Dating App Leads Entrepreneur to Develop Perfume

LabHouse perfumes. (Courtesy photo)

Most people meeting up through a dating app site end up with a bad date story to tell their friends. Instead,  Miriam Shechet found love, not just with the guy she met, but with his career as well. That date set her on a career path that led to her launching her own independent perfume brand in NH, LabHouse.

Back to that date. The man she met was an industrial perfumer. “Most people think he’s the guy in the mall spritzing them,” she says with a laugh. Instead, he helped to develop scents. “I didn’t know this was a career, and people could make a living with their nose—sniffing things and creating formulas,” Shechet says. “He talked about the chemistry behind it.”

She ordered a scent kit to start to “train her nose” and began picking apart the scents of the perfumes she found in stores. “It was fascinating to me,” she says. “I was being shown a whole world where you can design a molecule to smell a certain way.”

That inspired her to enroll at the University of North Carolina to pursue a chemistry degree. Shechet was surrounded by students studying to go into the medical field, research and industry. She was alone in earning a chemistry degree to become a perfumer.

After graduating, Shechet worked for Procter and Gamble in Massachusetts in 2020 as a site odor coordinator for the Gillette brand, hoping she could get a toe in the company that would lead to transferring to the coveted perfume division. “I realized it was a dead end for me, and I was worried about how long everything was taking,” Shechet says.

Miriam Shechet, founder of LabHouse. (Courtesy photo)

During the pandemic, she moved to Dover in 2022 and decided to take control over her destiny by starting her own perfume brand. And since she was developing her perfume in her home, she dubbed her new venture LabHouse.

After a year of developing her signature scents, Shechet launched LabHouse in December 2022, selling her perfumes at farmers markets, craft fairs and events such as Market Square Day in Portsmouth. 

Shechet’s passion for scents and being a perfumer is obvious as one speaks to her. For her, creating perfume is more akin to creating art. “I am a rebel,” she says. “I wanted something unique.” 

Her scents include Mirage, which she describes this way on her website, “It opens with bright sparkling top notes of sichuan pepper, citrus and cardamom; layered with middle notes of creamy sandalwood, toasted sugar, and thick vanilla; melting into base notes of dark resins, fizzing ambers and sappy green frankincense.” 

And her bottles come adorned with edgy original artwork to reflect the scent experience and “describe what I was thinking when I formulated,” she says. For Mirage, that means an ethereal woman, her hair giving way to smoke and clouds.

“I found it attracts people who say they don’t wear perfume. They mean they don’t want to smell like the perfume counter at Macy’s,” Shechet says.

“When I smell a new raw material, it’s an adventure for me. Every time you combine different ingredients you get a new experience,” Shechet says. “I like to be challenging,” she says of developing scents that are different from those produced by the big fragrance houses. “I go bold.”

As her business grew, she found she could no longer operate out of her house and found a small lab space in Exeter. She is focused on growing her online sales and seeking the right stores for her product. 

“I hope I am hiring people by the end of the year, Shechet says. “I want to keep as much of the manufacturing in-house as I can.” For more information, visit labhouseperfume.com.

(LabHouse will be exhibiting at the Made in NH Expo on April 14, 15 and 16 at the DoubleTree by Hilton in downtown Manchester.)