Wales Perfumery

Wales Perfumery is an independent niche fragrance house based just outside Monmouth, in the Wye Valley in south-east Wales. It was founded by Louise Smith, a perfumer who worked in the pharmaceutical industry before training in Paris. She opened a studio in a walled garden in Monmouthshire in 2019 and began running perfume-making workshops there, and the business later grew into a house with its own collections [2]. The company calls itself "Wales' first independent fine fragrance house" [1], and a 2024 business profile introduced it as the only perfume house in Wales [11].

All of its fragrances are formulated and made by Smith in the company's own lab in Wales. The range consists of three collections, Natur, The Celts and the Perfume Layering Library, along with hair and body mists, discovery and travel sets, a home fragrance line and bespoke perfume-making workshops. The house describes itself as independent and names no owning company. It remains active.

Smith grew up in Pembrokeshire, in west Wales. In interviews she has traced her interest in scent to childhood afternoons at her grandmother's mid-century dressing table, smelling the stoppers of the perfume bottles kept there. Chemistry was her favourite subject at school, and a chemistry set she received at the age of ten is part of the story the company tells about her.

Her route into perfumery was indirect. After school she worked in a dental practice, then as a dental consultant at Boots in Cardiff, and later in sales for the oral-care brand Sonicare. Alongside that job she worked Sundays on a Lancôme counter at Boots, and she has said the launch of the Lancôme fragrance Miracle while she was there first made her consider perfumery as a career. She went on to work for GlaxoSmithKline, first running clinical trials at dental and medical schools and then in research and development. The company's own account describes this period as years of scientific training that she later brought to the perfumer's bench.

The turning point, by her account, was a chance article about perfumery as a discipline, which led her to a perfume school in Paris. The two published interviews with Smith place that moment differently. A 2023 interview with the Visit Monmouthshire tourism board has her reading the article "one day in 2012" and then training in Paris, and later also in Italy and London [12]. A 2024 GlobalWelsh profile quotes her as finding the advertisement for the Paris school "about 10 years ago", which would point to around 2014 [11]. The brand's own website states only that she trained in Paris, without giving a year.

She returned to Wales and set the business up first as a side project. In 2019 she opened her studio in what the company describes as a 500-year-old secret walled garden near Monmouth, and began welcoming people in for workshops. The garden, known as The Secret Walled Garden, also offers glamping. In the GlobalWelsh interview, Smith described the formal launch as having happened five years earlier, which matches the 2019 date.

For its first years, Wales Perfumery was mainly a place of teaching. Visitors could book group sessions or one-to-one appointments to compose a fragrance of their own in the lab. The house's own fragrance collections came later.

Natur, launched in 2022, was the first collection. It was built around the Welsh landscape, and Smith has said she considered four features of it when creating the range: the coastline, the green countryside, the forests and the dark night skies.

The Celts followed, a collection of five fragrances, each inspired by a Celtic people. The company dates the launch to 2025 [2]. A news item in County Wedding Magazine, published on 16 February 2026, reported that Wales Perfumery "has announced the launch of The Celts" [13]. The brand's own pages are consistent on 2025, and the magazine item may be later coverage of the same launch.

The third collection, the Perfume Layering Library, launched in 2026. Its name came out of a course project in March 2025, when a group of MSc students from Cardiff Business School worked with Smith and gave the collection its identity [9]. One member of that group, Jo Shaddick, went on to coordinate marketing for the company. The official launch evening was held on 18 June 2026 at Fablas Ice Cream, an ice cream parlour on the beach at Barry Island, where the menu was designed to echo the three new scents. According to the company, the concept had been developing in the Monmouthshire studio for about two years before the launch.

Wales Perfumery presents itself as a story-led house. "Everything I make begins with a story I want to tell," Smith writes on the company website, and the collections draw on the Welsh landscape, Celtic history and the natural world. The house's About page sums up its identity as "built on science, craft and story".

The company stresses its independence. It says the house is not built on trends, and that as an independent perfumer Smith makes every decision herself, from the choice of materials to the way a scent is described, with no committees, trend reports or marketing briefs. She has described her reason for starting the business as a wish to share "the real world of fragrance": the materials, the process and the history behind what ends up in the bottle. Teaching remains part of that aim, and workshops are still offered for individuals, groups and businesses.

