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Scentbird CEO’s journey to building a multimillion dollar company

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A Russian immigrant with a nose for fragrance built a subscription box into a multimillion-dollar company by solving a problem every perfume buyer knows.

In February 2019, YouTuber Shelby Church published a profile titled “Scentbird CEO’s journey to building a multimillion dollar company,” turning her camera on Mariya Nurislamova, the co-founder and CEO of fragrance subscription service Scentbird. Nurislamova, who immigrated to the United States, launched the company in 2013-2014 with co-founders Sergei Gusev and Andrei Rebrov. The pitch was simple: stop letting people buy $150 bottles of perfume they wear twice and then abandon.

• Scentbird was built to solve the “perfume graveyard” problem, letting subscribers “date fragrances before marrying them” instead of committing to a full-size bottle upfront.
• After testing several iterations as a scent discovery platform, the founders pivoted to an 8ml, 30-day supply subscription model that became the company’s core product.
• Scentbird landed backing from Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Goodwater Capital after early investors doubted fragrance sampling could scale online.

The Perfume Graveyard Problem

Nurislamova’s founding insight wasn’t a new fragrance — it was a broken buying habit. Consumers routinely dropped serious money on department-store bottles, wore them a handful of times, and left them to sit on a dresser for years. Scentbird’s answer was to strip the purchase down to a monthly 8ml decant, sized for a 30-day supply, so customers could rotate through designer scents instead of gambling on a full bottle sight unseen.

Date fragrances before you marry them.

That line became the company’s operating philosophy as much as its marketing hook. It reframed fragrance shopping as a low-commitment trial rather than a one-time luxury purchase, which is exactly the kind of subscription logic that has reshaped other categories — the same dynamic that powered the direct-to-consumer boom covered in how a 22-year-old scaled a tea subscription brand to $600K a month.

Convincing Skeptical Investors

Getting there wasn’t smooth. Gusev, Rebrov, and Nurislamova faced real skepticism from early investors who didn’t believe a subscription built around sampling — rather than selling full-price product — could generate durable revenue at scale. Fragrance was seen as a category people bought in stores, tested on their wrists, and walked out with in hand, not something they’d trust to a monthly mailer.

The team kept iterating on the model until the numbers worked, and the eventual backing from Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Goodwater Capital validated the bet that recurring, low-cost trial could beat one-off, high-cost purchases in a category built on impulse and scent memory.

Creator Marketing as the Growth Engine

Scentbird’s expansion leaned heavily on YouTube and Instagram creators rather than traditional beauty advertising. Partnering with influencers to unbox and review scents gave the brand a distribution channel that legacy fragrance retailers hadn’t figured out how to use, driving trial among subscribers who trusted a creator’s recommendation over a department-store counter pitch. That same creator-driven approach to building an audience is the subject of pieces like how lifestyle brands turn social content into customer acquisition.

Beyond Perfume

By 2019, Scentbird had grown its subscriber base across the United States and Canada and pushed beyond fragrance into skincare and body care, broadening the box beyond the original 8ml perfume vial. Nurislamova also built out sister brand Deck of Scarlet, extending the same subscription-and-discovery formula into a different corner of beauty.

Deck of Scarlet is the tell here — Nurislamova isn’t just running one fragrance box, she’s replicating the “try it before you commit to it” model across the beauty categories that have the same graveyard problem perfume did in 2013.