Heritage
A house, in its own words
Foras began in 2021 in Folkestone, a town on the English Channel whose chalk cliffs, harbor, and creative quarter have drawn artists and makers for years. The house was co-founded by Alex Verier, a perfumer with more than fifteen years of experience in the fragrance industry, and Avery Yang, who serves as creative director. Verier had previously built a career in perfumery before turning to his own label, and the founding of Foras marked a return to hands-on, small-scale creation rooted in place. The brand registered Foras Fragrance Limited in the United Kingdom and set up shop at 11 Church Street in central Folkestone, a stone's throw from the Old High Street and the harbor. The space doubles as a retail boutique and working laboratory, a format that has become central to how Foras presents itself to customers. Within a year of launch, the team expanded to include shop manager Michal Piotrowski, helping run the storefront and the direct-to-customer experience. The debut collection arrived in 2020 and established Foras's identity as a coastal, botanically driven line. Compositions such as Folkestone Green, Rosemary Benzoin, and Fig Ozone drew on the herbs, salt air, and hedgerows of the local area, while Mushroom Forest and Oxidised Rose pushed into more atmospheric, woodland territory. The brand has since extended beyond fine fragrance into skincare and home scent, including a candle range, all developed in the same Folkestone studio. Foras builds its fragrances around the immediate surroundings of its Folkestone home, treating the coast, gardens, and woodland of east Kent as a working library of scent. The team works in small batches, with each composition developed and adjusted in-house rather than handed off to a large manufacturing partner. That proximity between creator and customer is intentional: visitors to the Church Street shop can talk directly with the people who blended the juice on the shelf. The brand treats scent as something bound to memory and place. Rather than chasing market categories or trend cycles, Foras composes around experiences, whether that means the green, briny pull of the Channel coast or the dark, damp quiet of a forest floor. The result is a lineup that reads less like a product range and more like a series of local impressions, with nature serving as the primary creative reference point.