Heritage
A house, in its own words
Unifrom was founded by Haisam Mohammed, a designer raised in the Swedish tower blocks on the outskirts of Stockholm. Mohammed grew up navigating the liminal corridors of those housing estates, spaces saturated with cooking spices, incense, cleaning products, and the ambient scent languages of neighbors whose roots reached across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Those aromatic impressions, layered and unresolved, became the seed for a fragrance project that treats scent as cultural translation rather than decoration. The brand began taking shape around 2019, with public launches following in 2020. Its debut release, Limbo, arrived as a direct articulation of that suspended, transitional feeling between cultures, languages, and geographies. Subsequent collections expanded the idea outward: Maghrib references the westernmost stretch of the Arab world, Cassis leans into the sharp brightness of blackcurrant, and Frankincense draws on the resin used for centuries across incense routes connecting East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Cannabloom, introduced in 2024, marked a more vegetal turn. Stockholm remains the conceptual home of the house, and the Swedish high-rise environment that shaped Mohammed's sense of smell continues to inform the brand's reference points. The project also represents one of the relatively few Black-owned fragrance houses to emerge from Scandinavia, situating it within a broader movement of independent founders reshaping European niche perfumery from outside its traditional Parisian and Italian centers. Unifrom's creative vision treats fragrance as a portable archive of place. Rather than chasing recognizable luxury codes, the brand builds compositions around specific environments: a stairwell in a Rinkeby apartment block, a kitchen during iftar preparation, a balcony overlooking a concrete courtyard in late summer. Mohammed has described the project as a way to bottle the in-between, those unnamed sensory pockets where immigrant and diasporic life in Scandinavia actually unfolds. Sustainability operates as a structural commitment rather than a tagline. The house works in perfume oils rather than alcohol-based sprays, which reduces packaging weight, eliminates the need for pressurized components, and concentrates the formula itself. Portability is a parallel value: each format is designed to fit into a coat pocket, a bag, or the hand, encouraging reapplication as a daily ritual rather than a single moment of display. The brand also leans into naming as content. Titles like Limbo, Bliss, Dawn, and Maghrib are chosen to evoke states and geographies rather than to flatter the wearer, inviting a more interpretive relationship between scent and self. It is an approach closer to literary zine culture than to traditional European perfumery, and it is one of the clearer signals of what the house considers its audience.