Kintsugi: Resilience, healing, and rebirth in scent

Meet Kintsugi – the Czech perfume house named after the ancient Japanese art of repairing cracked pottery with gold, where imperfections become the source of beauty. This philosophy guides the perfume house, founded by Daniel Nikolov and Martin Švach in 2021. Kintsugi aims to create fragrances inspired by resilience, healing, and rebirth, where the challenging and the cherished are equally beautiful.

The house began its journey with scented candles. Through this, an interest in fragrance was sparked, leading to the creation of Kintsugi’s perfumes. Their motivation was to use scent as a way to tell stories: “I kind of tell my own stories,” says Martin Švach, “But we are not that different from each other. I guess that’s why it resonates.”

Martin, now based in Prague, describes his most vivid scent memory as the smell of his childhood home’s basement, just after the floods that sometimes affected his hometown. He is a self-taught indie perfumer, which he feels is reflected in the house’s DNA – “I mean it in a good way. Our materials are top-notch. Our creations are crafted with soul.”

Storytelling is central to the entire creative process. “When I want to tell a new story, I carry that story inside me—it shapes what I create. I can somehow see the backbone of the perfume. Then I add the rest and tweak it until I feel like it’s finished.” Knowing when a fragrance is finished is intuitive: “When it’s done, I just know it. There are no more ideas. Nothing to be added or removed. It’s the best feeling.”

In Kintsugi’s own words, each bottle carries a unique essence that reflects the duality of our nature: delicate yet unbreakable, imperfect yet complete – fragrances that are certain to resonate with those who find themselves intertwined with the story they tell.