Heritage
A house, in its own words
AYOND began as a skincare company in 2019, the brainchild of Shani van Breukelen and Porter Yates, who shared a fascination with the botanical resilience of the desert landscapes they call home. According to Wallpaper magazine, the couple launched the brand with a clear intention: to create formulations that honored the adaptive intelligence of plants surviving in arid conditions. The skincare line grew a loyal following for its desert-derived ingredients, including prickly pear, juniper, and piñon. By 2024, the founders expanded into fine fragrance, releasing three genderless eau de parfums that carried the brand's core ethos into a new format. The leap from skincare to perfume was a natural progression, since both categories relied on the same ingredient philosophy: natural, traceable, and deeply connected to place. Within its first year, the fragrance line gained editorial attention for its commitment to 100% natural origin compositions, a relatively rare stance in the perfume industry where synthetic musks and accords dominate the market. At its core, AYOND operates on the belief that fragrance is functional, not just decorative. The brand frames scent as something that interacts with mood, memory, and physiological state, aligning with a growing body of research on olfactory psychology. Rather than chasing trends or celebrity-driven launches, AYOND develops each composition around a specific botanical story and its traditional or ecological context. The founders have spoken about wanting to shift the conversation away from fragrance as a luxury accessory toward fragrance as a wellness tool, an idea that informs everything from formulation choices to packaging decisions. The commitment to genderless design reflects a broader cultural move away than binary scent categories, and the insistence on natural origin ingredients signals a skepticism of the synthetic-heavy status quo. AYOND's creative vision is anchored in specificity: every scent should evoke a particular place, plant, or moment in the desert ecosystem.