How Okami Parfums Went From a Butter Paper Idea to Selling Out Without an Ads Manager

India makes some of the finest carpets in the world. Ask anyone in the West what a "Persian rug" is and they'll know. Ask them where Bhadohi is, and you'll get a blank stare, even though it's one of the largest carpet-exporting hubs on the planet. That gap between making something world-class and actually owning the story around it is, according to Ali Syed, the exact reason India still doesn't have a perfume brand that can stand next to Kenzo or Issey Miyake.

Ali would know. Before he started bottling fragrances, he was working policy at the Ministry of External Affairs' think tank, then with the Asian Development Bank, with a stint at the United Nations in Ukraine tucked in between. Not exactly the resume you'd expect from someone who now spends his time debating top notes and base notes with perfumers.

In 2021, he tried his hand at a climate-based skincare app called SuperSkin. It didn't work. So he went back to the drawing board, and this time built Okami Parfums from first principles, taking cues from Japanese perfumery, refusing to do samples, and somehow selling out without ever really trying to go viral.

What makes this conversation worth reading isn't just the product story. It's how unapologetically Ali rejects the standard D2C playbook, no discounts, no samples, minimal social media, and still ends up with a brand that Vogue has covered and that grew almost entirely through word of mouth from two tweets.

Key Takeaways: Building a Fragrance Brand Without the Usual Playbook

On product before everything else:

• Okami launched with zero performance marketing and did over 20 lakhs in revenue between August and mid-December, driven entirely by two organic tweets.
• The brand maintains a 17% recurring customer rate without running retention campaigns, deliberately choosing not to "bother" customers.
• Perfume making requires a STEM background because fragrance formulation happens at a molecular level, which is why Ali studied how Japanese houses like Issey Miyake and Kenzo build muted, restrained scent profiles instead of loud ones.

On the India branding gap:

• India exports more carpets than most countries but has no globally recognized carpet brand, a pattern Ali sees repeating in fragrance.
• Ajmal is one of the few Indian fragrance names with national recognition, and even that grew through repatriated branding via the Middle East diaspora rather than a story built from India outward.
• Going global requires patient capital and a repeatable storytelling formula. For Okami, that's precision, quality, and minimalism, values repeated across every product decision.

On staying deliberately un-scalable in the right ways:

• Okami sells only 70ml bottles, no samples, no small sizes, targeting second-time perfume users who already know their notes.
• The bottle size was recently cut from 100ml to 70ml purely because of carry-on luggage weight, not cost.
• Ali personally took customer service calls for the first 10-11 months to learn operational details down to the courier bag micron size.

Q: Could you give us a quick introduction to yourself and Okami?

Ali Syed: I'm from the city of Lucknow. I've been living in Delhi for over 10 years. Founder of Okami. Prior to that, my last job was with Asian Development Bank. Before that, I was with the think tank of the Ministry of External Affairs. Worked for the United Nations in Ukraine. Studied in Costa Rica. That's like going back in time. And now I'm running a fragrance brand in India which has been doing exceedingly well. This is my first full-fledged venture, but if you were to ask me the rate of attempts I've made in life with entrepreneurship, maybe this is two and a half. This one being the complete one. Half being SuperSkin that I tried out in 2021, which was climate action skin care.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A resume that goes from the UN to Ukraine to perfume bottles sounds random until you realize the common thread is someone who studies a system deeply before touching it. That instinct is the whole Okami story.

Q: What was SuperSkin, and why do you think it didn't work?

Ali Syed: The idea was very idealistic. The problem I was solving was that branded products were too expensive. I wanted to make it more accessible by giving people pharma grade product, because any pharmaceutical facility follows the highest standards to get its permit. So imagine marrying Tata 1mg with Sephora. On a serious note, I think in modern times, besides having a great product, you need to have a certain amount of capital in order to launch it and sustain it for a long-term period.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A great idea without capital runway isn't a failed idea, it's an unfinished one. SuperSkin didn't die because it was wrong, it died because idealism doesn't pay warehouse rent.

Q: How did the learnings from SuperSkin carry into Okami?

