Discover the story behind RHR Luxury, where niche high-perfumery redefines the art of luxury home scenting.
There’s a moment that defines the vision of many entrepreneurs, a time when passion meets purpose, and the world is changed. For Riccardo Halac-Ruggeroni, the founder of RHR Luxury, this pivotal moment came in the quiet yet intoxicating world of fragrance creation. In a market flooded with mass-produced scents, Riccardo envisioned a new path, one where each fragrance was carefully crafted to tell a story, evoke emotions, and immerse consumers in the most luxurious home scent experiences. It wasn’t just about candles; it was about offering something unique, an entirely personalized luxury.
RHR Luxury is rewriting the narrative of what home fragrances should be. With an unwavering commitment to quality, craftsmanship, and artistry, the brand brings a level of sophistication to home fragrance not seen before. Riccardo, a designer-turned-perfumer at the helm of his brand, is the creator of every single fragrance used in RHR Luxury’s exclusive line. This personal touch sets the brand apart in a crowded market of generic, mass-manufactured products.
The Origin of RHR Luxury: Crafting a Dream
This journey into the world of niche, luxury home fragrances wasn’t one driven by trends or commercial opportunity. Instead, it evolved from a lifelong love for fragrance, viewed through the aesthetic of a designer who had spent over 30 years in the world of interior design and fashion. Riccardo, RHR for short, or simply Ric, entered the rarified world of French haute parfumerie, or high perfumery, almost by accident more than a decade ago, when he realized that there was a niche for hyper-luxury in the home fragrance market.
While cultivating a hobby of collecting luxury scented candles, Ric realized that most brands followed a business model offering generic scents manufactured by third parties, so-called compounders, companies dedicated to functional fragrance. Riccardo realized that entire companies exist and thrive in a world of mass-produced fragrances for different functional uses: dish and laundry detergents, floor wipes, cleaning products, fabric softeners, shampoos, shower gels, soaps, and, yes, candles, diffusers, room sprays, and any other scented products for the home.
Ric realized there were too many similarities between everyday fragrances found in functional products and candles he’d purchase at retail. There are just too many candles with a smell reminiscent of household cleaning products. His research led him to study the product development of perfumes for personal use and where it overlaps with functional fragrancing, and it suddenly all made sense. Fragrance is difficult to create if you are not in the industry. Additionally, a vast market offers pre-made fragrance oils, making the entire process very easy.
The problem, as far as he saw it, was that particularly in the world of luxury candles, many candles from different brands offered a range of usual aromatic profiles, following what everybody else is doing: if vanilla is the trend of the year, everyone is offering a vanilla version, if next year it’s cherry, then let’s also ensure we have our cherry version. And it didn’t stop there; more complex aromatic profiles were also similar from brand to brand: incense, old books, clean linen, tomato leaf, amber, sandalwood, and oud accords were all starting to smell deceptively similar when strolling through a luxury department store hall.
That’s because, beyond a certain company size, if you are not a perfumer, you have to transition from purchasing fragrance oils on a website to mass-produced fragrance sold by the hundreds of kilograms. At that level, there’s only a handful of usual suspects supplying everybody. Fragrance duplication and similarities are inevitable.
Ric decided to learn perfumery in order to understand the similarities, so he could create his own blends. Perfumery involves chemistry, biochemistry, botany, product development, and extensive, periodic R&D, research and development. Although daunting to him at first, and completely devoid of instant satisfaction, today, through meticulously crafted scents, Ric transports his customers into a world of refined luxury, the rarified world of niche perfumery. A mystifying world where rare and exotic materials are combined with ultramodern technology to create incredibly sophisticated perfumes that paint an olfactive universe in a few seconds.
Riccardo interprets the craft of French, niche high-perfumery into luxurious perfumed candles that diffuse with a strength and consistency that’s unparalleled in the world of luxury home fragrance.
A Commitment to Excellence: From Concept to Creation
In doing so, Ric created the first collection of luxury home fragrances, blending fragrances with authorship using niche perfumery techniques.
