Kavi Moltz
Kavi Ahuja Moltz does not create perfume. She creates the conditions for it. As co-founder of Brooklyn's D.S. & Durga alongside her husband David Seth Moltz, Kavi brought architectural thinking to a fragrance house built on intuition rather than formal training. The couple launched in 2007, starting with one-off holiday tonics made as gifts before the project grew into something neither anticipated. Trained as an architect, Kavi approached the business like a spatial problem: how do you construct a world from scent? While David serves as the house's self-taught nose, Kavi has shaped the brand's identity from the ground up. The Brooklyn atelier they built together reflects her sensibility—structured yet sensory, deliberate yet surprising. For over a decade, D.S. & Durga scaled without investors, growing from hobby into cult favorite entirely through word of mouth and a fiercely independent vision that Kavi helped architect. She remains the other half of one of independent perfumery's most compelling partnerships, the mind behind the brand that houses David's nose.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Kavi composes
Kavi's influence on D.S. & Durga reads less in individual accords and more in the brand's overall architecture. She gravitates toward unexpected combinations that feel inevitable in retrospect. The house is known for masculine-feminine ambiguity, for fragrance that smells like places rather than people, for materials that tell stories. Under her guidance, D.S. & Durga has developed a recognizable sensibility: clean structure, unexpected warmth, a certainNY specificity that feels both personal and universal. Where David provides the nose, Kavi provides the editorial eye, the curatorial instinct that keeps the collection coherent across dozens of releases. She favors restraint over excess, clarity over complexity. When something smells like too much, she pulls it back. The result is a house that rewards attention.
Philosophy
What drives Kavi
Architecture taught Kavi to think in systems. Fragrance, she found, operates the same way—materials must relate to one another spatially, creating rooms you move through over time. She approaches the brand as a practice of translation, helping David articulate what he senses into something others can experience. The D.S. & Durga universe draws heavily on American vernacular, musical subcultures, and literary spaces, a palette Kavi has shaped as much as anyone. She believes in working without nets: the first decade brought zero investors, no formal business plan, just stubborn commitment to making things properly. That autonomy has allowed the house to smell like nothing else on the market, unfettered by market research or trend forecasting. Kavi's driving conviction is that specificity breeds authenticity. Vague ideas produce vague perfume. Precise ones produce worlds.
The houses
Maisons Kavi composes for
In the same league