Stora Skuggan
A Stockholm perfume studio launched in 2015, exploring myth and reality through scent and design.
Sweden
About Stora Skuggan
Stora Skuggan is a Stockholm perfume studio that released its first fragrance in 2015. Its Swedish name means “the big shadow,” and its perfumes explore the uncertain space between documented phenomena, folklore and imagination.
History
The five founders—Anna Barkne, Tomas Hempel, Olle Hemmendorff, Jonas Nordin and Martin Nicolausson—met in 2005 through the creative scene around Stockholm’s Beckmans College of Design. Their interest in a scent-related project became more concrete when Hempel began learning perfumery in 2010, and the others gradually joined the experiments. Instead of commissioning established perfumers and design agencies, the group developed the fragrances, bottle designs and artwork themselves, treating those elements as parts of the same work.
Philosophy & Signature Style
A vanished plant, a limestone cave or an unexplained sound can provide the starting point for a fragrance. The founders describe an intuitive process, but one that also involves extensive smelling and repeated trials before a perfume enters the collection. Oversized spherical caps and distinctive graphics offer a visual introduction to each scent’s particular world, alongside its composition of flowers, woods, spices or resins.
Iconic Fragrances
Silphium imagines a lost plant of antiquity through spices, resins, woods and leather, while Moonmilk connects the pale substance of a cave with the smoothness of sandalwood. Mistpouffer takes mysterious booming sounds heard around bodies of water as its subject: the team spent four years developing a balance of smoke, clarity and an elusive, fog-like atmosphere.