With authorship comes responsibility. RHR Luxury’s commitment to the craft of perfumery extends to transparency and responsible sourcing. By personally selecting the materials that form his expansive library, Ric follows a personal desire to adhere to sustainable practices and fair trade, many times sourcing directly from small producers in different developing countries.
Like any French perfumery nose, Riccardo has become intimately close to the almost two thousand materials in his library, “And growing, periodically growing,” he says. He sources and tests all the materials in his lab, and formulates every fragrance for a specific end, to fit a specific aromatic profile and find a place in the scent families that organize his collections. “Each fragrance needs to be unique, original, and different from all others, and most importantly, different from everything else in the market in the same aromatic family,” he explains.
What does this mean in the mind of a perfumer? It means that each candle or diffuser must tell its own story, while remaining a luxurious product that will diffuse as expected, surpass the diffusion of a candle from the competition, and offer a point of view that is sufficiently novel to compel a customer to return for more. It means a careful selection of materials that result in a different version of rose, or Neroli, or leather. It means crafting a niche product to the standards of every other niche product in the collection, and worthy of being called niche. After more than a decade of research, testing, and refinement of formulations, Riccardo now understands why most other brand owners will shy away from perfumery: it is simply too complex, and it’s just easier to hand that in to someone else.
“However, the most important aspect of a scented candle is its fragrance,” he says, “If you are giving up the authorship of your fragrances, how much do you really care about your products? And why do you want to enter home fragrance, or perfumery, if you are not going to learn the pivotal aspect of what you want to sell?”
This attention to detail by way of asking the simplest questions extends beyond the fragrance creation itself. RHR Luxury’s packaging is also crafted with the same meticulous care, the candles, diffusers and room sprays are presented in crystal of exceptional clarity and refraction index, “I despise cheap glass, and I love purist design, crystal was an obvious choice” Riccardo says, “Spray-painted glass is really inexpensive and easy to dress in paper labels, meanwhile when you depart from a specific design aesthetic, suddenly the elements of design point to a different language,” he explains. “I worked in Interiors and Fashion Design for more than 30 years, and my family has been generationally involved in textiles and decorating. I learned the principles of Interior Design with my parents, and they had a penchant for Modernism,” he confides.
Purist design influences his styling, a clear Mid-Century Modern aesthetic in the use of crystal, gold-plated metal trims, and a range of accessories crafted of marbles, onyx, and semiprecious stones from different parts of the world complements the collections, offering authentic luxury in the details, materials, and design aesthetic. Diffuser bottles carved in crystal, and topped with semiprecious stone caps, customized onyx and marble trays, and crystal cloches with marble trays expand the candle collections for those who prefer flameless fragrance. Coated, water and oil-proof papers, debossed gold-foiled logos, and customized labeling protect his candles in a mysterious dark navy box that seems to say, “Go ahead, open me to see the treasure I hold.”
The Turning Point: Niche Perfumery Meets Luxury Home Fragrance
RHR Luxury didn’t just emerge from a desire to create candles; it was born from a vision to debunk a paradigm. While most niche fragrance houses focus on personal perfumes, Riccardo noticed an untapped market for high-end home scents. “The clearest niche was just there, glaring and looking back at me: no niche scented candles created by a perfumer,” he says. You can find niche perfume houses that have launched their candles, which are extensions of their perfumes poured into wax; in a sense, there’s authorship, yes, but the candle was not originally created as a functional, home fragrance product. It was created as a +1, a marketing incentive to entice customers to buy more.
Conversely, home fragrance brands, and even the luxury ones, rely on the practice of buying pre-made fragrance and simply adding it to wax, and bam! They are in business. The product is created with a functional end, but has no authorship. Some of these luxury home brands now even offer perfumes for personal use, but the creation of the fragrance remains shrouded.
“I couldn’t conceive a product sold under my name, in which I did not have something to do with its entire design and development process,” says Ric. “It’s a paradigm that the most important aspect of a fragranced product, its fragrance, is handed, entrusted, to people that perhaps you won’t ever meet, and these brands don’t offer visibility to how they procure their raw materials.”