Welsh identity runs through the brand. Smith has said it was important to her that the fragrances carry bilingual names, so that the Welsh language appears across the range. The company describes its fragrances as unisex and gender neutral.

According to its FAQ, the house's fragrance materials are vegan-friendly, contain no animal-derived ingredients and have not been tested on animals, either by the company or its suppliers [3]. These are the company's own statements; no third-party cruelty-free or vegan certification is documented. The same FAQ says all fragrances are made by the company itself, in Wales.

Smith says she is a member of the British Society of Perfumers and the International Fragrance Association, and a champion for Smell Taste UK, an organisation concerned with smell and taste. In 2023 she also described herself as an ambassador for the charity Fifth Sense. In the same interview she said she creates fragrances for other well-known brands and for a variety of scent projects, though no clients were named [12].

Natur. The first collection follows the Welsh landscape. Coast (Arfordir in Welsh) came first; Smith has said that, as someone from Pembrokeshire, the coast felt like the right place to start, and she described it in terms of rock pools, salt air and the beach at Freshwater West on a breezy day. Country (Gwlad) is an ode to the green landscape around her Monmouthshire studio, and also a tribute to her grandmother, whose favourite perfume was called Gardenia. Forest (Coedwig) is described as deep and earthy, evoking moss-covered oaks, wild mushrooms and the forest floor in autumn. Star (Seren), the last fragrance in the collection, takes its theme from the night skies, with notes of yuzu, jasmine and sandalwood. Each Natur scent is also sold as a layering set that pairs an eau de parfum with a matching hair and body mist.

The Celts. This collection consists of four eaux de parfum and one parfum, Celt, which the company calls the most concentrated formulation it produces. The five scents are inspired by the Celtic peoples of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany. County Wedding Magazine described the range as the result of three years of historical research into how those peoples lived, what they traded, what they ate and what they celebrated, and said each scent uses accords made specifically for the collection. Smith described the work as "olfactory archaeology", aimed at capturing smells such as Breton mead at celebrations and the icy forests of early Ireland [13]. On its own website, the company calls The Celts the most ambitious collection it has made so far.

The Perfume Layering Library. The third collection takes a different direction from the landscape and history themes. Its first three perfumes draw on ice cream, French macarons and confectionery: Vanilla, Tonka, Mallow; Rose, Peony, Pink Pepper; and Fig, Coconut, Cedar. Each can be worn alone or layered with the others, and the company says the three scents can already be combined in up to seven ways, with more scents planned. The vanilla has a longer history than the collection itself. Smith had used it as the house base in her workshops for about seven years, and students kept asking whether they could buy it.

Beyond perfume, the house sells hair and body mists, discovery sets, travel sizes and a home fragrance range that includes candles, hand washes and lotions. Bespoke perfume-making, either in workshops or in private one-to-one sessions at the studio, remains a core part of the business.

The company sells through its own online shop, at fairs and events, at the studio, and through what it describes as "a small number of carefully selected stockists" [7]. Its FAQ refers customers in Europe to the German retailer Duftkunsthandlung.

At the Royal Welsh Winter Fair in 2025, Wales Perfumery was named Reserve Best Christmas Gift Stand, the runner-up place in that category [8].

The house has been profiled by the Visit Monmouthshire tourism board (2023) and by the Welsh business network GlobalWelsh (2024), and its Celts launch was covered by County Wedding Magazine (2026). According to the company, the magazine Cardiff Life attended the Layering Library launch and described it as "an inspiring evening celebrating fragrance, creativity and Welsh craftsmanship", while the fragrance writer Samantha Scriven of the blog I Scent You A Day reviewed the collection. In the 2023 interview, Smith said the house had previously been featured in The Guardian, National Geographic Travel, WalesOnline and Monmouthshire Living, as well as on several perfume review sites.

Wales Perfumery is active. In 2026 it launched the Perfume Layering Library, and its events listings show fairs and a London pop-up planned from October to December 2026. The most recent visible activity is a blog post on choosing perfume as a gift, published on 8 October 2026 [10]. The business is still run by its founder from the studio near Monmouth, and its online shop delivers within the United Kingdom.