Product notes — 01

The Purple Room

Find a perfume by how it will actually smell on you — not by a list of notes.

RoleIdeation · design · build

StackFlutter · Supabase · pgvector

StatusLive

Year2026

Open the live appBuild something like this

The Purple Room

“At noon it opens sharp and citric; by evening the vanilla has settled into the skin — quieter, warmer, closer to you than it was.”

FRESH — HEART — DRY

Warm cream ground, orchid signature, editorial serif.

The problem

Fragrance sites are databases with photographs. They tell you a perfume has bergamot, jasmine, and vanilla — about as useful as being told a song has a guitar in it.

What people want to know is how it will behave: on their skin, on a hot afternoon, four hours in. That question is what the app is built to answer.

The decisions

Jewel firstBuilt one gorgeous screen — the condition explorer — before the rest of the app existed. If the centrepiece isn't extraordinary, no amount of surrounding structure saves it.

No wallBrowsing needs no account. Signup appears as a dismissible sheet only at depth — never a gate at the door.

Real similarity"More like this" runs on weighted accords and embeddings, not shared notes. Two perfumes can share every note and smell nothing alike — proportion is the thing.

EditorialEvery write-up is authored, not crowdsourced. Slower to fill, but the writing becomes the product — and there's no moderation burden on day one.

The design world

Perfume is warm, atmospheric, and personal, so the app is too. Warm cream rather than the black-and-gold luxury cliché, heavy grain for print texture, and purple kept as a signature rather than an environment — it appears in the mark and small accents, never as the room.

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What I’d do differently

Content is the bottleneck, and I underestimated it. The engine was ready long before there were enough bottles to make it sing — a recommendation system with fifteen items has nothing interesting to recommend.

Next time the content pipeline gets built alongside the feature, not after it.

All work SONA