Welcome to The Spotlight, our new monthly column by journalist Precious Adesina.

Each month, Precious will introduce us to an innovate Black entrepreneur making waves in their industry. In today's edition, meet perfumer Maya Njie...

Writer Precious Adesina

If you’ve ever fallen in love then you probably understand the power scent can have on one's emotions.

London-based perfumer Maya Njie used the feelings that certain smells can conjure up to develop her gender-neutral fragrances inspired by family photographs from the 1970’s alongside her Gambian-Swedish heritage. Her company, Maya Njie Perfumes, uses scenes from an album put together decades before she was born to create a product that is as much about the personal as it is about the aroma. “Your choice of fragrance comes from a deeper place,” she says. “It's not just something you wear.”

Maya was born in Västerås, a small city just outside of Stockholm before moving to London in her late teens. While studying surface design and photography at the University of the Arts London, she used smell as a medium to further communicate her work. After graduating in 2012, she worked at The Laundry, an arts hub situated in London Fields, where she developed her fragrances in her spare time. While using the perfume, people coming in and out of the building would stop to find out more. “It was a great conversation starter, '' she says. “I realised how much [fragrances] mean to people.” By 2016 Maya Njie Perfumes was founded.

How did you go from studying design and photography at university to exploring smells?

I was really influenced by the smells that surrounded me when growing up. I was always fascinated by things that smell, like candles or stationary. As I started studying and working visually, I really missed that element in my work and decided to try and pair the two. I found the prospect of looking at photography and then trying to tell that story through olfaction really exciting. I would have the photographs on a moodboard with a colour palette underneath. I’d then think about what materials represented those snapshots and colours in the same way.

How did you go from making perfumes into making it into a company?

People would tell me that I should make my perfumes into a business but I didn’t see it that way at first as it was a personal project based on my family photos. I studied as a mature student, so when I graduated university, I was 32 and my daughter had just started school. I realised fairly quickly after I finished that I needed to just get a job so I worked in a front of house position in Hackney. But, when I properly started thinking about how I was going to get out of my situation at the time, I became more business minded about it. Whenever I made a fragrance, I would bring it into work and I would spray the reception space with it. In the three and half years I worked there, there was a lot of interest in my perfumes so I looked into cosmetic legislation. It was a lot of trial and error. I sold it to friends and the people in the building and I reinvested the money back into the business towards items such as new bottles, labels and boxes. I eventually started selling to local shops.

How did you feel when you realised that you had made your idea into a legitimate business?

It feels like a big achievement and I am as happy as I was when I first started. From working for myself to getting other people on board to growing into a team and moving from the kitchen table into a studio. All these elements give me the same gratification that I got when I first began working on the company. 

What has made your perfume stand out?

I’ve learnt that people connect on an emotional level to stories that they can relate to themselves. Perfume advertising has been outdated for a long time with a lot of big players focusing on masculinity, femininity, sexuality and attraction. What I saw as my weakness initially was the fact that I didn't have any backing, funding or professional shots, but using my brand to tell a genuine personal story in a way that hasn’t been told before has made me different from the others. 

My fragrances are very much a mixture of the two cultures that I'm from. They are rooted in my Scandinavian heritage in terms of the nature that surrounded me growing up. Then there are my experiences of going to west Africa as a child: coming off the plane, going down the markets, eating fresh tropical fruits and spending time on the beach. A big part of people discovering me has been through like-minded companies such as Hoohaa, who promote niche fragrances. Hoohaa has a really interesting roster under their umbrella.

What is the relationship between your brand and the environment - and why has your brand decided to support the climate organisation Ecologi?

I always try to think of ways that I can be more environmentally friendly. Being a small niche brand everything is produced in-house. As someone from a design background, I like packaging, but for my products, I wanted it to be minimal, which is why the box is so small. 

Ecologi is a way for Maya Njie Perfumes as a business to support climate projects. They do things around the world each month. It's just a way to give back.

Where do you see your business going in the future?

I would like to add to my collection and bring out other products, such as home fragrances and incense. I'd also like to learn more about sourcing and think about the farmers that we work with. I’m trying to figure out whether there is a way that we can have more consideration for where the oils come from. There's been quite a lot of conversations about that in the studio.

Maya Njie Perfumes is available at hoohaa.co.uk or at mayanjie.com