At an Axis Bank event, Himvaani turned a corporate room into 150 individual conversations

Himvaani ran its live perfume bar at Hyatt Regency Dehradun for an Axis Bank event bringing together the bank's all-India level heads. Four team members worked an eight-hour shift, curating accords and building fragrances on the spot for more than 150 guests.

The format asks something unusual of a corporate event. A perfume built for a person has to start with a short conversation about what they like, what they wear, what they want to smell like. Four people had those conversations more than 150 times in a single day, and each guest left with something made in front of them rather than handed to them from a table.

Himvaani works across perfumes, attars, essential oils, soaps, wedding favours, dhoop cones and crystals. The live bar is the format that carries all of it into a room at once, and corporate events sit alongside weddings and private celebrations as the places it operates.

Founder Kunal Mehta reports that direct sales to guests during the event exceeded what the brand was paid for the booking, and that the day produced business tie-ups and collaborations for the future. The job came through an agency. He says the event was not the largest the brand has taken on, placing it among a set of comparable bookings rather than above them.

Live curation at that headcount is an operations problem before it is a creative one, but the operations exist to protect the thing that makes it work. If the conversation gets rushed, the fragrance is just a bottle.

~Editor Shobhit Mehandiratta