New preorder release model & pricing updates

Mythpunk Olfactive is switching to a preorder model for at least the remainder of 2024 and will likely continue this release model into 2025.

Additionally, there will be a price increase during September's preorder window.

PREORDER FAQ 

AUGUST PREORDERS

The window for preorders will open on the 1st of every month at 8AM central time / 9AM eastern time. Since the normal preorder window has already passed for August, this month’s preorders will open on August 9th at 8am. The shop will be closed until then.

ORDERING WINDOWS

When the shop reopens on the 1st of every month, all perfumes in the store and trinket packs will be available for purchase. I will close the store down after 24 hours or when the order volume has exceeded my capacity to fulfill orders by the end of the month, whichever comes first.

LEAD TIMES

Orders placed during the preorder timeframe will ship before the next preorder window on the 1st. If an order cannot ship prior to the next window due to stock issues, I will proactively reach out to offer one of three options: provide a new updated lead time, refund/cancel the order, or replace the item causing the delay with another item that is in stock. 

Please also note that orders are not always shipped in chronological order - shipping order is based on stock availability. However, I will try to honor up to one request per customer to fulfill their order by a certain date due to extenuating circumstances - I may not always be able to honor these requests depending on stock availability, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

OTHER EXPECTATIONS

MONTHLY MOTHS

A new Monthly Moth will be available during every single order window but they will no longer be available as trinkets. Each Monthly Moth will be available as a 5mL EdP for purchase, or it can be added as a free gift for orders that total $100+ after discounts. I am currently working on getting the functionality for this set up on the site.

August's Moth is Rosy Maple Moth, whose notes are inspired by the colors rather than the name: black cherry, cedrat, magnolia, cedar, fairy floss, and pink musk. The vibe is basically cherry lemonade for sungarden pixies. 

COMBINING ORDERS

I will no longer offer this service.

OTHER AUGUST AVAILABILITY

I am finishing up my Stuffkin II prototypes which has freed up OG Stuffkin’s vanilla for use in other perfumes. The OG Stuffkin will continue to be on the site and it will be available alongside whichever Stuffkin prototype is chosen. I’m not 100% sure what the naming convention will be - Stuffkin I and Stuffkin II, Sr. and Jr., I’m still deciding!

I will be reaching out to everyone who volunteered to be a Stuffkin prototype tester by the end of August with a goal of getting Stuffkin II on the site by October. I got a lot of interest and selected a group of people who all had different experience levels with Stuffkin, but I’d love more input from people who previously tried the OG Stuffkin and found yourself going anosmic. Please reach out to me if you’d be willing to try the new prototypes and fill out a feedback form about them. 

In addition to Stuffkin: Autumnkin, Scruffkin, and Skullkin will also be available for August’s preorder. The previous re-release date for these was September, but I know that’s around the time people want to start wearing fall scents again, so I’m doing it early. 

The Golden Curl has been reformulated and will be available. The notes are the same, but the atmospheric elements are stronger and the fruit notes in the top are slightly less strong and long-lasting. Leafcrown’d has been reformulated and will be available. The notes also have not changed but the tea accord has been reformulated to be stronger and the perfume has fewer sulfuric top notes due to a restructuring of the lychee accord and the pineapple accord.

OTHER IMPORTANT SEPTEMBER CHANGES

There are other changes coming in September. I will reannounce these things during the August 9th preorder window and shortly before the September preorder window with more details.

1. Prices will increase storewide.
2. I will add 10mL, 15mL, and 30mL bottles to the shop temporarily, and they will be on sale. These bottles are by the same manufacturer as my current 5mLs, which I have been having a lot of trouble with, so I have decided to upgrade to higher-quality bottles; the purpose of the sale is to make room in the studio and raise funds for these upgrades, so the bottles will only be available as long as supplies last. I am still deciding which bottles to buy, ultimately, so I will not have news about new sizes and bottles until September at the earliest.
3. PETRICHOR X part II will be available for preorder. Every perfume from PETRICHOR X part I will be made available until October. I will be putting out a poll to see which perfumes from the collection should be made part of the permanent collection and which ones should return for seasonal rotations, and I’ll do the same thing for part II after it has been out for a bit.

I’m working on some other fall Pixie Puffs and a new Candy Butcher Puff but they’re still in the early stages of testing (which is a late stage of prototyping / prototype finalization, if that makes sense!). So, I hope to have them ready for September, but they’re lower priority than PETRICHOR X II.

OCTOBER’S ORDERING WINDOW

I will be taking a vacation in the last half of October. It will be the first real vacation I have literally ever had in my life. It has been in the works for over a year and a half. October’s window will therefore be short and may not last the full 24 hours. I’ll send out another reminder in both September and October.

