Website:
uniquescents.co
Job details:
WORK WITH A BRAND THAT HAS DESIGNED SIGNATURE AMBIENT SCENTS FOR WEWORK, INDUSTRIOUS AND MARRIOTT.
Full-Time | Surat or Remote | ₹60,000–₹100,000/month
COME BUILD BRANDS, NOT JUST ASSETS
We are looking for a Brand & Graphic Designer to work directly with the founder across Laaveen, Strange Habit and HOTELAIR—three fragrance businesses at very different stages, with very different personalities.
We are a small team, but not an early-stage company trying to figure out whether people will buy what we make.
Laaveen has grown into a fragrance business serving hundreds of hotels across the U.S., with approximately $1 million in annual revenue across our existing businesses.
We have built partnerships internationally, supplied fragrance programs across dozens of locations for major hospitality and workplace clients, and learned how to turn fragrance into a recurring business rather than simply another product on a shelf. We have created bespoke signature scents for Hospitality and CRE brands including WeWork, Industrious and Marriott.
Now we're using that foundation to build the next generation of brands.
Strange Habit and HOTELAIR are opportunities to do something much more ambitious creatively.
And we're looking for the designer who wants to help shape them.
WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS
We don't want to hire an agency to hand us a finished identity and disappear.
We don't want a freelancer executing a predetermined list of deliverables.
And we don't want design to become a department that receives instructions after all the important decisions have already been made.
We want design inside the process of building the company.
The designer joining us will work directly with the founder while products, packaging, campaigns and brands are actually being conceived.
That means your work won't live in a presentation.
It will get manufactured.
Packaging you design will become physical packaging.
Campaigns you develop will go into the market.
Landing pages you design will sell real products.
Advertisements you create will be shown to real customers.
Visual systems you help establish could eventually appear across thousands of products, spaces and customer interactions.
And because the team is small, you won't be designer number 17 executing a creative director's system.
You will have a hand in creating the system.
WE TAKE TASTE SERIOUSLY
For us, design isn't decoration added after the business strategy is finished.
We spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about why something looks the way it does.
We study fragrance, fashion, hospitality, art, architecture, packaging, typography, interiors, photography and culture, not because every reference should become a moodboard, but because good brands require a much larger visual vocabulary than graphic design alone.
We don't believe that making something beige makes it sophisticated.
We don't believe minimalism automatically means good taste.
We don't want three brands following whatever visual language happens to be fashionable on Behance this year.
And we don't want every brand we build to look like it came from the same founder.
Laaveen, Strange Habit and HOTELAIR need completely different visual worlds.
That is part of what makes this role difficult and interesting.
THREE BRANDS. THREE DIFFERENT PROBLEMS.
LAAVEEN
Laaveen is already a real operating business serving hundreds of hospitality customers.
Here, design has to work commercially.
You'll encounter actual constraints: customers, sales, print, direct mail, digital advertising, packaging, physical products and a business that already has revenue.
You'll learn what happens when design leaves Figma and enters the real world.
STRANGE HABIT
Strange Habit starts somewhere else entirely.
It is being built around people who have developed their own point of view, people who notice, judge, choose and refine rather than simply borrowing whatever taste is currently being prescribed to them (the brand stands against borrowed taste).
Its fragrance names come from rituals and behaviors, not conventional fragrance fantasy.
The opportunity here isn't to make another attractive fragrance brand.
It's to help construct a recognizable cultural world around an idea.
HOTELAIR
HOTELAIR explores beauty, pleasure, status, taste and contradiction.
It is interested in richness rather than defaulting to reduction: layering, sensuality, ornament, abundance and complexity can all belong in its world.
But it cannot simply become "Indian maximalism," conventional luxury or Strange Habit with different typography.
We're interested in what contemporary Indian design and fragrance could become rather than simply reproducing visual codes developed somewhere else.
None of these brands should look related.
The person we hire will help make sure they don't.
WHAT YOU'LL ACTUALLY DO
You will work across:
- Brand identity and visual systems
- Fragrance and product packaging
- Paid advertising
- Campaign concepts
- Email marketing design
- Landing pages and e-commerce
- Flyers and direct mail
- Photography and image direction
- Product launches
- Print
- Presentations and sales materials
- Everyday brand execution
One week you may be developing a fragrance package.
