Melanie Bender is tired of talking about people’s faces.
It’s an honest, if bold, sentiment coming from a beauty executive, but especially Bender, who has been developing products for the face since 2013: She helped build masstige skincare label Versed, becoming its founding president; makeup line Merit; and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, where she was the brand’s first chief executive.
But when she began thinking of something for herself, her attention drifted below the neck.
“After doing two skincare brands and one makeup brand, I was just tired of talking about how people look,” Bender recently told The Business of Beauty. “I’ve always been such a feeling and emotion junkie — it’s why I’m in beauty, because beauty is this space of emotion and hope and being able to define not just how we see ourselves, but how the world sees us.”
So Bender set out to redefine not only herself, but a category, starting with a product that shoppers couldn’t see.
Enter Lore, an emotive, visually-driven fragrance line that is Bender’s first project as a founder with a capital F (she is also the label’s CEO). It debuts on Tuesday, Sept. 2 with four scents — Sublimity, inspired by her youth in Hawaii; Somewhere but nowhere, a nod to Americana and individualism; Disfruta, the collection’s sexiest scent, and Lovely and a little bit twisted, which smells exactly how it sounds — on a direct-to-consumer website, and will launch in Sephora doors on Sept. 15. Taking its cues from world-building fashion labels like Jacquemus, Miu Miu, Loewe and Telfar, the scents are housed in design-forward 50mL flacons, which reference the work of French glassblower Andre Thuret and retail for only $88.
Lore, which gets its name from the term’s standard definition (handing traditions or knowledge down by individuals) and its slangier connotation (meaning backstory), has a robust roster: Joe Cloyes and Greg Gonzalez, founders of skincare line Youth To The People, join as co-founders, and Mazdack Rassi of Milk Makeup is founding partner. When Bender shared the news of the brand on her social media channels, she posted a cropped photo of the 1992 US men’s Olympic basketball team, also known as the “Dream Team” who took home the gold that year. (It featured: Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley; Cloyes joked the picture was missing Patrick Ewing.)
They’re not the brand’s only boldfaced names: Go-to nose Jérôme Epinette developed the scents and Imaginary Ventures came on board pre-launch (Lore did not share their funding details), as did Sephora, where the collection will launch online and in 140 stores simultaneously on Sept. 15.
Fragrance remains beauty’s most optimistic and growing category — a new guard of entrants like Kayali and Phlur are shifting price points, reenergising formats and introducing layering to Western customers, but dynamics are changing. According to data from Euromonitor, the growth of the fragrance category declined from 15 percent in 2021 to 11 percent in 2024, and bigger conglomerates like L’Oréal are worried about economic uncertainty and tariffs aggravating the slowdown.
But Bender is not deterred.
“My goal is always to build something that will be successful regardless of market dynamics. Markets go up, markets go down. Who your competitive set is today will be very different from who your competitive set is in five or eight years from now,” she said. “I have always been drawn to areas that are shifting, because that’s where something interesting is going on.”
Drafting a Dream Team
Bender has never actually considered herself a founder. Part of a founding team, sure. But it wasn’t until after she had decamped from Rhode in 2023 that she began to entertain the notion of starting her own venture.
“There’s so much risk in opening yourself up and saying, like, ‘This is what I want it to be,’” said Bender. “In my career, I loved being able to do that behind someone else’s vision, partnering with people that I found very creatively inspiring and ambitious, like Hailey [Bieber] or Katherine [Power of Merit and Versed] … but this more personal.”
Cloyes and Gonzales, whom Bender met in a pandemic-era beauty group on social media platform Clubhouse, told her she had it in her.
Creating a followup to a brand like Rhode or Youth To The People could have been an exercise in anxiety, but Gonzalez described it as a “vibe.” (Sources close to YTTP said the founders sold the brand to L’Oréal in 2021 for an estimated $350 to $450 million plus an earn-out; Cloyes and Gonzalez would not share details.) The duo, who happen to be cousins, moved into a founder and advisory role at Youth To The People shortly before Bender left Rhode.
“When we were coming out of Youth To The People, you start to wonder what’s going to be next, and what should you be working on, and where is that coming from,” said Gonzalez. “Is it something to prove? Is it some sort of ego?”
Rassi, who first created Milk Studios nearly 30 years ago before its followup makeup line, felt differently. (Milk Makeup sold to Waldencast in 2021 in a three-way transaction that included the skincare brand Obagi for $1.2 billion.)
“We didn’t have that much to prove this time around,” he said. “There was a confidence, an ease, this one came from the heart.”
Redefining Luxury Fragrance
None of the brand’s key players had worked in fragrance before, and all were taken with the rawness and intricacies of creating a scent. References of Hawaiian waters and cliffs, Marlon Brando in Western wear and Surrealist art filled mood boards and text chains. These references not only indicate aspects of the founders and fragrances’ backstories — their respective lores — but each induces a strong feeling, which Gonzalez said was the starting point of the brand.
Lore began teasing the launch in August via an Instagram broadcast channel dubbed “Everything possible,” where Bender and over 1,100 followers posed questions and prompts to one another (such as “What’s your favourite form of potato?”). Asked to describe Lore as a movie, she settled on “the universe of Hayao Miyazai’s ‘Spirited Away’” blended with “the “wardrobe of ‘Spice World.’” Emma Vernon, known as Perfumerism on social media, is a moderator of the chat: Fragrance influencers will be a key part of the brand strategy, Bender said. Conor Begley, the chief strategy officer of social listening firm CreatorIQ and another friend from the Clubhouse days, is an advisor.
After exploring hundreds of scents and whittling down its first collection to four, Cloyes said there was an addressable market that was still lacking for more.
“I don’t think luxury fragrance has been quite tapped into yet from a non-designer couture brand,” Cloyes added, wondering aloud what the next Byredo might look like. While the Puig-owned niche fragrance label’s price point is significantly higher than Lore’s ($235 for its eau de parfums and even higher for its eau de absolutes), cost was “irrelevant” for Lore, said Cloyes.
Despite each scent’s affordability, Rassi said the brand’s visual identity conveys its luxury positioning: “A lot of people in the beauty category have probably never been exposed to the fashion industry or to a high level sort of design and style, like they either come from artistry or are hardcore beauty creators,” resulting in brands with “no real differentiation.”
While it may be true that a level of blandness has overtaken the beauty aisle in packaging, formulation and even scent — the moment’s most popular fragrance is vanilla, after all — Lore isn’t attempting to be an esoteric project. Its founders hope to build a sizeable business on their core perfume offering and Bender indicated plans to reach into other formats, like merchandise, in the coming months.
Her metric for success isn’t a sales goal, but staying power.
“We all develop things that are intended to be big and have impact and be felt and be shared and become movements, that’s what we’ve all sought to do with our other brands,” said Bender. “That being said, I think we look at impact as being more important than racing to a certain number.”
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