Ali Syed: No, no learnings have applied with Okami because that clearly didn't work out well. With Okami, the product turned out to be so good. I took an insane amount of time, sat with multiple perfumers, studied how Japan would come up with its own perfumery. There is Indian perfumery, French perfumery, Middle Eastern perfumery. Being a fan of Issey Miyake, I realized that Japanese fragrances, be it Kenzo, be it Issey Miyake, are slightly different. They are slightly muted. They are not loud, because that's not part of the Japanese culture. And that's how Okami came about in terms of product development.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Not every failure needs a lesson. Sometimes the real lesson is starting over from a completely different first principle.

Q: Why do you think India doesn't have a perfume brand that can compete globally, despite our history with attars?

Ali Syed: First of all, we Indians have now learned about storytelling. One of the biggest examples would be Forest Essentials. We're pretty early in that stage. Indian carpets go all over the world, but you never hear about them, you hear about Persian rugs, whereas India is one of the biggest exporters of carpets coming from Uttar Pradesh, Bhadohi. Finally we are learning the art of storytelling, and hopefully in the near future you'll be having brands coming out of India. Forget global scale, there aren't even Indian fragrance brands that are national level famous. Ajmal has done it to a great extent, but even with them, it's like repatriated branding. They went to the Middle East, got very famous, and because India has a massive diaspora in West Asia, coming back, that's how it became a brand.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: We keep exporting the product and importing the story. Until Indian brands own their own narrative instead of borrowing credibility from abroad, "Made in India" will keep meaning "manufactured," not "created."

Q: Is fragrance manufacturing itself a challenge for India, or is it purely a branding problem?

Ali Syed: Perfumes are not very hard to manufacture, filling is the main part. The biggest challenge is coming up with the right kind of juice. You have to hire a perfumer, because perfume making isn't as simple as what you find pitched at airports. You need a STEM background because you have to study it at the molecular level. Grasse Institute of Perfumery is known in the world for it. You have to hire people who understand fragrance at the molecular level, what's going to go with what, because the fragrance oils hold onto each other. The top note, middle note, heart note, base note, everything goes in together, and then science decides what pops out first and what comes later.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Perfume looks like art but runs on chemistry. The brands that treat it purely as vibes without the science behind it are the ones that go flat after six months.

Q: What was the first "aha" moment where you realized Okami was bigger than your previous work?

Ali Syed: Honestly, the first micro aha moment happened when I was constantly coming up with ideas for the packaging. I remember suddenly having this moment where I felt there needs to be a butter paper inside the box. There was no team, it was just me working by myself. I got the butter papers printed and went to see a friend, it was kept at the back of my car. He turns around and asks, "What's this?" I show him the butter paper and ask, "Did you feel that something good is coming out of it?" That was the first micro aha moment. Once you really put your heart and soul into it, once you touch everything yourself, it has to be original. You have to build it from first principles.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Nobody falls in love with a spreadsheet projection. They fall in love with butter paper inside a box. The smallest, least "strategic" detail is usually the one that actually converts a stranger into a believer.

Q: Who is Okami's target customer, and why don't you offer samples?

Ali Syed: Second time users, people who have already been using perfumes for a long time. Okami is not an introductory product for them. We don't do sampling, we don't even do small bottles, we do 70ml, that's it. So you need to know your notes already. A lot of our buyers are collectors, people who understand Okami. We don't get demands for samples. The idea is very simple, we are catering to an audience that understands fragrances, and we build on top of that.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most D2C brands chase the widest possible funnel. Okami deliberately built a narrow gate and let the product do the convincing on the other side of it.

Q: Tell us the story behind your four perfumes and how the brand got its name.

Ali Syed: Okami means great deity in Japanese kanji script. I linked it to the elements, four moods, four elements. Okami is the brand name, and it's followed by a series called The Elementals. You have the ocean, the sun, the wind, and the night, that completes the entire gamut of your perfume wearing. Perfume is the final touch of getting ready for something. You wear clothes, then you wear perfume. So we give people an opportunity to wear something fresh via the ocean, very tropical, very meadowy. The wind is very elevating, very morning. The sun is the sun, and the night is the night.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Notice what's missing here: no lavender, no musk, no jargon a regular customer has to Google. Okami sells moments, not molecules, and that's exactly why non-nerds can shop it too.

Q: How did the brand's early hype actually happen?