The next you may be art-directing product photography.
The next you may be figuring out why an advertisement isn't working.
And occasionally we'll start with nothing more than an idea and ask:
What should this look like?
WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR
You should already understand your craft.
Typography. Hierarchy. Grids. Spacing. Proportion. Composition. Color. Image selection.
Illustrator, Photoshop and Figma should be tools rather than obstacles.
Packaging and print-production knowledge is highly valuable.
But we're not hiring primarily for software proficiency.
We're hiring for the quality of your eye and the quality of your brain behind it.
You notice things.
You notice an unusual package in a store.
You notice when photography across fashion begins changing.
You can look at two technically competent designs and explain why one feels relevant and the other somehow already feels dated.
When you save a reference, you don't only think:
"I like this."
You eventually want to understand:
"Why do I like this?"
YOU DON'T NEED TO ARRIVE WITH PERFECT TASTE
But you need the capacity to develop it quickly.
You'll work directly with a founder who is deeply involved in brand, product and creative direction.
You may be shown five references that appear completely unrelated.
Your job isn't to copy them.
Your job is to eventually understand what connects them and why you were shown them.
We want someone with unusually high learning velocity.
Someone who can receive direction today, understand the principle tomorrow and eventually make the decision independently.
YOU CANNOT HAVE ONE "STYLE"
This may be the most important requirement in the entire role.
A lot of talented designers develop a recognizable aesthetic and then apply variations of it to every client.
That won't work here.
HOTELAIR should look like HOTELAIR.
Strange Habit should look like Strange Habit.
Laaveen should look like Laaveen.
Your own taste should improve the decision-making.
It should not erase the identity of the brand.
WHAT YOU GET IN RETURN
We're asking for someone ambitious, so the opportunity needs to be ambitious too.
You'll get something that's difficult to get from doing isolated freelance projects:
continuity.
You'll be able to design something, launch it, watch customers respond to it, improve it, extend it into packaging, campaigns, digital experiences and physical spaces—and then see what that brand becomes over several years.
You'll have direct access to the person making the decisions.
Good ideas don't need to travel through five levels of approval.
And because we operate real businesses, good ideas have the opportunity to become real objects and real commercial outcomes quickly.
We're not looking for someone to stay a production designer forever.
We're looking for someone capable of becoming significantly better than they are today—and taking substantially more creative ownership as that happens.
If you're ambitious about becoming an exceptional designer, we want this company to be an unusually good place to do it.
COMPENSATION
₹60,000–₹100,000 per month
Full-time, based in Surat ideally or remotely.
Compensation depends on your portfolio, experience and demonstrated capability.
HOW TO APPLY
Ensure each part of each question is answered, attention to detail is extremely important.
Don't send us a long cover letter.
Send us your portfolio and answer these five questions.
1. Show us three pieces of design you love that you did NOT create.
Packaging, advertisements, websites, books, magazines, identities, fashion campaigns—anything.
For each, tell us:
What specifically makes it good?
Don't just tell us that it's clean, premium or minimal.
Tell us what you're seeing.
2. Show us one project from your own portfolio that best represents your taste.
Why?
And if you redesigned it today, what would you change?
3. What's one visual/design trend you're noticing right now?
More importantly:
Why do you think it's happening?
4. What do you actually look at?
Give us actual names.
Designers. Studios. Brands. Publications. Websites. Instagram accounts. Books. Photographers. Architects. Fashion houses. Artists.
Whatever genuinely contributes to your visual vocabulary.
5. What's something about design you've taught yourself during the last six months?
What made you curious about it?
How did you learn it?
Also include:
- Portfolio
- Current compensation
- Expected compensation
- Notice period
- Current location
- Software you use regularly
A BEAUTIFUL PORTFOLIO WILL GET OUR ATTENTION.
But we're looking for something beyond beautiful work.
We're looking for someone who sees things, understands why they work, learns unusually quickly and wants the opportunity to help build brands people may eventually recognize.
If you've been looking for a company through which you can do the best work of your career rather than simply complete another set of deliverables, we'd like to see what you've made.
Click on Apply to know more.