Satoshi Kuwata’s Perfume Dreams Come True

Beauty happened much quicker than Satoshi Kuwata expected.

First, Kuwata had a meeting with Adrian Joffe, the president of Dover Street Market and chief executive of Comme des Garçons, in London, to present the concept for his first fragrance collection. It was not their first encounter. Setchu, the Milan-based fashion label Kuwata founded in 2020, is stocked at nearly every Dover Street Market worldwide. But Joffe is known as a formidable perfume critic — he also heads up Comme des Garçons Parfums — and has lately set his sights on building the retailer’s beauty selection in step with its avant-garde fashion proposition.

Besides, Kuwata barely had a bottle. He was armed with little more than a handful of lab samples, a concept based on momentary pleasures and a 3D printed mock-up for a cubic flacon.

“Everyone told me it would be difficult to convince Adrian,” Kuwata told The Business of Beauty exclusively.

Insiders said he’d be lucky if he sold a single scent; and forget about getting into the Tokyo Ginza flagship store, where the selection is contingent on the approval of Comme des Garçons founder (and Joffe’s wife) Rei Kawakubo. Instead, Joffe bought the line on sight, without any packaging, imagery or campaigns attached. After the label officially debuts in September at Florence’s Pitti Fragranze, Setchu’s first five fragrances, with names like Monday 9 am Genmaicha and Friday 2 am Tatami, will launch in five of seven Dover Street Market locations, including Ginza. Some details are still in development: On Joffe’s recommendation, each fragrance will be priced at €200 ($230); in lieu of bottle design renderings, the brand offered an abstract diagram of a square cleaved into two triangular parts.

Setchu’s name comes from a Japanese term of compromise — as Kuwata said, “if you want to meet at 7 and I want to meet at 9, we’ll setchu at 8” — that also implies a blending of Japanese and Western styles, as in the current global thirst for matcha. A more elevated example of setchu might be the brand’s origami jacket, a unisex blazer with a sharp, slouchy geometry that can be folded into a perfect square; it costs around $2,000 and is the line’s best-seller. Craftsmanship is a focus for Kuwata, who studied at Central Saint Martins and apprenticed on London’s Savile Row. It also earned him the prestigious LVMH Prize in 2023.

The perfume compositions follow suit, as in Friday 2 am Tatami, with notes inspired by bodies intertwined on a tatami mat. Thursday 1 pm Ayu is inspired by camping — blending the sweet flora in the South of France with a sweetfish found in rivers throughout Japan. Each representing a specific moment in time, they’re also intended to be olfactory expressions of Setchu’s overarching promise of two disparate but harmonious elements briefly becoming one.

Kuwata has long harbored dreams of working on a fragrance, but the opportunity materialised only recently, after the designer was invited to stage Setchu’s very first fashion show at Pitti Uomo earlier this year. Francesca Tacconi, special projects director of parent company Pitti Immagine, invited Kuwata to be a special guest at this year’s Pitti Fragranze, themed around “Composition.” The designer’s fusion of opposites “into a singular, unified experience,” Tacconi said, helped inspire the event’s programming, which will include presentations around translating fashion design to fine fragrance.

Tacconi also introduced him to a number of fragrance houses, including the French firm Mane, who was enthusiastic enough about Setchu’s East-West perfume concept that they leased a small team to Kuwata to develop it free of charge; he also has taken on other jobs, such as a redesign of the cabin crew uniforms for Japanese airline All Nippon Airways, to help offset manufacturing costs.

If the key to a successful fragrance enterprise is a good team, then Kuwata has assembled a deep bench of all-stars, though Dover Street Market may be his MVP.

“They’re really niche. And I am niche too,” he said.

At the same time, Kuwata is keen to build a business, and imagines a fragrance business can help him do so; he reported his five year old line is already profitable. Its success relies on a perfect alchemy of those two dueling factors: What’s cool and what’s commercial.

Good Compromise

In 2025, a niche fragrance play is not a bad business idea. The category continues to boom, driven by esoteric formulations and desire for novelty. In early June, Circana’s fragrance category analyst Jacquelyn Wenskus wrote that prestige perfume sales have only accelerated as the year has progressed, and sales of new scents increased by 31 percent over the Mother’s Day holiday period.

But sustaining niche appeal, in fashion and especially fragrance, is a case study in progress. Setchu has the benefit of scarcity: Its first collection will be a micro batch, with no more than 200 bottles earmarked for five Dover Street Market locations and 300 for Setchu to sell to retailers after DSM’s exclusivity expires. His overhead was reduced thanks to the support of Pitti Fragranze and Mane, though Kuwata plans to scale things slowly but surely, launching one or two scents per year with an aim to amortise “in three to five years.”

Fashion designers making fragrances is a century-old tradition, their products seen as a relatively easy way to commercialise; Chanel’s $18 billion dollar enterprise is supported in no small part by its beauty business, which despite the company’s greater slump grew last year on the strength of skincare sales and launches like its new Chanel Chance perfume. Challenging macroeconomic conditions have fashion houses making the most of the opportunity: Bottega Veneta, Jil Sander and Loewe are among the many storied houses reintroducing perfumes in the past year. Balenciaga and Cartier are also hard at work on their own iterations.

Other brands are figuring out how to make the most of the category, including Comme des Garçons, which licensed nearly half of its perfume collection to Spanish firm Puig in an agreement that expired at the end of 2023. The Japanese fashion group has yet to launch a new fragrance since, despite pent-up demand.

Kuwata’s hope is that Setchu’s fragrances will help establish it as a lifestyle brand.

“My dream is to have my own space somewhere, maybe in Milan, maybe in Japan,” he said. “People categorize Setchu to be quiet luxury, which I don’t agree with at all. I want to create a kind of luxury you can experience.”

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Editor’s Note: This article was amended on July 10 2025 to make a correction: Pitti Fragranze will take place in Florence, not Milan.