Heritage
A house, in its own words
retaW was founded in 2009 in Tokyo by Hiroshi Fujiwara and Daisuke Murakami. Fujiwara is widely recognized as a central figure in Japan's Ura-Harajuku scene, the founder of Fragment Design, and one of the early collaborators who introduced Nike sneakers like the Air Force 1 to Japanese consumers in the late 1980s. Murakami serves as CEO of Blender, a Tokyo-based creative and consulting agency. The brand's name itself is a visual play: "retaW" reads as "water" when spelled backwards, a small riddle intended to spark curiosity. The first documented fragrance, Natural Mystic, appeared in 2008, a year before the company was formally registered, suggesting that formulation and brand development overlapped as parallel processes. From the outset, the product range was conceived differently from the conventional fragrance industry. Rather than pursuing door-to-door distribution or department-store concessions, Fujiwara channeled initial sales through his own retail environments, including the POOL Aoyama concept space and his Goodenough stores, which gave the line an embedded cultural context from day one. Between 2010 and 2012 the catalogue expanded steadily with Allen, Evelyn, and Barney, the latter named after a regular collaborator. Geographic place-names became a recurring motif starting in 2016, when Shibuya and Harajuku released in the same year, followed by Tsubame in 2017 and Ginza in 2018. This pattern of tying scent to neighborhood suggests that retaW treats Tokyo's districts not just as marketing backdrops but as thematic building blocks for composition. By 2018 the brand had grown large enough to open its own web store dedicated to overseas customers, a step that formalized its status as a fragrance label rather than a side project of the Harajuku scene. Fujiwara has framed retaW around the idea that scent operates on a different rhythm than clothing or visual design. In interviews and brand materials, he has described fragrance as something that registers over time, requiring a wearer to step outside the urgency of a fashion release calendar. The brand's stated approach treats scent profiles as profiles of moments, drawing loosely from music, subculture, and the environments in which Fujiwara has spent his adult life. Co-founder Murakami has connected this idea to Blender's broader work in creative direction, where mood and atmosphere sit alongside more measurable brand outcomes. The scent names themselves carry the philosophy: Natural Mystic borrows from Bob Marley, Evelyn and Barney reference people, and Shibuya, Harajuku, Tsubame, and Ginza point directly to specific Tokyo geographies. This naming convention treats each fragrance as a container for a place or a person rather than a pyramid of top, heart, and base notes. The brand has been notably consistent about not publishing traditional pyramid notes for most of its releases, opting instead for short atmospheric descriptions. This decision reflects a belief that scent, like a song, should be experienced before it is analyzed.