SITE FUNCTIONALITY

When preorders are not open during future months, I will do my best to leave perfume pages up on the site so people can see full details of the perfume and read the perfume reviews. However, this will have to start after the August 9th preorder window so that I can make the necessary infrastructure changes and FAQ changes. Until then, all physical products have been marked inactive on the backend so that I can get the new structural changes up.

FREE TRINKET REQUESTS

Requests for specific free trinkets will continue to be honored (unless it is for the Monthly Moth) to the best of my ability, stock permitting. When stock of a perfume is low, bottle orders and trinket pack orders take priority over the free sample requests, so if you want to ensure that you receive a specific sample, please include it in your trinket pack. I will never swap out a trinket in a trinket pack without proactively reaching out first.

CURRENT ORDERS AND TAT

I am currently over TAT due to issues surrounding the PETRICHOR X release and the sheer volume of sales. I kicked off the collection with a full stock of every perfume and have run out of most perfumes multiple times. I truly did not anticipate this level of interest and while I am incredibly honored I am also incredibly overwhelmed, so please bear with me.

Based on the numerous emails I received today, many people are quite upset. If you have not received your order yet, it will be shipping soon. I do have a fairly sudden sonogram to check my thyroid nodule on Tuesday and I just found out that my street will be closed on Thursday, which may limit the amount of orders I can ship both Tuesday and Thursday (depending on the logistics of the closure and how close I can park to my house), but if you have an outstanding order with me that is over TAT I will be emailing you once your order is dropped off between now and Saturday (although the email from me may be in the late evening). If you want a refund, email me. If you don't want a refund, please don’t worry! I will not proactively refund you or cancel your order, I promise! Otherwise, please hold tight til the end of the week - you are welcome to proactively reach out to me if you wish but I will not be prioritizing responses to these during daytime hours, there is a very limited window of time during the day to ship items out, so please don't be alarmed - I will have to respond after PO hours.

I normally get anywhere from 10-30 emails a day. I have gotten twice that number today. Here are some of the questions I received:

• Am I scammer? Expressing disappointment is totally fine, but keep it above board, please. You’ll know if you’re running afoul of this because you’ll be typing the words “Are you a scammer? Are you trying to steal from me?” I won’t respond to these - I will simply refund your order and I’ll let the Shopify cancellation email do all the talking for me. There are more efficient ways to scam people than through fine fragrance, one of the lowest profit margin products I could possibly develop, so we both know that if you’re coming at me like this you’re trying to be hurtful / incendiary, which means we’re past the point where fulfilling your order benefits either of us.

• Am I going to exceed my quoted TAT in the future? If I might exceed TAT due to a stock issue, I will reach out. Right now due to the sheer volume of orders and stock issues it is extremely difficult for me to reach out to every single person impacted ahead of time, so any orders over TAT WILL be shipped by Saturday at the absolute latest and, again, I will be following up via email. I will be prioritizing actually shipping orders and emailing after the drop-off over responding to proactive enquiries. The preorder process should help a lot with this in the future - it should be easier to address stock issues and offer proactive updates if there will be delays.

• Why didn’t you shut down if you knew you were behind? While I appreciate the people who have made this suggestion out of kindness thinking it would save me headaches in the future, I have been closing down regularly at the end of every month, sometimes a few days early, and I can say with confidence that closing down in any capacity actually backfires pretty badly. I get that this seems like an obvious and foolproof solution, but it often creates additional work, and it's easy for people to miss the information about the shop closures, which causes panic about things selling out. Without fail I get at least a couple of handful of emails every time I close at the end of every month, even though I put up an announcement bar and a banner on the front page (in addition to mentioning it in my FAQ) - I'm sharing this to elucidate part of the extra workload. When I reopen, I get a flood of orders, often within minutes of making stuff available again, and this creates a cycle of playing catch-up. To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with people reaching out because they don't realize I'm closed! My point is to share that shop closures generate an unexpected amount of work and chaos. And that's understandable, since people don't see what's going on on the backend. So, yes, well-meaning advice, but misguided - it may work for some businesses but it is not working for my business and I am hoping the preorder model flips this on its head a bit.
  

