Reopening announcement & product updates

May 7, 2025

UPDATE - May 7th, 11:45PM CST

Thank you so much to everyone who has visited us, placed orders, or reached out with words of encouragement!

We've decided to stop accepting new orders for now so we can focus on fulfilling existing orders.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, but we look forward to reopening the shop once we've made a dent in the queue.

Thank you!

- Ashe

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Mythpunk Olfactive is now reopen and accepting orders.

First, we have some announcements. We've made some changes to streamline our product offerings, prices, turnaround time and inventorying system. We also address evaporation issues with the trinkets and we discuss what we've been doing to prepare to reopen, the outreach we've made to customers impacted by our closure in 2024, and what happened in the aftermath as well as our prolonged absence.

We know there’s a lot of information here so we appreciate you for reading it!

Product sizes & prices

General catalogue and seasonal products will be available in two atomizer bottle options:

6mL baubles for $30: These are the same glass bottles we have always used, but their capacity is actually 6mL and not 5mL.
2.8mL trinkets for $8: These are also the same vials we previously offered in sample packs, but they are now sold individually and filled completely full.

These can be purchased via the dropdown on each product page.

If you’re math-ing along at home, you’ll notice the 2.8mL has a lower price per mL than the baubles - we go into more detail about why in “Trinket changes” just below.

Trinket changes

Previously, we sold trinkets in sets of five, and they were partially filled to 1.5mL (or 1.25mL for premium fragrances)**. This allowed us to price the trinket packs at $25, which made the price per mL consistent with the 6mL baubles formerly known as 5mLs.

However, we began getting some reports of evaporation in mid-2024. A little bit of evaporation is normal with all alcohol-based perfumes, but some customers had trinkets that evaporated completely - that wasn’t normal, and it’s a bad experience. Unfortunately, we were running low on vials when the reports began, and we didn’t have time to source new vials before we had to resupply.

So, we wanted to be mindful of that during our relaunch and make updates to mitigate evaporation where possible.

Filling the vials completely full helps mitigate evaporation in shipment, and ultimately customers get more use out of the trinkets, so we decided to begin doing that. The increased volume means that we have to increase the price, but we were uncomfortable pricing them equivalently to the baubles.

For one thing, evaporation rates could still become problematic as customers use the perfume and the headspace - the air above the perfume in the vial - increases. Also, the vials are roughly half the capacity of our full sizes, so pricing them equivalently doesn’t make them a very affordable option for sampling. Due to their increased price, we decided to put them up for sale individually rather than in packs to give customers greater control over the total of their cart. (Also, trinket packs made it very difficult to manage inventory, because perfumes we sold within trinket packs couldn’t be tracked adequately.)

Sourcing better trinket vials - hopefully with a smaller capacity so we can price them more affordably - is a high priority for us. In the meantime, we’re hoping that these updates feel like a good temporary solution to the problem.

** On the site, we previously advertised that the trinkets were filled to 1mL / .75mL. This is because our supplier listed the vials as being 2mL when they are actually 2.8mL. Lesson learned: always double check the volume of bottles manually!

Changes to our perfumer alcohol’s base

We are now mixing isopropyl myristate (IPM) into our perfumer’s alcohol base.

Without doing this, we were facing larger price increases - the price of the perfumer’s alcohol base that we use has increased in price by 150%, while IPM now costs what we used to pay for the base. So, this helps us avoid that.

However, there’s one other positive side to this - IPM decreases the volatility of the perfumes and results in slower evaporation.

Reaching out to us if you experienced evaporation (+ storage tips to mitigate evaporation risk)

If you experienced evaporation issues with a trinket pack order in 2024, please feel free to contact us for replacements for the trinkets that evaporated. We’re happy to swap the trinkets out for others you might prefer, or if a replacement isn’t wanted, we can try to work with you to find a solution that makes you happy.

We hope that the introduction of IPM to the base and filling the vials completely full helps mitigate some of the existing issues. We recommend taking the following steps as well when you receive your trinkets:

Store trinkets upright in a cool environment out of direct sunlight. During our testing, we noticed that storing them upright in a dark location reduced the rate of evaporation.
Remove trinkets from the shipping box when they arrive and tighten the caps. Trinkets are shipped on their sides and the caps may get loose during shipping, which could worsen evaporation.
Plan on using the perfume in your trinkets when the volume gets low. Perfume evaporates when exposed to air and increased headspace in the vials can increase evaporation rates.

We’ve put this information on the product page for each perfume to surface the potential evaporation issues for new customers.

The new inventorying system + studio goblins

We’ve hired some help in the studio with tasks like taking inventory, folding boxes, labeling and filling vials, trimming the bauble tubes, and helping with order fulfillment. These are friends and family of mine who were looking for work and wanted to help with the reopening, so the timing was mutually beneficial.

We’ve also been setting up a new dynamic perfume and material inventorying system that will help improve operational efficiency. With the new system, we inventory each perfume’s mother bottle weekly, prefill a small number of 6mL baubles and 2.8mL trinkets with each perfume, and then we add those to the site for sale.

