Heritage
A house, in its own words
Matteo Parfums was founded in 2017 by Matthew J. Sánchez, a UCLA alumnus who launched the brand out of Southern California at a relatively young age. Sánchez has described the project as a personal creative venture, not a legacy house inherited from a prior generation, and the company remains closely identified with his own taste and biography. The brand's debut fragrance, Celadawn, arrived in 2019, two years after incorporation, giving Sánchez time to develop a signature accord and a small initial collection before going public. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, and Sánchez has positioned himself as both founder and in-house perfumer, a structure more common to indie ateliers than to established fashion houses. In 2024, Sánchez was named to UCLA's Bruin Business 100, an alumni recognition list that highlights graduates building notable ventures within a few years of leaving campus. The recognition placed Matteo Parfums alongside a roster of young companies rather than alongside legacy fragrance houses, a detail that captures the brand's place in the current independent fragrance landscape. Sánchez has framed Matteo Parfums as a cross-cultural, narrative-driven practice, with fragrances conceived around stories, places, and personal references rather than around abstract olfactive families. The brand's self-description leans on words like multicultural, whimsical, and imaginative, and that vocabulary shows up clearly in the naming conventions: Koribbean nods to Caribbean heritage, Celadawn reads as a personal portmanteau, and Porcelain Petal and Ambered Petal lean into material and color imagery. Rather than chasing a single house style, Sánchez has spoken about fusing cultures and concepts into each product, treating fragrance as a vehicle for evoking confidence and specific memories. The house also built its early identity around a single proprietary accord, L' Bouquet, which ties several central compositions together and functions as a kind of creative through-line. The result is a philosophy that prizes authorial voice over category convention.