“If you work with a compounder, established fragrance manufacturers, you interact with an account manager, and you seldom get to actually meet the perfumers who blended what you are smelling. And blends are not created exclusively for you; there are entire libraries of incense, old books, oud, palo santo, Tuscan leather, Russian leather, and anything under the trendy spectrum. What you think is exclusive is, in reality, also mass-produced. So all the account manager has to do is direct a team of assistants to pull vials, get some votive samples made, and voilà, samples are ready for you to review,” he goes on. “While I have nothing against this methodology, and entire businesses thrive on it, I preferred to take the longer route, so I could learn what actually goes into the creation of a fragrance: the dosification, potential allergens, and how you are going to make it function to scent an entire room within an hour of a candle burning.”
This approach means that RHR Luxury is not available everywhere. As a matter of fact, Riccardo carefully chooses where to sell, “I am entering the European market with caution, and they are boutiques and small businesses that cater to the niche segment. In the US, only a handful of boutiques carry my candles,” he concedes. After analyzing how department stores operate, he decided to hold off, “I mean, they don’t even have sales associates on the floors anymore. If you walk through Bergdorfs or Bloomingdale’s, you have to almost stalk someone to get product information or to just grab it from a high shelf,” he says. “My product is different from what they offer, all the brands they sell follow the paradigm using compounders, so candles and diffusers all smell too similar” he goes on, “And I cater to a clientele that wants something else besides the Dyptiques and Trudons of the world, they travel, they buy niche fragrance, so to them niche candles are sort of a natural progression.’ he says.
One unexpected outcome of this highly customized process is a clientele that took a step further, asking for custom candles and diffusers for their homes. “I didn’t think such a thing could exist, but it totally made sense when a client asked to scent their Park Avenue home. And then, their friends contacted me. And suddenly I am replenishing custom candles I created five years ago, or the client refers me to a business owner that wants a souvenir for a launching party, or a trade fair,” he explains.
It doesn’t get more bespoke than having a personal scented candle for each room of your home, or a room spray for your plane. While RHR Luxury offers a collection of fragrances on its website, bespoke work is possible by appointment, and of course, the lead times are different.
Quiet Luxury Matters
But there’s an interesting twist: Ric doesn’t advertise, he doesn’t believe in influencer collaborations, and is hesitant about hiring a marketing agency. His website, he says, “Does the job.” And this philosophy aligns with the phenomenon of quiet luxury. Being undiscovered remains the best asset that a brand can have. On his social media, Ric prefers to share about perfumery materials, his process, and takes pride in the customization of purchase orders. “I don’t understand how showing a table with 300 candles being poured would be enticing to a customer; it just means it’s a cookie-cutting process,” he points out.
“If you are going after a deep penetration in the market, you are challenging the very notion of luxury and exclusivity. From the inception of my brand, I’ve been studying other brands and their tactics, and I arrived at the conclusion that the growth has to be organic. You see specialty stores and luxury department stores with shelves full of product accumulating dust. Their candle testers have a layer of lint—and sometimes hairs! – and overexposure renders them odorless. To me, that’s talking down to the consumer, saying here, this is the best we could do, for $140,” he observes. “My clients love that I pour as required; they know they will receive a freshly poured candle or diffuser. I don’t see the point in keeping a large stock that I’d later have to worry about selling. We pour what we sell, which is another step towards sustainability that the larger home fragrance companies cannot commit to.”
As a result, RHR Luxury is possibly the next best thing in the hyper-luxury home fragrance market, appealing to those who are familiar with the well-known brands but want to try something new and more exclusive.
Experience RHR Luxury: A World of Exclusive Scents Awaits
Ready to elevate your home fragrance experience? RHR Luxury’s exclusive collection of bespoke scents is available now. Discover how the artistry of a true perfumer can transform your space and mood with fragrances that are as unique as you are. Visit RHR Luxury at https://rhr.luxury and explore a world of refined authenticity and modern design. For the latest updates, follow them on Instagram at @rhrluxury and stay connected with their journey.
RHR Luxury is not just about fragrance; it’s about creating a lasting impression. Indulge in the ultimate scent experience today.
