline events. HoM Haute cannot do any of that yet, so it has to play a different game, built on organic posts, the website, and simply showing up where the community gathers.

Part of that effort is gently moving buyers from the marketplaces toward buying direct through the site, something no local fragrance brand has truly managed to pull off yet. I am still present on the marketplaces too, but their economics are punishing for a house with margins like mine. Percentage-wise they are far thinner than the mass market’s, even though my prices run higher, because the materials cost so much more and are bought in such small quantities. That same high cost is also why production often stays limited. Buying direct is a large part of what keeps the house alive enough to keep making.

And to answer a question I sometimes get. Staying bootstrapped, with no investor, is a deliberate choice, not a stage I am waiting to grow out of. This is a personal project, and a personal project should answer to no one and follow no rules but its own. That freedom is the whole point of it.

Let me also be honest about the ambition behind all this, because the modest setup can hide it. HoM Haute is a solo project, produced in small in-house batches the artisan way, with no established name behind it and no reputation to lean on. I am starting from the very bottom. But the ambition is not small. At home, I want this house to stand beside the real Indonesian brands building something lasting, the ones with genuine craft rather than the hype chasers. And further out, I want it to reach the world the way houses like Zoologist, a handful of other Asian names, and the established international indie and artisan houses already have. The size of the goal is not in question. Only the time it takes to get there.

None of this is the finished shape of things, and it will change again. If you have followed HoM Haute through its earlier eras, you already know that changing its approach is the one thing the house does reliably. This is a season, not a destination, and I would ask you to hold it loosely, the way I am trying to.

So, welcome to another stage of HoM Haute. I hope things only get better from here, and that whatever shape the house takes next, its legacy stays long after any single season of it.