Ali Syed: I didn't create the hype, it was purely accident, and that was the best part of it. It was the pure generosity of the person who found us. Harneet Kaur, shoutout to Harneet. On the 18th of August she finds out about Okami through a WhatsApp group, writes a massive Substack page about perfumes, orders all four of them, gets them delivered, and tweets about it. That tweet just blows up. Like 2,500 people bookmark that tweet. We got 7 lakhs in sale in a single day. This was August, this is when it just started, the baby just came out of the womb, that's it.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Seven lakhs in a day from one tweet isn't luck showing up randomly, it's luck finding a product that was already good enough to survive the spotlight the moment it arrived.

Q: What happened after that first viral moment?

Ali Syed: Luck also plays a major role, but you only get lucky when you've worked hard enough, I think. I have a buyer from Nizamuddin East in Delhi constantly making purchases of Yoru, the night fragrance. I wrote to him, he didn't respond, so I found him on Instagram. Turns out he's Professor Sanjay Bakshi, a major influential figure, a value real estate investor. He said he loved the product and wanted to help. We met in the neighborhood, and on 2nd of October, Professor Bakshi tweets about Okami again, and it blows up. From August to mid-December we did zero performance marketing, no ads manager, and we did more than 20 lakhs with zero spend. That was the product market fit validation exercise, nothing like it.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Two strangers, zero paid marketing, twenty lakhs in revenue. If your product needs an ads budget to prove people want it, you don't actually know if people want it yet.

Q: Was there a moment before the viral tweets where you already sensed you had something?

Ali Syed: Yes, before we went into performance marketing, this was supposed to be a retail project. We were over many kiosks across the country, but the margins didn't work out, even though it was a great offer from one of my mentors, Mayank Bathija, a very successful young entrepreneur who gave me access to his sales channel. Once we got into retail, we were outperforming every single brand that was spending crores on marketing. I knew then that this book was being judged by its cover, and that was a very important point for me.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Outselling brands with crore-sized ad budgets while spending zero on marketing isn't an underdog story, it's proof the packaging and product experience were doing the heavy lifting the whole time.

Q: You mentioned a 17% recurring customer rate without bothering people. Walk us through that philosophy.

Ali Syed: We have a policy, we are not going to bother our customers. Either the product is good enough and you come back to us, or you don't. The product has to do all the work, and we have over 17% recurring customers. Even if the product speaks for itself, it's always a slight bother unless you're spamming them every day, which isn't even the budget or the idea. The idea is, it's something good, let it go out to as many people as possible.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Retention marketing exists because most products aren't good enough to retain people on their own. Okami's version of a retention strategy is simply not needing one.

Q: What's been the hardest part of building Okami behind the scenes?

Ali Syed: The other word for entrepreneurship is dealing with friction. There's friction with turnaround time for getting the product ready, friction with costing, friction with dispatch and warehousing. The biggest friction, which every D2C brand faces more or less, is pilferage. It's not even that big a deal financially, but it annoys me because I'm maybe a middle-aged man, but I'm still very idealistic about life. I'm like, why are you going to whack my product? During delivery, a delivery partner just whacks the product. I know I can't fix it, I'll make peace with it eventually, it's just part of the process, but right now it's annoying.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Every founder story skips the part where you're mentally worked up over a stolen delivery box. The glossy version of entrepreneurship never mentions how much bandwidth petty friction actually eats.

Q: What do you think has driven the brand's growth more than anything else?

Ali Syed: I don't agree that product is just one part of the game and then there's social media doing the rest. We lose our ability to question things when we listen to someone through a screen, we think that's the truth, it's not the truth at all. Product plays a massive role. People order from Zomato all the time without tasting the food, and honestly that's more problematic if you think about it, you don't even know what's in the kitchen and you're literally consuming it. So don't tell me people need to smell a perfume before buying. Give the right kind of information and let people decide.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The "you can't sell perfume without samples" objection collapses the second you compare it to how casually people already trust food delivery apps with zero sensory proof. Trust is a habit, not a rule.

Q: What do you want Okami to look like in the next five years?

Ali Syed: I think there will be two to three Indian brands that will come with natural recall, and Okami is going to be one of them. It has already shown all the signs of what a brand turns out to be. My philosophy was always that I am launching a product, not a brand, the junta will decide whether it's a brand or not. The response we've gotten, the verdict is there, it is a brand. We still haven't started our social media properly, and we've probably served four times more orders than the number of followers we have on Instagram.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A brand with more customers than followers has its incentives exactly backwards from most D2C companies today, and that's precisely why it works.

