‍ ‍What you own and what we keep

What does my brand own?

Everything that makes your brand recognizable: the name, trademark, bottle and packaging design, label, marketing, and customer relationships. You also hold exclusivity on the fragrance itself.

Your Brand

Brand name and trademark

Bottle, packaging, and label design

Exclusive right to the scent

Marketing, story, and customers

Atelier Madrona

The fragrance formula

Raw material specifications and supplier grades

Proprietary bases and accords

Batch records and quality control data

Your fragrance is never sold, adapted, or reproduced for another brand for as long as we produce together. Exclusivity holds through development and for forty-eight months after your most recent production order. Each order resets that period.

Exclusivity never lapses quietly. Before it could end, you receive written notice and ninety days to place an order. These protections are part of every client agreement.

What does exclusivity mean?

The design fee covers the creative development process: the interview and creative brief, sketch design, refinement rounds, and compliance documentation through final approval. It pays for the work on your project.

It does not buy the perfumer’s training, material library, proprietary bases, or years of accumulated formulation knowledge that the formula is built from. We do not profit on the design fee. Our business is built on long-term production partnerships, and we typically reach breakeven between the second and fourth production run.

Why doesn’t the design fee buy the formula?

Commissioned IP

I brought the idea. Isn’t the fragrance mine?

Your idea shapes the fragrance, and your brand owns the result as a product. The formula is the perfumer’s creative and technical work, in the same way a painting belongs to the painter who made it.

Imagine commissioning an abstract landscape in the colors of a Caribbean sunset. Your vision guides the piece, and you take the painting home. You would not expect to sign your name on the canvas or receive the artist’s technique.

How does commissioned creative work normally work?

The general principle in US law is that the creator of commissioned work keeps the underlying rights unless they are transferred in a signed written agreement. Some familiar examples:

A commissioned portrait. You own the painting. The artist keeps the copyright.

An architect-designed home. You own the house. The architect keeps the rights to the plans.

A commissioned fragrance. You own the brand and hold exclusivity on the scent. The perfumer keeps the formula.

Fragrance formulas are protected as trade secrets rather than by copyright. A trade secret is only protected while it stays secret, which is one reason professional perfumers control where a formula goes. This is general background, not legal advice; your attorney can speak to your specific situation.

Is this unusual?

No. It is how the fragrance industry has always worked. The major fragrance houses that create scents for the world’s best-known brands retain their formulas and supply the fragrance concentrate. Their clients own the brand, the bottle, and exclusive rights to the scent.

Do I have to commit to a production run before the fragrance is finished?

No. You approve the final formula before making any production commitment. Once you're satisfied with the fragrance and ready to move forward, a 50% deposit initiates production. There's no pressure to commit to a production volume until you're ready. Please allow 90 days for production.

Who owns the formula once it's developed?

Atelier Madrona retains ownership of all formulas by default, which allows us to maintain quality and consistency for all your future production orders. Your formula is exclusive to your brand — we will never use it for another client. If you prefer to own your formula outright, we offer formula transfer options at tiered pricing based on production commitment.

What formats can you develop fragrances for?

We develop fragrances for a wide range of product formats including fine fragrance (eau de parfum, eau de toilette, extrait), body oils, candles, reed diffusers, and room sprays. Each format has different concentration and formulation requirements, and we guide you through those decisions as part of the development process.

Do you handle regulatory compliance and testing?

Yes. Our standard process includes review of each ingredient for sensitization, compliance with IFRA, EU, and FDA standards, and generation of IFRA certificates, Safety Data Sheets (SDS), Certificate of Analysis (CoA), and allergen lists for product labeling. For brands requiring additional compliance — such as EWG, Sephora Clean, Credo, or Thrive standards — we offer optional compliance services at additional cost. We also coordinate third-party stability and safety testing through certified laboratories.

Can you help with packaging sourcing and bottling?

Yes, optionally. We offer packaging sourcing, filling, assembly, and labeling services for fragrances produced by Atelier Madrona. Just like your fragrance, your bottle, cap and packaging will be unique to your brand. You can choose full-service (we source and fill), client-sourced packaging (you ship packaging to us and we fill), or juice-only (we ship bulk diluted fragrance to you for bottling elsewhere). These services are quoted separately based on your specific needs.

Do you work with brands outside of Seattle?

Yes. While we're based in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, we work with brands across the United States. Remote clients participate in the creative brief and review process via video, and fragrance samples are shipped for evaluation. The process is fully designed to work without in-person visits, though local clients are always welcome at our studio by appointment.

What kinds of brands do you work with?

We work with a wide range of brands including independent beauty and wellness startups, fine fragrance brands, skincare companies, hospitality and retail concepts, entrepreneurs launching new product lines, influencers and creators building signature scent collections, and creative professionals extending their brand into fragrance. Our no-minimum-order model makes us particularly well-suited for early-stage brands that aren't yet at the volume required by larger fragrance houses.

How is Atelier Madrona different from larger fragrance houses?

Most large fragrance houses require minimum orders of thousands of units, work from stock catalogs rather than true custom formulation, and assign your project to a team rather than a dedicated perfumer. At Atelier Madrona, every formula is developed from scratch by a professionally trained perfumer, there's no minimum order quantity, revisions are unlimited, and you never commit to production until you've approved the final fragrance. We're built for brands that want a genuine creative partnership, not a commodity transaction.

Production is quoted after your fragrance is finalized — the concentrate is the biggest variable, and any number before that exists is a guess. That said, here are realistic ranges based on past projects:

100 bottles: ~$35–$75 per unit, all-in
250 bottles: ~$25–$45
500 bottles: ~$16–$35
1,000 bottles: ~$12–$20

We often work backwards from your target retail price and margin to design production around your budget — something we're happy to walk through on our call.

Formula Ownership FAQ: Atelier Madrona Private Label Fragrance