A K-pop star, a dachshund, and the future of scent

When South Korean fragrance label Tamburins launched its Sunshine collection last September, it did not target pet owners. It targeted their emotions. The collection — two human fragrances, Sunshine and Puppy, built entirely around the emotional world of dogs — arrived with sculptural packaging designed as collectible objects: the Sunshine bottle takes the form of a glass paw with metallic claws; the Puppy bottle mimics a dog-bone wrapped in faux-croc leather. The rollout was expansive: a pop-up installation in Beijing, a home scent range, accessories, and a campaign fronted by Felix of Stray Kids. Rather than a straightforward celebrity endorsement, the campaign is built around a fable. Sunshine — Felix’s real dachshund — dreams of donning gleaming armor and becoming a warrior from the future. Felix brings that transformation to life on screen, embodying the duality between fragility and strength that sits at the heart of the collection. The brand’s invitation to consumers is to inhabit that dream — to blur the line between a pet companion and oneself, and let fragrance occupy the most intimate emotional register imaginable. Aesop has taken a quieter position. Its animal wash — a $48, 500ml skin and fur cleanser formulated with lemon peel oil, tea tree leaf oil, and spearmint leaf oil — extends the owner’s care ritual to the pet, offering the same sensory attention that the brand’s human range delivers. Botanical, restrained, characteristically on-brand. From social marker to intimate object For the past decade in China, the dominant logic of fragrance has been outward-driven. Worn primarily as a social marker, it has signaled identity, taste, and status — carefully adjusted to context, carefully managed for audience. The governing question has been a simple one: how do I want to appear? What is shifting — rapidly, and most visibly among younger consumers in China and across Asia — is the question itself. For post-2000 consumers, fragrance is increasingly an intimate object: something that encodes comfort, warmth, and the specific feeling of being at home with someone who asks nothing of you. The pet relationship is the most extreme expression of that emotional register. According to the 2026 China Pet Industry White Paper, China’s urban pet consumption market reached 312.6 billion RMB ($45.5 billion) in 2025, with the dog segment alone accounting for 160.6 billion RMB. For this generation — the majority of China’s urban pet owners are under 35 — a pet is not an accessory. It is a primary emotional companion: a relationship defined by unconditionality, non-performance, and mutual presence. Aesop understands this vertically: it extends care to the animal, deepening the nurturing bond between owner and pet through a shared ritual. Tamburins works horizontally: it elevates the pet to the level of the human — or rather, blurs the line entirely, as Felix embodies Sunshine's dream of a more powerful self, each becoming the idealized shadow of the other. In both cases, scent has nothing to do with performing identity. It is about companionship, comfort, and the most private sphere. That represents a profound shift from the lifestyle fragrance category as it has been built and marketed for the past 30 years. The real question for fragrance labels The lesson is not that every fragrance brand should launch a pet range. It is about emotional positioning — and whether your brand is present where younger consumers’ emotional lives actually unfold. Post-2000 consumers in China are not rejecting fragrance. They are embracing it more deeply than any previous generation — but on entirely different terms. They want scent to infuse their daily lives: their homes, their routines, their relationships, the quiet moments between the performative ones. They are drawn to narratives that are intimate, healing, sometimes irreverent — and they can immediately identify when a brand is performing wellness versus genuinely inhabiting it. The Tamburins campaign works not because it features a K-pop idol, but because its underlying story — a small dog dreaming of a more powerful self, and a fragrance that lets you inhabit that dream — is emotionally precise. It speaks to a generation that uses scent not to signal who they are to others, but to feel more fully like themselves, or like something they wish to become. For brands operating in the lifestyle fragrance category, the strategic question is sharper than it may appear: what emotional territory does your fragrance narrative inhabit? Is it aspirational in the old sense — status, seduction, occasion — or does it reach into the everyday intimacy that now defines how post-2000 consumers relate to scent? Fragrance has recently doubled down on its most legible language: projection. The rise of Middle Eastern export powerhouses like Lattafa topping global bestseller charts, and the proliferation of extrait and high-concentration formats across prestige houses, both signal a market in pursuit of maximum olfactory impact — scent as statement. What Aesop and Tamburins suggest is that another current is running underneath: scent not made to be smelled, but to be felt — written for the private sphere, not the social one. Dao Nguyen is the founder of Essenzia ByDao, a Paris-based strategic consultancy specializing in fragrance and beauty markets across Asia and emerging economies. Drawing on anthropology of taste and cross-cultural intelligence, she helps global and regional brands decode shifting consumer codes - and translate them into potentializing strategies that travel across markets, languages, and generations.

A K-pop star, a dachshund, and the future of scent

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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A K-pop star, a dachshund, and the future of scent

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag