Lance McGregor
Lance McGregor arrived at fragrance design through an unexpected corridor: industrial design. After graduating from Victoria University's School of Design in his native Wellington, New Zealand, he cut his teeth at Fisher & Paykel, the iconic Kiwi appliance maker, before a restless curiosity pulled him across three continents. He spent years collaborating with design luminaries including Tom Dixon, Matthew Hilton, and Fabien Baron, contributing to projects for fashion houses like Prada and Viktor & Rolf. This immersion in luxury aesthetics sharpened his eye for form, material, and proportion, the same instincts that would later inform his work in scent and beauty packaging. He ultimately settled in New York, where he founded McGregor & McGregor, a creative design atelier serving some of the world's most influential beauty and fashion brands. His recent collaboration with perfumer Anne McClain and glass artist Alan Iwamura produced a handcrafted socially conscious fragrance that bridges artisan craft with intentional design. With roughly fourteen years dedicated to beauty industry design, McGregor operates at the intersection of object, vessel, and scent, shaping how fragrance is experienced before the first note even reaches skin.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Lance composes
McGregor's design language favors clean geometry, considered proportions, and tactile materials that invite touch. In product and packaging work, he gravitates toward handblown glass, refined metalwork, and architectural forms that feel both modern and timeless. His collaborative fragrance with Anne McClain reflects this ethos: artisan glass vessels paired with compositions designed to honor craftsmanship. He prizes restraint over excess, allowing negative space and material honesty to carry visual weight. While his direct olfactory contributions remain emerging, the environments he creates for scent, the bottles, the unboxing rituals, the brand worlds, consistently emphasize sustainability, sensory richness, and quiet luxury over loud spectacle.
Philosophy
What drives Lance
McGregor approaches fragrance from the outside in, beginning with the vessel, the weight of glass in hand, the interplay of light through liquid, the story a cap tells before it is unscrewed. He believes design and scent are inseparable partners, each shaping how the other is perceived and remembered. His Wellington upbringing, surrounded by raw natural beauty and a culture of pragmatic craftsmanship, taught him to honor materials and the hands that shape them. Working across continents exposed him to radically different design philosophies, from Japanese minimalism to European opulence, and he synthesizes these influences into work that feels considered rather than derivative. For McGregor, a fragrance is a complete sensory object, every element from outer carton to inner juice contributing to a single coherent experience. His social and environmental consciousness runs through the practice; beauty should not come at the planet's expense.
The houses