Building and selling cologne

I started Pheroe as a side experiment at 26 and spent the next several years turning it into a real ecommerce business. I developed the product, built the brand and Shopify experience, managed acquisition and retention, handled the operational realities behind the scenes, and grew the company to approximately $300K in revenue before completing an asset sale at 30.

The storefront converted at approximately 5%, with a $60 average order value and customer acquisition costs generally between $25 and $40. The hardest part wasn’t finding demand. It was managing cash flow and keeping enough inventory available to meet it. Pheroe taught me to see product design as part of a much larger commercial system, where the interface, acquisition model, supply chain, and customer experience all affect one another.

I couldn’t find a fragrance brand using natural ingredients that I actually wanted to wear. Having worked at Murchison-Hume, where fragrance formulation was core to the product, I had the exposure and the contacts to test a hypothesis: a small, natural cologne line could work if the product was good, the unit economics were honest, and the brand felt like something I would buy.

I wasn’t trying to start a company at first. I was trying to make something I would use. Cologne was lightweight to ship, margins were healthier than the bulky liquids I’d worked with before, and the numbers could support paid acquisition without pretending the product was a venture-scale category.

I developed the formulas myself, sourced raw materials, and handled early testing. Formulation and production stayed domestic. Packaging came through contacts in China. Positioning was simple: a daily-wear fragrance with a clear scent story, not a luxury house impression.

Pricing had to clear product cost, shipping, and a customer. The customer experience was the bottle, the unboxing, the site, and whether the scent was good enough to buy again. I designed the brand, the packaging, and the storefront as one system.

I ran the operation end to end: Shopify storefront and checkout, fulfillment (first from my apartment, later a fulfillment center), email and SMS, paid social, and customer support. At peak I managed up to seven contractors. The stack was Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Figma.

There was no separate growth team or ops team. If checkout leaked, ads got more expensive. If a shipment slipped, the next campaign had nothing to sell.

The numbers only mattered together. A 5% conversion rate on a $60 average order meant each visitor was worth something real. A $25 to $40 CPA left room to acquire a customer and still keep a first-order margin, especially once email, SMS, and repeat purchase started doing some of the work.

• Approximately 5% conversion
• Approximately $60 AOV
• $25-$40 CPA
• Meta advertising
• Klaviyo and SMS
• Repeat sellouts

The biggest growth constraint wasn’t conversion or customer acquisition. It was cash flow and the ability to keep inventory available.

Demand showed up in bursts. Product sold through faster than I could restock. Paid social only worked if there was stock behind it. When inventory ran out, the ads, the email flows, and the storefront were spending attention I couldn’t fulfill. Growth was limited by working capital and lead times, not by whether people wanted the product.

I exited in 2024 through an asset sale, not the sale of a large operating company. The buyout covered remaining inventory, the Shopify storefront, the email list, the domains, and related digital assets. The buyer was an early investor in Manscaped. The brand later wound down, which I was at peace with.

It was a clean transfer of the things that had value: product, channel, and list. It was not a claim that Pheroe had become a scaled consumer company.

Design decisions are business decisions. A page, a price, a campaign, and a restock date all change what the business can do next.

Growth is constrained by the entire operating system, not the interface. Customer experience extends past the site, into the package, the scent, the shipment, and whether the product is even in stock. Revenue, margins, inventory, and fulfillment decide what is worth building.