Heritage
A house, in its own words
The story of D.S. & Durga begins with two people from non-fragrance backgrounds who brought entirely different skills to perfumery. David Seth Moltz, who goes by D.S., was an indie musician before turning to fragrance. He taught himself the craft of perfumery through study and experimentation, eventually composing all the house's scents. His partner Kavi Moltz, whose name gave the brand its Durga handle, trained as an architect. The couple founded the house in Brooklyn in 2007, operating initially as a small studio making fragrances with strong narrative and atmospheric pull. Over time, the house expanded from a single creative studio into a full production facility in Brooklyn, scaling their small-batch process without abandoning the hands-on approach that defines the brand. The house gained recognition among niche fragrance collectors for its conceptual approach to scent-making, with each fragrance built around a specific story, place, or cultural moment rather than traditional fragrance families. Early releases established a devoted following, and the brand's expansion into broader retail channels brought their Brooklyn-made scents to a wider audience while maintaining their production base in New York. The house remains one of the few perfumer-owned independent fragrance brands operating at scale in the United States.
D.S. & Durga approaches fragrance as storytelling through smell. Rather than organizing scents around traditional fragrance families, the house builds each composition around a specific atmosphere, landscape, or cultural reference. David Seth Moltz draws on his musical background to compose scents the way a musician might build a composition, layering sensory detail into something cohesive and transportive. Kavi Moltz contributes an architectural sensibility, thinking about how fragrance occupies and structures space. The result is a collection of scents that feel like environments rather than conventional perfumes. Each fragrance carries a name and a conceptual anchor that invites the wearer to imagine a specific place or moment. The brand describes its scents as immersive, suggesting an experience that extends beyond the act of wearing perfume into something more like inhabiting a narrative. This approach reflects the founders' belief that fragrance can function as a storytelling medium, as expressive as music or film but working entirely through the nose.