Most shops would be concerned if their walls started disappearing. At one East London perfume boutique, that is exactly how business is supposed to work.
12_things has opened an unconventional fragrance shop at 198 Hackney Road, where every purchase physically removes a piece of the store. The walls are lined with recycled metal vault drawers, each housing a bottle of perfume. Buy the fragrance and the drawer comes home with you, leaving an empty space behind.
As more customers shop, more gaps appear until, eventually, there will be nothing left to sell or dismantle. The concept is the work of 12_things founder and former Haeckels managing director Charlie Vickery, who has described consumption as a 'weapon'. Here, smelling irresistible is practically an act of destruction. Unlike most perfumeries that want to stay on the map, 12_things aims to vanish.
This Perfume Shop Was Built to Destroy Itself
12_things opened its Hackney Road doors on 15 October with an interior that looks closer to an industrial vault than the polished counters usually associated with luxury fragrance.
Those metal vaults aren't merely displays. They double as packaging, meaning customers quite literally take part of the architecture home with their perfume. Every transaction changes the room for whoever walks through the door next.
'The store is designed to slowly destroy itself,' 12_things explained on Instagram. 'I wanted people to come inside and tear it apart with me.'
The disappearing act also fits the brand's deliberately finite approach. Its debut collection, REGISTRATION, consists of 8 perfumes priced at £140 for 50ml each. Once a fragrance sells out, 12_things says that particular release will not return. When REGISTRATION reaches its end, so does the original store installation.
For a beauty industry constantly chasing the next launch, restock, and expansion, 12_things has instead created a shop whose ultimate goal is to run out of things.
Why Don't the Perfumes Smell Like a Garden?
The fragrances themselves are no more interested in following the traditional beauty playbook. 'Because the world does not smell like a garden,' 12_things declares on its website when explaining its unusual approach to perfumery.
Instead of whisking wearers away to imaginary rose gardens or Mediterranean holidays on the mere whiff of a scent, the collection finds its inspiration closer to the pavement, the city, and the way the world smells when not told through the eyes of a fairytale. Hot metal, wet asphalt, vinyl, tobacco ash, steam, ink, cold air, dust, and human skin all appear across the 8 formulas.
Even their names sound more like random places than perfumes people would actually wear: Inkskin, White Dust, Infrastructure, Condensation, Vacuum, Interference, Cold Storage, and Void.
Cold Storage combines cold metal and plastic with lime, ambergris, dry leaf, salty skin, iodine, and lichen. Infrastructure pairs a rain-on-asphalt accord with cold metal, iris, cedarwood, and mineral musk. White Dust ventures into sterile vapour, vinyl, warm iron, and clay mineral dust.
Vickery has compared the entire collection to an album, complete with approachable 'singles' and stranger deep cuts for anyone ready to smell outside the box.
Eventually, those scents will leave Hackney Road one metal drawer at a time. Along with bottling some seriously unusual smells, 12_things seems to specialise in the art of the vanishing act. After capturing everything from Cold Storage to Void in a bottle, it might soon discover what 'sold out' smells like, too.