Q: What advice would you give a first-time founder trying to build a product people actually want?

Ali Syed: First, there has to be a sense of honesty with the founder itself. I've experienced retail collaborations with a real insincerity toward the consumer, where it's just twenty products of the same shape and size thrown at people without thinking about what makes their life easier. You need that consumer lens. I always tell my marketing team, remember, before becoming a business owner, I was also a consumer. If I'm not going to pick it as a consumer, why should I expect someone else to? Originality requires sitting with your product for a while. When choosing our retail sample vials, I took three to four days just picking the right vial, keeping it on my table, letting it co-inhabit my room to see if it bothered me or not.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most founders test their product on a spreadsheet. Ali tested a bottle cap by literally living with it in his room for days. That's the difference between building a product and manufacturing one.

Q: What mistakes do you see founders making, especially when building for tier two markets or mass premium segments?

Ali Syed: I think the same mistake Tata made with Nano, rubbing it too much in people's face that this is for the middle class. You can build for tier two, but even tier two deserves something nice, you can't have a demarcation so visibly based on economic disparity. People sometimes have no filter between sales strategy and marketing strategy. The sales strategy can say tier two, this is an elevation, this is a graduation for you, that's smart. But screaming it as "this is cheap for you" is where it goes wrong.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Nobody wants to buy the "affordable" version of anything out loud. Sell the upgrade, never sell the discount, even when the price point is exactly the same.

Q: Do you plan to take Okami global, and what's the strategy?

Ali Syed: If Okami can go global, I would love that. I'm working on diversification of SKUs, not limited to perfumes, two or three very diverse products linked to scent that we have in mind, mind you, not candles. Going international requires patient capital and a repeatable storytelling formula. For us, that's precision, quality, and minimalism, we keep falling back to those values and every product speaks of that. It sounds easy, but it's not, you have to say no a lot. Every yes is also like ten no's.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A brand's values only mean something once they've said no to money because of them. Anyone can put "precision and minimalism" on a website, few can turn down a retail deal because of it.

Q: What are your thoughts on fundraising, given you're bootstrapped and profitable?

Ali Syed: The VC community may have received a lot of bad PR in recent years, but I'm of the opinion that if you get the right kind of partners, it can definitely be an elevation point. If I find partners who understand the value of precision and delivering authentic products, I'd be very happy to join hands. VCs make money, founders make brand, if we can have that intermarriage between the two, I'm good to go. But right now my goal is to turn this into something long term, really long term. Money is coming in, and it will come in larger volumes.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Ali isn't anti-VC, he's anti-mismatch. Capital isn't the enemy of a slow, deliberate brand, the wrong kind of capital pushing the wrong kind of speed is.

Final Thoughts: The Product Has to Do All the Work

Ali's closing perspective: "We are not going to bother our customer. The product has to do all the work."

The bottom line: Okami's growth defies almost every rule of modern D2C playbooks. No samples, no discounts, minimal social media, no retention campaigns, and yet a 17% recurring customer rate and two accidental tweets that generated over 20 lakhs in sales with zero ad spend. The common thread across everything Ali describes, from the butter paper in the box to the three days spent staring at a bottle cap, is an almost stubborn refusal to cut corners on the actual product experience.

For founders building anything in a crowded consumer category, the practical implication is worth sitting with. Chasing scale before the product itself is fully resolved, before you've lived with your own bottle cap, tested your own packaging, answered your own customer emails, tends to just move the friction downstream instead of removing it. Okami spent its first ten months answering every customer call personally before touching performance marketing at all.

What's coming next for Okami is a bet on diversification beyond perfume and, eventually, a push toward global shelves. Whether Indian fragrance brands can finally close the storytelling gap that's kept them out of the Sephoras and department stores of the world remains an open question. But if Ali's approach holds, the answer will come from obsessing over the product long before it comes from a marketing budget.

Q: How can people connect with you and learn more about Okami?

Ali Syed: Find us on our website, you can just Google Okami Parfums, you'll find us. Our website is okami.life. And on Instagram, we are okami.parfums, spelled p-a-r-f-u-m-s.

Final words: The lesson buried in Ali's story isn't really about perfume. It's about resisting the urge to look sideways at what everyone else in your category is doing, and instead sitting with your own product long enough to know, without a doubt, that it's good. Everything else, the virality, the recurring customers, the brand recall, tends to follow from that one decision.

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