Heritage
A house, in its own words
Cottee’s origins lie in Shanghai, where founder Wang Chen and the brand’s operators previously ran a neighborhood café for more than a decade. That daily encounter with customers, atmosphere and the rituals of coffee shaped the house’s instinct for creating an intimate, sensory experience. The source material identifies Wang Chen as founder, while a Notes Shanghai profile also credits Ludovic Bonneton with founding the small brand. The available information does not establish a single founding date or clarify each founder’s precise role. Cottee later developed Traveler's Plan, a collection of eight fragrances presented as pages in a photographic and narrative exhibition. The concept extends perfume beyond a list of notes, connecting composition with the act of recording and remembering. Cottee remains a small, relatively young Shanghai brand, but its café roots give its identity a grounded beginning. Much of its public story is still emerging, so the house’s milestones are best understood as the move from hospitality and coffee culture into independent perfumery. Cottee’s creative vision appears to begin with lived experience. The name itself emerged from Wang Chen’s former café, turning an ordinary neighborhood setting into a lasting reference point. That history gives the house a distinctive position within Shanghai’s emerging fragrance culture: intimate, observant, and grounded in daily life rather than mythology or spectacle. Traveler's Plan extends this approach through eight fragrances presented like entries in a record. Each scent functions as a chapter, while photography gives the collection a visual and autobiographical structure. The idea places composition beside context. A fragrance becomes tied to a scene, memory, or passage rather than existing only as an arrangement of notes. Cottee’s deliberate smallness also shapes its identity. It presents perfume as a personal form of documentation, created through attention to atmosphere and connection. Exact formulation principles and the meanings assigned to each of the eight perfumes have not been established in the available sources, so those details remain open.