Sebastian Dobrincu built Scento around trying the real perfume first
Sebastian Dobrincu is Founder & CEO of Scento, a Paris-based online perfume retailer that sells hand-poured decants from original bottles. The conversation explores how lowering the cost of trying a fragrance, treating discovery as the product and publishing reliable perfume data shape Scento’s approach to customers.
Make the first purchase inexpensive enough that customers can take a chance without much risk. For Scento, that means selling decants of genuine fragrances and building around discovery, not treating a sample as merely a step toward a full bottle.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
Scento started in 2024 from a simple observation: luxury perfume is hard to get into. A full bottle of a niche fragrance often costs €200 or more, and you can’t smell it through a screen, so most people either play it safe or never try. We wanted a better way to discover the world’s best fragrances. What makes us different is what’s in the vial. Every Scento decant is hand-poured from an original, full-sized bottle of the real perfume. We never sell clones, dupes or "inspired-by" versions. You can choose from more than 1,000 designer and niche fragrances in 2 ml, 5 ml or 8 ml, and most also come in 30 ml. So you can wear the actual perfume for a few days or a few weeks before deciding whether it deserves a full bottle.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
The offer itself does most of the persuading. When trying a niche perfume costs under €20 instead of a few hundred, the first order stops being a gamble. A 2 ml vial of any of our ten most-ordered perfumes costs less than that. Today we put our effort into giving people reasons to trust us before they buy. We publish what our customers actually order, like our 2026 ranking of the most-ordered perfumes on Scento, built only from real orders. We also put accurate perfume information where people now look for it: our free Scento Perfume API gives AI assistants and developers the full note pyramids of more than 1,600 perfumes. And on 29 October we launched the Scento app on iPhone and Android.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision: original perfume only. Every decant is poured from a genuine full-sized bottle, and we never sell copies. It’s the harder path, because the real perfume costs more than an imitation, but it’s the only reason a decant is worth anything. You’re testing the perfume you would actually buy. The lesson came from our own orders. It would have been a mistake to treat a decant as a trial step on the way to the "real" purchase. In 2026 nearly four in five of our orders held two or more different perfumes. People don’t come to test one perfume. They come to explore, so discovery itself is the product, and we build the shop around it.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
More and more people ask an AI assistant what a perfume smells like before they buy, and those answers often add notes the perfume doesn’t have. In October we asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for the notes of 100 perfumes and compared every answer with the official list. Gemini added at least one note that isn’t on the official list in 49% of its answers, ChatGPT in 24% and Perplexity in 25%. So we adapted by giving the engines better data. We launched the Scento Perfume API, a free, read-only connector with full note pyramids for more than 1,600 designer and niche perfumes, plus explanations of more than 400 raw materials. It needs no account or key, and every answer links back to the matching page on scento.com.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: make the first purchase cheap to be wrong about. Find the most expensive mistake your customer is afraid of making, and sell them a small, cheap way to avoid it. In perfume, that’s a decant of the real fragrance. Ignore: hype. You don’t need celebrity marketing or fancy bottles to win in fragrance. Customers care whether the scent in the vial is the real one and whether it suits them. Put your money into the product and into honest information, and publish what your customers actually do rather than what you wish they did.
Thank you to Sebastian Dobrincu and the team at Scento for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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