Bernardo Möller was 13 when he started collecting fragrance. “I was the only kid in school that would wear white jeans and was drenched in perfume,” he says. “Everybody knew me for that: obsessed with smells.” Möller, whose collection is now over 500 scents strong, always knew that fragrance was his passion — but up until 2020, he believed working in the business of smell was “unattainable.”
So Möller pursued a career as a real estate agent, a job that afforded him financial freedom and a comfortable lifestyle. Then the pandemic hit, forcing him to reevaluate everything. “When my father passed away from COVID, that really changed everything for me,” Möller says. “He had such an inspiring, beautiful life… He died happy because he was following his passion to the very end.”
The loss instilled a new sense of urgency in Möller. Privately, he had always wanted to launch a fragrance brand — he already had a name and concept tucked away in the back of his mind. A month after his father died, he confided in his life partner, Giancarlo Perez: “I want to do this fragrance line that I’ve always dreamed of.” Perez, a neurosurgeon, immediately agreed to helm its business operations, with Möller leading all things creative. Suddenly, Möller’s brand — a luxury perfume house called House of Bō — was born.
Two months after its launch in October 2021, House of Bō clinched a coveted retail partnership with Neiman Marcus. By 2023, one of the brand’s scents, Infinitoud, by perfumer Carlos Benaïm, was nominated for Men’s Luxury Fragrance of the Year at the Fragrance Foundation Awards. In an industry that tends to oscillate between two extremes — either hyper-glamorous or hyper-conceptual — House of Bō occupies a comfortable middle ground that’s both commercial and niche, an attribute that’s less the making of a clever marketing strategy and more the result of Möller’s unwavering belief in honoring one’s authentic self.
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