• Why don’t I hire someone to help me? This isn't feasible but I appreciate the recommendation. I am currently working out of my home - I have an enclosed studio here and an office where I pack orders. I am currently the sole caretaker of 3 elderly ladies (one grandmother, two cats), all of whom have rapidly progressing stage 3 kidney disease. (This is in addition to two other cats, who are precious young darlings, and they are thankfully in good health.) My grandmother also happens to have severe osteoarthritis with bone spurs in her wrists and a chronic back and hip issue, so she is rapidly losing independence in what she can physically do, and mentally she is also going through an onset of dementa-like symptoms that her doctors have referred to as "deconditioning," which basically means that her general physical decline and chronic pain is leading to a cognitive decline with a marked increase in dementia-like episodes and regressions; for everyone's safety and dignity, I cannot have someone unfamiliar in our space. I have looked into renting studio space, and retail space is the only option here - that is beyond my budget, and I need to be at home with her most days. Taking on a role of "boss" diminishes my ability to grow more successfully into my roles as business owner and caretaker. Again, while I appreciate that these suggestions are well-meaning, they also underestimate the expense and burden of hiring employees; having employees creates additional overhead and resource debt. I’m working 10-14 hour days currently on top of my household responsibilities; hiring and training employees will add to this workload. I think hustle culture tries to normalize these things - working long hours or going into further debt to hire employees and run your business like a corporation is just what you have to do to be successful as an entrepreneur and an artist. I get where that comes from, but right now I don’t have any choice but to reject that as unsustainable for my own health and for my family's health. I would like to grow in that direction eventually and in the interim I may look into offering contract work for things that can be outsourced. Until I can make that happen, for now, moving to this preorder method and raising my prices in September is the most sustainable way for me to try to find some balance and reclaim some agency over my days and my own health.
  

 

IN CLOSING

I owe my grandma a lot - she’s actually not my biological grandmother; she was my grandfather’s girlfriend, and she saw that I’d been born into a really bad situation, so she stepped in to care for me when nobody else in my life could.

We grew up extremely impoverished, but she kept me as stable as possible in an environment full of abusers and addicts, and she kept me out of the Texas foster system, which is notorious for chewing children up and spitting them back out. And I never would’ve made it out of there alive - I was damaged as hell. Am damaged as hell, I guess - I don’t know if you ever fully get over what I went through as a kid because it was pretty bad, as in “sex trafficked in drug dens” bad. But despite how damaged I was from this, my grandma stayed with me, and she tried to teach me that I was worth loving (and that my mother deserved love and empathy too).

30-something years later and I still struggle with the ghosts my mother gave me, but I am only here, alive and making perfume, because my grandma gave me the gift of safety, care, and compassion. So, I would really like to do the same for her as we head towards the end. And it’s becoming pretty clear that we’re heading there faster than we had hoped.

So, I’d love to free up the time and emotional energy to make this last stretch together as meaningful and high-quality as possible. Yesterday was her birthday, and Friday was my grandfather’s birthday. So, this weekend was really hard for her and it may have been her last birthday with me, but I was so wrapped up in my own stress from trying to get orders out that I completely forgot about both days.

This was actually the biggest wake-up call for me out of everything, and the biggest reason I’m trying to figure out a new way forward. So, this news was in the pipeline before I woke up to my inbox getting suckerpunched this morning. Being a better caretaker for her - a more present caretaker - can only happen if I’m a better business owner, so I need to facilitate systems that make it easier to be better. Sunday was also the new moon in Leo, conjuncting my midheaven in the 10th house. So, this seems like an appropriate time for a new start. I'm a Scorpio rising - transformation is what I do best.

I know our transactional culture also teaches us that it’s uncouth or inappropriate for business owners to be vulnerable or to reveal much about their own lives, especially deep-seated traumas that they still deal with.

But. I pour everything that I am into the perfumes I make - every version of me I've been, everything I've fought through including addictions and eating disorders and my daily struggle with the suicidal ideations I've dealt with for as long as I can remember and the hard-won stability I've carved out for myself after an extremely unstable childhood - they're all in there. All of this fire and ash and rebirth is in every perfume I make because I’m an artist first and foremost. They're a reflection of who I am, and every other aspect of the business is as well, for better or worse. This means right now that it’s chaotic because I am too. But I’m getting better. I’m learning all the time. And I hope that the weird vulnerable pieces of myself in my work reflect something kind and cherished that you hold in yourself - feral hearts in wild camaraderie with one another, feeling seen and understood. Maybe it’s not that deep to you, but it is to me and it’s why I do this. If the TAT has been too much and my perfumes aren’t worth it and you don’t wanna see maudlin shit like this or know anything about my life, that means my perfumery isn’t for you and that’s fine. I completely understand - it won't be for everyone and shouldn't be for everyone. I'll still be kind to you and I hope you'll be kind to me. No hard feelings, thanks so much for trying.

But if you’re still here, still reading, still interested, thank you. I cannot begin to express how much your support and your presence means to me, so thank you, thank you, thank you. I thank you from the bottom of my queer weirdo goblin heart; as scraggly and damaged as it is, it’s big as hell, bottomless, big enough for all of you, and you're in it always. Thank you for believing in it.

Until August 9th, then.

- Ashe