How do you create a fragrance brand that genuinely disrupts the beauty industry? It wasn’t even a question on Charlie Vickery’s mind when he started creating 12_things, but it's one he’s answered.
Inkskin.
Following his role as managing director of the brand formerly known as Haeckels (now Dulcie), Vickery wasn’t looking to start his own brand. Yet, years spent reconfiguring the industry from the inside had primed him to question the status quo), and clearly, the status quo. So, when he started being served perfume brands on Instagram that each looked exactly the same, each pushing the same ingredients and generating generic, AI-sloppy content, he started to think: ‘Is there a way in which you can create a world unto itself that is two fingers up to the perfume industry?'
For Vickery, who lives in London, the answer was to create a fragrance that drew ingredients and inspiration not from gardens and beautiful lands, but instead, from the often unpleasant realities of everyday life, especially everyday life in a modern city with its industry, decay, and even, the ultimate taboo word in brand marketing, death. A way of, in his words, ‘creating beauty in the ugliness around you by looking at the materials that we typically ignore’.
12_things debuts that concept with its first launch, Inkskin, a fragrance inspired by the act of rewriting your story after a difficult ending, a kind of rebirth after a figurative death. It opens notes of metal (inspired by the smell of a morgue), before developing into paper accords (the idea of ‘writing yourself into existence again’) and rounding out with the smell of sweaty skin. Together, they create an olfactory narrative of coming back to yourself after an experience that seemed like it would un-do you.
The scent Cold Storage, in Vickery’s words, ‘sounds minging, is beautiful’
While the storytelling aspect of the scent is interesting, what makes it most compelling is that, against all reason, it actually smells good, really good. The same is true for the other scents that will soon be added to the collection, including White Dust, a scent inspired by the remnants of a house after you move out, with notes of plastic, vapour and dust; and Infrastructure, an ode to the destruction of a city, with notes of concrete, rain-on-asphalt accord, charred cashmere, musk, and iris fraction. It even holds for Cold Storage, the most aggressive scent in the collection, which is inspired by the smell of preserving a dead body, with notes of cold metal, plastic, and ambergris, iodine, a salty skin accord – in Vickery’s words, ‘sounds minging, is beautiful’.
Beautiful, yes, and also, despite its sometimes macabre subject matter, ultimately hopeful in its message. ‘In the brand world, you're just expected to churn things out again and again,’ says Vickery. ‘So I was drawn to the idea that you could turn the ending into a celebration, turn destruction into beauty.’
That notion of turning destruction into beauty is not only present in the fragrances themselves, but the entire brand identity. 12 Things is not only an experiment in how to disrupt the fragrance industry, but how to disrupt the playbook for building any kind of brand in the Instagram-era.
Products come packed in deliberately photo-unfriendly grey, foam boxes or, for smaller sizes, plastic bags with printer paper that lists out the fragrance’s notes and makes it look more like a medical sample than a luxury perfume. To buy it, customers go to a website that looks like an early Y2K coding exercise gone awry, where they will find no products to purchase. Instead, they’ll find a phone number that they have to text in order to purchase – a way of combating the thoughtless click-to-instantly-own impulse that has become a feature of modern life. When the 12 Things physical retail space does come to London in October 2026, it will be ‘a store that destroys itself’, the details of which Vickery plans to unveil closer to the opening.
Altogether, it's an approach that doesn’t make things effortless for the customer, but then, that’s the point. ‘I think we've lost the world of retail to this sort of grey colourways and beautiful materials, but we're not really inviting the customer in,’ Vickery says. ‘I love this idea of discovery because not all things should be spoon-fed to your audience. You should breadcrumb it, and you should make them want more.
‘That will isolate 95 per cent of the population who just want stuff served to them on an ad, but that really small percentage who are interested in lore and world-building and stories and narratives need to be rewarded.’