How niche Turkish fragrance house Nishane conquered the perfume world

IN 2012, before the word niche had really entered the mainstream vernacular of perfume lovers, Mert Güzel and Murat Katran locked their booth at Esxence, the annual fragrance trade fair in Milan. Thus was the world debut of Nishane. 

It was a total gamble, explains Alexandre Hilwani, the brand’s Global Experience Director. “Two people coming from Turkey, which wasn’t known for luxury, which wasn’t known for perfumery. Arriving in the middle of Esxence in 2012… who just believed in their products. They were passionate about them, and that has always been the key point of Nishane. Passion.”

Fourteen years, 13 boutiques and over 50 fragrances later – it’s been a gamble that has more than paid off. 

“At the end of the day,” says Hilwani between sips of coffee, “Nishane is the story of two gentlemen, Mert and Murat, who at one point decided to drop everything and just say ‘okay, we love perfumery. Let’s make something out of it.’”

To set the scene – Hilwani and I are sitting at the front of Bill’s cafe in Surry Hills. The night before, he had regaled a room full of fragrance lovers with a theatric evening celebrating the launch of Nishane’s latest creation, Meant To Be Seen. A charming, violet-iris creation with a dry woody heart and intriguingly warm, musky dry down like sinking into a feather pillow. 

Now, we’re smelling our way through some of the brand’s classics. The oolong tea-inspired Wulong Cha, with its curious blend of bergamot, tea and nutmeg and fig. Not a tea scent in truth but more of a tisane. The wonderfully redolent Sultan Vetiver that brings out all the incredible licorice greenery of vetiver, with a warming peppery dry down. My personal favourites, Fan Your Flames and Nanshe: the former a rum and coconut concoction that has a raw earthiness to it normally found in natural perfumery. The latter, a cold-hearted rose, orris and carrot seed. 

Trying to understand what Nishane is, who they are, what they create, and neatly packaging all that up into a singular box is a waste of time. It is, as Hilwani describes it, a brand that is more of a nexus. “The brand was spouted Istanbul more than Turkish,” says Hilwani, “and I think Istanbul is as Turkish as New York represents all of America.” 

Perhaps it helps to first understand the name. The brand takes its name from the Ottoman word for mark or sign – nişane – which turns out to be a reasonably precise description of what they were trying to achieve. 

“The main philosophy of Nishane is always about passionate people, purely passionate people, because that’s how they create. Being struck by the beauty of Rumi’s poetry and creating Fan Your Flames, for example. Meant To Be Seen was literally inspired by a documentary on Marilyn Monroe. 

“There was this interview and she just said, ‘The body’s meant to be seen’. Immediately, Mert and Murat were like, ‘Oh my God, this is a great idea. Let’s do something around this’.”

It’s a mentality that defies trend. Or when a trend arrives – pistachio notes, let’s say, or whatever accord is currently cycling through the algorithm – it is noted and set aside. Tero, a salted caramel fragrance launched in 2022, found its audience years later when the market caught up to where Güzel and Katran already were. 

“In that case,” says Hilwani, “we’re quite avant-garde.”

That creation process is built around a single assigned perfumer rather than competitive briefs distributed across multiple noses. Nishane feeds its collaborators well – music, images, mood boards, books, quotes – and the back-and-forth can produce ten, fifteen, sometimes thirty versions before a final formula emerges. Occasionally the earliest iteration turns out to be the right one. “You explore an idea and try to exhaust it,” Hilwani says, “and at the end of the day, sometimes the first idea was the best.”

The concept, almost invariably, comes before the formula. Their best-selling pineapple masterpiece, Hacivat, was built around a character from Karagöz shadow theatre – a sophisticated, cosmopolitan young man – and the question of what he might wear. Or the charismatic Ege / ΑΙΓΑΙΟ inspired by the Aegean Sea, a briny accord that sparkles notes of basil and citrus.

Meant to Be Seen, as we mentioned, began with a single line from a Marilyn Monroe interview: the body’s meant to be seen. 

The word, at Nishane at least, often precedes the scent. 

“In the beginning was the word,” as Hilwani frames it, with some amusement.

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