Initio Parfums Privés puts neuroscience at the heart of its customer journey

The French niche fragrance house Initio Parfums Privés unveils its latest innovation: Feel Lab Experience, an experiment that combines perfumery, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.

Developed in partnership with Feel’Tech by Micropole, BrainCo, and the Harvard Innovation Lab, this experience invites customers to explore their emotional responses to a fragrance. Specifically, customers are invited to wear an electroencephalography (EEG) headband fitted with sensors that record their brain activity during the discovery session. The brainwaves captured are analyzed, revealing unconscious preferences and the degree of well-being elicited by a fragrance — a process which, the brand notes, does not replace the consumer’s final choice.

The initiative is being introduced this month at Initio Parfums Privés’ Paris flagship, ahead of a selective international rollout.

For Initio, this marks another step in a strategy that treats perfume as an emotional and immersive experience. In April, the house formalized a partnership with dsm-firmenich, one of the leading suppliers of fragrance ingredients, to deepen research into the interactions between olfactory molecules and emotions.

This momentum comes against a favorable backdrop for the Sprecher Berrier Group of Companies, parent company of Initio and Parfums de Marly. The group, which recorded retail sales of $775 million for the year ended March 31, 2025 (a 41% increase), is preparing the next stage of its development with the arrival of Patrice Béliard as CEO on October 1. The former Shiseido and Estée Lauder executive will succeed Julien Sausset, who has been the driving force behind the strong expansion of both brands since 2016.

Buoyed by 50% growth in retail sales over the year, to $189 million, Initio Parfums Privés reaffirms its ambition to unite luxury, innovation, and cognitive science to strengthen its foothold in the global niche perfumery market.