The system gives us highly granular insight into stock levels and material levels - when we add baubles and trinkets to the site, their volume is automatically subtracted from the mother bottle, and we’ll get notified when that’s running low. Every time we restock a perfume’s mother bottle, the materials we used in the restock are dynamically adjusted, and the system notifies us when it’s time to reorder materials.

This prevents us from selling perfume we don’t have in stock, helps us provide and maintain an accurate TAT for order fulfillment (our #1 operational goal as a company) and it also helps us provide more accurate ETAs for restocks.

Changes to the free shipping threshold + free trinkets + updates on safeversaries / birthday baubles

Due to increases in the cost of shipping and handling, we’re raising our free shipping threshold from $50 to $90.00. We’d love to lower this again at some point, but the name of the game for us right now is sustainability.

Also, we are pausing our freebie programs - the two free trinkets we offered with every order and the safeversaries / birthday baubles program.

We love offering these programs, so this is not a permanent change. But, with the new inventorying system and getting relaunched, we’re trying to be very cautious about overextending ourselves and our stock, and we want to experience our new inventorying system in an active sale environment before we throw too much chaos at it, especially with multiple people working on order fulfillment.

We hope to provide an update in a few months after we’ve settled in and assessed the best implementation option for these programs.

Perfume updates - seasonal releases and discontinuations

First, a temporary goodbye

After the Night’s Shade and Strange Bedfellow from the Twice-Told Tales collection are being retired temporarily. We plan to re-release these as part of limited edition collections for Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest at a later date, but we don’t have an ETA at this time. We have added our remaining bottles to the site at a discount.

Now, a hello and a welcome back!

Mangomallow Puff is the newest addition to the summer puffs. Along with the returning Mermallow Puff and Moonmallow Puff, it will available until the end of July. They will be restocked during this time if they run out.

Beachkin is currently out of stock but will be restocked ASAP.

Seasonal overstock on the site

Additionally, we’ve added 6mL baubles of seasonal overstock to the site:

Five Malloween fragrances: Black Witch Moth, Root Beer Float Puff, Scruffkin, Skullkin, and Autumnkin. These will return officially in August, at which time trinkets will be available.
The PETRICHOR X collection. These will also return later this year, at which time trinkets will be available.
Rosy Maple Moth (August 2024’s moth). This will also return officially in August, but we made more recently and have added the overstock to the site.
Candy Butcher Puff. This perfume won’t be returning in its current form, so we have discounted it.

Please note that some of this stock is very limited, and we’re unable to restock until the official rereleases later this year.

The shop’s closure and unfulfilled orders

Now we're getting to the point where we address some of what's happened.

Before closing the shop down in 2024, we cancelled outstanding orders with trinkets (due to running out of them), and only full size bottle orders remained in the system to be fulfilled. Many of these were fulfilled, but many more were not. As part of our reopening plan, we have been in the process of reaching out to these customers to make things right. At this point, all outreach is complete, and with the exception of some orders still going out Wednesday, all reship requests have been actioned.

For orders that were unfulfilled or marked as fulfilled without showing a successful delivery, I made outreach directly to customers. Some had chargebacks; some did not. What we learned is that not all chargebacks are recorded in Shopify’s interface, so the outreach was framed around clarifying whether a chargeback happened successfully and offering to ship the order. We offered this even if a chargeback was successful - this is something we wanted to do as a token of apology for disappearing on these customers while they had active orders.
For the orders that were cancelled and refunded: I’ve gone through these to verify that the refund was processed. We went through these as well to ensure they were processed properly, and we made outreach where necessary. We didn't offer to reship these because they were cancelled and communicated about proactively.

At this point, all outreach is complete. If you feel you should’ve been in one of these categories, please reach out to us!

Additional thoughts - looking back & moving forward

So far, I’ve talked about the product updates, shop changes, the new inventory system, my studio goblins, evaporation issues, the shop closure last year and what we’ve done to make things right for customers impacted by our order fulfillment issues.

The only thing left is to talk about the “what” and “why” of it - why some orders went unfulfilled after the shop closure and what the circumstances were that led to that happening.

I acknowledge that I disappointed (and worried) a lot of people and I’m sorry for that. I've done a lot of work during the shop closure to rethink our business model and to streamline how the business is run that will hopefully result in a much more sustainable and consistent business. I know that there's a history of this cycle playing out in the indie perfume community and that it doesn’t usually end well - I know I’m statistically likely to fail. That’s really scary, and it’s humbling to try to pick up the pieces in such a public way, but I'm doing my best to learn from this cycle and be better this time around.

That being said, the circumstances around my needing to close and what happened in the time after are very personal. I appreciate everyone who has been patient or reached out to express support or concern. It's easy to get caught in the trap of oversharing or justifying failures and fuck-ups, but my goal here is to acknowledge them, make amends, and move forward.

I know that a successful business requires a combination of good products, sustainable prices, efficient systems for operation, and persistent effort. I’ve detailed some of those plans above, but I’m under no delusion that all will be forgiven or forgotten, and I know that the news of my reopening will be met with excitement by some and suspicion by others. A mix of the two is understandable too.

Wherever you fall on the spectrum of second chances and whether you think I deserve one or not, I appreciate you being here - thank you for reading this.