An Indian fragrance house, now rubbing shoulders with Loewe and Tom Ford at Selfridges

For a country with one of the richest olfactory histories in the world—damask rose, jasmine, sandalwood, vetiver—India’s perfumery heritage runs deep, but globally, it has more often been recognised for its ingredients than perfume houses telling its story. Its botanicals travel far, from being used by renowned perfumers in Paris to niche perfume houses in Tokyo. But a globally resonant, contemporary Indian niche perfume house? That’s been conspicuously absent. Until now.

This week, Rahasya launches at Selfridges’ Oxford Street flagship in London, becoming the first Indian niche fragrance brand to enter the iconic department store’s newly renovated beauty hall—sharing shelf space with giants like Loewe, Tom Ford, and Amouage and niche labels from around the world like Stockholm-based Byredo, Nishane from Istanbul, and Seoul’s Borntostandout.

For co-founders Sai Pogaru, Utkarsh Vijayvargiya, and Sachit Sood, the idea for Rahasya began as a question that kept resurfacing over their two decades of friendship and shared obsessions. All three were born in India, grew up abroad, and built careers across tech, fintech, and consulting. Pogaru had stints at Meta and TikTok; Sood was a project lead at BCG; Vijayvargiya worked across fintech and insurtech. “Naturally, as third culture kids who’ve grown up overseas, the desire to get behind brands that are Indian or speak our story is very strong within us,” says Pogaru. “We kept coming back to one question every time we’d hang out: in the world of perfumes—one thing we all care deeply about—why is there no brand that is telling our story in a way that we can connect with? Especially one that doesn’t feel stereotypical?” The answer, eventually, was to build it themselves.

What began as casual conversations about fragrances and personal collections became more directional. In January 2024, they quit their jobs and spent the next 11 months immersing themselves in perfumery—training their noses on the weekends, experimenting, researching, and attempting to understand the craft from the ground up. “Initially we thought, oh, maybe, we can try and concoct our own fragrances. We realised quickly fragrance isn’t just art, it’s also science,” Pogaru says. That realisation led them to onboard Singapore-based Kajal Gujar, a perfumer at DSM-Firmenich, to bridge the gap. Gujar now closely works with the co-founders to translate their ideas into scent—with the fragrances produced at DSM-Firmenich’s perfumery centre in Mumbai. “Our fragrances start with a story and an emotion first, always. For example, we want to capture the feeling of a hill station in India. We’ve been incredibly lucky because it helps when our perfumer understands the context.”

At the core of Rahasya is its refusal to begin with trends. Each fragrance begins with a feeling, often rooted in a memory. For instance, one of their debut scents, Chapter One, draws from the fading world of independent Indian bookstores—family-run establishments like Delhi’s Faqir Chand which Sood used to frequent growing up, where the air carries the soft density of old paper, ink, wood, and time. To capture its essence, the team visited bookstores across Mumbai and Delhi, attempting to catalogue the intangible before translating them into notes. “I mean, how do you even describe the smell of a book?” says Pogaru. “It’s paper, a bit woody, leathery, and there’s a bit of inky freshness. We tried to absorb those spaces and then worked backwards: what notes best fit these smells that we picked up?”

The same approach runs through the rest of their debut collection that launched in Singapore in November 2024. There’s Cutting Rain, which bottles the anticipation of monsoon showers; Oud Mangifera, an evocation of the sultriness of aamras; and Love Marriage, a sweet, nutty, boozy composition that echoes the layered excess of an Indian wedding. Across all their offerings, the brand leans into specificity without slipping into clichés.

Scroll on the brand’s Instagram and the effort that goes into crafting their visuals and campaigns feels palpable. All the narratives are conceptualised in-house. “I’m sure there are agencies that would bring amazing ideas, but we felt that the storytelling is a lot more honest and heartfelt if it comes directly from us.” Of course, they do bring on freelance creative professionals to execute their campaigns. “Full transparency, we obsess over every single detail. Even with Instagram captions, we spend hours thinking about which word to use,” admits Pogaru. That passion extends to the physical experience of the product too: each full size 50ml bottle comes with a black leather travel pouch and tote, along with a 2 ml mystery vial nestled inside each box—a small but considered touch that makes the act of unboxing feel like discovering a secret.

Rahasya’s early growth has been anchored in the Indian diaspora. After launching in Singapore, the brand expanded into the United States last year and can be found in stores like Stéle in New York City, Merz Apothecary in Chicago, Arielle Shoshana in Washington DC, and The Scent Room in Dallas and Los Angeles. In October 2025, Rahasya arrived in London for their ‘In Transit’ pop-up, literally, in a rickshaw. They invited five South Asian DJs to play live sets in the three-wheelers while it was driven all over London. The four-and-a-half-day pop-up transformed a Soho gallery into a contemporary reimagining of an Indian railway carriage and had almost a thousand people in attendance.

There, Rahasya introduced its sophomore Magizhchi collection (Tamil for joy) with scents designed to capture fleeting everyday moments. The lineup included Chai Addiction, an ode to the smell of sweet milky tea floating through a kitchen; Hill Station, that elicits a cool, mist-laced morning in the hills; and Rickshaw Rhythms, that conjures the chaos of a rickshaw ride in a coastal town. At the pop-up, Rickshaw Rhythms sold out completely.

“I might be generalising massively, but we realised that the further away from India you go, the greater the longing to connect back to it,” says Pogaru. “It’s a very strong emotion we’ve seen people carry. There’s a huge diaspora that’s looking for ways to connect back home. They really want to get behind brands like us, and they show up like, it’s so great to see an Indian fragrance brand in London or in the US. We’ve been very lucky as well in that regard,” he says of his audience.

Now, Rahasya is finally launching at Selfridges where it will sit alongside some of the biggest names in global perfumery, marking a subtle but important shift in how Indian fragrance is positioned. Given storytelling is a core consideration for Rahasya, the brand has crafted a teaser campaign titled ‘Platform T-1’ to mark their Selfridges launch, which ties back into the ‘In Transit’ pop-up experience. Alongside the teaser campaign, they are also releasing ‘Crafted Chaos’, a new brand campaign shot by Pranoy Sarkar where ingredients meet the body in close, tactile ways, shifting from skin-level intimacy to surreal, enlarged forms—a metaphor for diasporic identity, that is shaped often through contact, proximity, and experience.

The next step, of course, is for Rahasya to come home. “India is a tough beast to crack,” says Pogaru. “We want to make sure we approach it with the love and attention that it deserves.” There have been gestures. Earlier this year, Rahasya collaborated with Gully Labs on Baraamda, the homegrown sneaker brand’s first-ever scent designed to complement the GL003 Shaahi sneaker, but a full-scale homecoming remains a future chapter. “Baby steps, but sometime in the next year, we’re hoping to be in India as well.”

Rahasya launches at Selfridges in-store and online on April 28, 2026