Ayaka Tan trained as a chemist before pivoting to scent in 2022. By the time we spoke to her, Yuzu Botanica was a profitable practice — selling at independent perfumeries across Kyoto and via a waitlist she ran on a Google Form.
Her accountant kept asking when the website was launching.
The three sentences
Ayaka's onboarding answers, verbatim:
- "I'm a botanical perfumer in Kyoto. Single-note florals, mostly yuzu, hinoki, white peach."
- "Customers are people who already know they want a small-batch botanical scent and want to support someone making it by hand."
- "Calm, precise, almost clinical — like a pharmacist's bench but with intention."
That's all the agent had to work with. The brand it generated leaned hard into a typographic ID — a serif body face she'd never have picked herself but admitted felt right after a day with it.
What launched
A 23-product catalogue with hand-photographed bottles she shot herself; an "About" page in her voice (she edited two sentences in the entire draft); a customer agent trained on her batch notes that can answer questions about scent profiles, longevity, and shipping.
She sent the link to her accountant before he'd finished his next email.
The numbers, four months later
- 172 orders in the first month, up from ~12/month via the Google Form waitlist
- $48 average order value — she'd been pricing low, the agent recommended a 35% bump on the basis of category benchmarks; she took the recommendation halfway
- 94% positive reviews, with the most common complaint being "I want more"