Courtney Somer
Courtney Somer built her fragrance empire the way she built her early career: with serendipity, instinct, and a healthy disregard for conventional ladders. She started as an Assistant Accessories Editor at Vogue before running her own production company for photo shoots, work that honed her eye for branding and visual storytelling. When she launched Lake & Skye in 2015 from her kitchen table, she brought that editorial sensibility to the world of scent. The brand quickly distinguished itself as a 5x award-winning fragrance line known for approachable luxury and accessible scents. In 2024, Tru Fragrance acquired Lake & Skye, a move that let Somer maintain creative oversight while gaining broader distribution. Ten years in, she has grown a bootstrapped startup into a room full of collaborators while staying true to her original mission: helping others discover the wonder of fragrance. Her background in wellness education informs the brand's focus on intentional, nourishing scent experiences. Somer represents a new archetype in perfumery: the founder-nose who came to fragrance through commerce, creativity, and curiosity rather than a formal perfumery education, proving that the most interesting scent stories sometimes come from unexpected places.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Courtney composes
Somer's stylistic sensibility remains difficult to pin down publicly because Lake & Skye works with multiple perfumers rather than a single in-house nose, though she maintains close creative involvement in brief development. What she has established publicly is a preference for warm, wearable compositions over unfamiliar avant-garde territory. The brand's catalog tends toward ambery florals, soft woods, and skin-close musks rather than sharp citrus explosions or challenging animalics. Somer's editorial background influences her aesthetic direction toward clean, minimal bottle design and packaging that reads less like perfume and more like lifestyle object. Her fragrance style, broadly, rewards repeat wearing over initial impression, suggesting compositions built for intimacy rather than projection. While specific accord signatures remain proprietary, Lake & Skye fragrances consistently earn descriptors like cozy, refined, and quietly confident.
Philosophy
What drives Courtney
Somer believes fragrance should feel like discovery, not intimidation. She built Lake & Skye around the premise that beautiful scent belongs everywhere, not just in inaccessible luxury niches. Her approach centers on emotional resonance: she asks what feeling a wearer wants to carry rather than what notes they should want. This wellness-informed philosophy shows up in her emphasis on intentionality, on scent as a form of self-care rather than mere decoration. She governs creative decisions through the lens of accessibility, asking constantly whether a fragrance invites someone in or shuts them out. Somer often speaks about helping people find the wonder in fragrance, language that reveals her genuine conviction that scent carries spiritual dimension. Her acquisitions by Tru Fragrance confirmed something the market already knew: accessible luxury is not an oxymoron, it is a positioning.
The houses
Maisons Courtney composes for
In the same league