How Parfumado scaled their perfume discovery platform with Firmhouse

By breaking through the limitations of customization and scalability, Parfumado has successfully delivered personalized customer experiences. Since partnering with Firmhouse, they have achieved impressive growth, with year-over-year increases ranging from 50 to 75%.

The vision

The pursuit to personalize the perfume discovery experience

Back in 2017, brother-sister duo Martijn and Floor van Rooy had a vision: they wanted to create a way for people to easily discover new scents online. They believed fragrances weren’t just products. The power of scents can actually evoke emotions and bring memories to life. The problem was, at the time, few options existed to personalize the experience of wearing different scents for different occasions and seasons. That’s when they launched Parfumado.

Lowering the barrier to access the multi-billion dollar perfume market

The multi-billion dollar perfume market grows and diversifies each year. Parfumado’s sample service was created to lower the barrier to accessing these products while making the perfume shopping experience enjoyable, simple, and personalized. But despite this vision, Parfumado ran into some challenges with their previous technology setup.

The challenge

Needing a customizable and scalable solution for recurring orders

At first, Parfumado's platform was built using a custom back end on top of Shopify to support their unique subscription model. But when Parfumado ran into issues with customization and scalability, they knew they needed to look for alternatives.

“We didn't want to solve all the subscription logic challenges ourselves, even though we had specific needs,” explains Jesse Tan, Technical Director at Parfumado. “We didn’t want to be burdened with all the nitty-gritty details of doing recurring orders.”

The solution

Partnering with Firmhouse to leverage our API-first, flexible technology foundation

That’s where Firmhouse came in. Parfumado was particularly interested in the API-first integration of our recurring commerce platform. The great thing was, with flexible architecture, Parfumado could connect their newly built front and back end, allowing full control over the customer experience.

“Firmhouse handles many other aspects for us that we do not want to fully customize,” shares Jesse. “They provide an easy-to-use portal for our internal use with customer orders and payment history and abstracts away the details of the payment provider.”
Crafting a customer journey to explore and discover new scents each month

Like many merchants offering subscriptions, Parfumado fulfills orders on a recurring basis. However, each bottle of perfume contains a different fragrance, which, as Jesse shares, transforms the service into a discovery platform. 

In other words, customers aren’t just receiving products; they’re embarking on a journey to explore and discover new scents each month.

“We can maintain our own brand identity and be a little bit headstrong or quirky about it,” says Jesse. “We want it like this, it needs to be like that, and Firmhouse gives us more freedom to be creative than other platforms.”
Creating a personalized perfume discovery experience for every subscriber

Here’s how it works: When customers sign up for a Parfumado subscription, powered by Firmhouse, they receive a new 8ml perfume each month. That’s enough for 30 days or four sprays per day.

Subscribers can:

  • Choose from more than 550 perfumes.
  • Build a personalized perfume calendar. 
  • Pause or cancel their subscription at any time. 

What’s more, each bottle of perfume is purchased directly from brands.

Parfumado loves to introduce people to niche and exclusive fragrances. These products are often more expensive to source. 

“Today, you're not the same person you were last week and you won’t be the same next week,” says Jesse. “When you want something new to match how you feel in a specific moment, you don't want 20 bottles that are €200 each.” 

The good news is, with Firmhouse, it was easy to configure adding a surcharge for premium perfumes to make it economically feasible.

Securing guaranteed income through prepaid subscriptions and discounts

On top of surcharges, Firmhouse enables Parfumado to add a discount for prepaid subscriptions. Customers can enjoy savings when they sign up for a six or 12-month subscription, or when they upgrade from a monthly plan. 

“For us, it's the benefit that we have a guaranteed income,” says Jesse. “We have cash in hand now and a guaranteed customer for several months.” 

This flexibility makes it easier for people to shift seamlessly between different options instead of canceling their subscriptions altogether.

Growing recurring revenue across borders with local payment methods

With us, Parfumado has been able to let their customers pay with the local payment methods they know and love. Last year, nearly all of their payments—we’re talking over 90%—came through preferred options like iDEAL and Bancontact. These automatically convert into direct debit for future payments, which make up 78% of everything that Parfumado processes. The rest? Just a small slice came from other options like PayPal and credit cards.

Experiencing swift support during unexpected growth spurts

Parfumado had a partnership with Jade Anna van Vliet, a Dutch influencer with a younger audience.

“If you signed up and chose the collaboration perfume, you would get a travel case in a specific color,” shares Jesse. “We only had a limited amount and had never had the issue where our infrastructure or website couldn't cope with the inflow of users.” 

They didn’t anticipate the impact this would have as people flocked to the website and log-in portal. Thankfully, Firmhouse quickly resolved the capacity issue and got everything working again. 

When issues arise, our teams solve them together rapidly through Slack. This direct line of communication means problems that could affect the customer experience are taken care of within minutes, not days.

Scaling growth without sacrificing experience, brand, or technology
“We prefer vendors with a similar creative, original, and quality-driven mindset as us, not just the cheapest ones or the incumbents,” shares Jesse. “As a partner, Firmhouse helps us solve many of our business problems by providing an out-of-the-box solution.”

By breaking through the limitations of customization and scalability, Parfumado has successfully delivered personalized customer experiences. Since partnering with Firmhouse, they have achieved impressive growth, with year-over-year increases ranging from 50 to 75%.

“Firmhouse gives us the freedom to be ourselves and the brand we want to be,” says Jesse. “That’s a reflection of how we approach our customers. We want them to feel good about themselves, find something that really speaks to them, and makes them feel confident about their own person.”

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Tech infrastructure

  • Firmhouse for subscriptions
  • Sanity for content management
  • Headless Storefront
  • Mollie for payments
  • Yotpo for reviews
  • Customer.io for CRM

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