This week, Glossy spotlights the power of specialty stores. While department stores’ demands and terms are turning brands away, specialty stores — often offering new awareness, desirable brand alignment, target consumer-focused curations and inspiring physical footprints — are becoming go-to retail partners. We’re spotlighting five U.S. stores that leading brands are betting on now.
When Jake Levy and Matt Belanger opened the second outpost of their fragrance store Stéle in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood in January, they were stepping into an already saturated perfume corridor. The Mott Street store was just a stone’s throw away from more established perfume names, including outposts from Le Labo and D.S. & Durga and multi-brand boutique Scent Bar.
But Belanger and Levy knew they had a winning formula on their hands; their original Williamsburg store, opened just nine months prior, was already stocking beloved indie brands like Stora Skuggan and Marissa Zappas and had won endorsements from fragrance experts like podcaster Emma Vernon. Belanger and Levy knew they needed more space to meet the demand of their fraghead audience.
“There is something called a scent evolution, meaning you’ve already tried your Glossiers, you’ve tried your Diptyques, you’ve tried your Le Labos, you’ve tried your D.S. & Durgas — you’ve tried everything that 10,000 people other than you have,” said Levy. “We’re the next step in the journey.”
Going to Stéle means going down the rabbit hole that is the niche fragrance world. The Nolita store’s spring 2025 arrivals include the likes of a capybara-inspired scent by Thai fragrance brand Voyager and a bubblegum-gasoline infusion from Romanian perfumer Toskovat. There are familiar aromas like rose and vetiver, too, but Stéle’s founders take pride in stocking scents that grow on you. “We don’t know how this is gonna do,” Belanger said of the latest collection. “We assume people are gonna love it and all that. But everything’s a game of chance.”
Belanger and Levy are familiar with how perfume can work its magic on you: They were self-admitted fragrance newbies when they opened the first store for Stéle, whose name is a reference to stone monuments, owing to their respective families’ backgrounds in stonemasonry. They acquired the Williamsburg space intending for it to be a creative studio for Levy where they may also sell items like candles from natural Parisian fragrance brand Ormaie. Only when Ormaie gifted them a full bottle of perfume of the spicy white floral Tableau Parisien did they decide to change course.
Now, the two stores stock 80 brands between them, the majority of which are independent. Belanger and Levy say they hope to stock only fully independent brands by 2026.
The stonemasonry heritage is present in the aesthetic of the stores, which are outfitted with undulating rows of marble shelving in shades of beige, gray and rosy-brown. That honed-in aesthetic captured the attention of fragrance veterans like Carlos Huber, whose niche line Arquiste was one of Stéle’s early brand partners. But the founders’ passion and professionalism won him over.
“The thing I really commend them on is they are just such nice store owners. You go there, they’re lovely, they really are excited and passionate about showing you everything they know,” said Huber. “In distribution and in wholesale, it’s about having a champion. And they’re champions.”
Maintaining the relationship is a two-way street, Huber said. Stéle gets customers excited about Arquiste scents like the figgy A Grove By the Sea, which Huber said is a particular hit with the retailer’s consumers. In turn, Huber has asked his international distributors to hold off on selling his new scent, Tropical, until he hosts a launch event with Stéle in May.
“Stéle is the most community-driven [store], and it’s the perfect way to launch it. So, for me, it’s special to honor that,” said Huber. “When somebody is doing that for you, you respond in kind.”
Stéle has also taken on scents from fellow fragrance newbies, as well. Raffaella Grisa created her aromatherapy-inspired brand Wa:it in Italy in 2020 after a career in engineering. She found Stéle’s intimate setting to be the perfect place to launch her brand in the U.S. with an event at the Nolita store in February.
“Experiencing is the new luxury,” said Grisa. “Independent stores are not just selling products, but they’re also selling experience. … No online platform or department store can replicate such a fantastic connection.”
Levy and Belanger say they now get pitched new brands on the daily, but while their noses have taken a liking to boundary-pushing brands, they remain steadfast in their commitment to aesthetics: If a perfume doesn’t look as good as it smells, they won’t take it.
“We won’t sign off on a brand because of aesthetic — even if the fragrance is good,” said Levy. “The aesthetic is just as important.”
But despite their early success in capturing the fragrance boom, running an independent boutique comes with challenges. Tester bottles are available throughout the store to let customers roam and sample at their leisure, but that also means shoppers can use up valuable testers without making a purchase and potentially cross-contaminate the ceramic discs Stéle’s staff spray each day with a respective scent. And working with numerous international independent brands now means determining how to navigate tariffs on imported goods.
“We have quite a few beautiful brands from China that we work with,” said Levy. “We sat on the phone with [Shanghai-based brand] Aromag for an hour and a half.” Levy and Belanger said they have not received any outside investment but have funded Stéle out of their own pockets.
Stéle has good reason to want to make those relationships work. While fragrance consumers are increasingly open to purchasing online, in-person shopping is still the gold standard: While in Paris for March’s Paris Perfume Week, Natalia Outeda, founder of Argentine niche brand Frassaï, said she saw over a dozen new monobrand perfume stores. Similar to Nolita’s Elizabeth Street, Paris’s Rue Saint-Honoré has become a hotbed for boutiques with newer arrivals including the likes of BDK Parfums and Matiere Premiere.
For smaller brands that can’t afford their own storefront, shops like Stéle offer a crucial touchpoint to reach their audience.
“I don’t know where this is going to be in five or 10 years. But it’s exciting because it means that the market is growing, that people are looking for different kinds of experiences,” said Outeda, who hosted a Frassaï event at Stéle Williamsburg in November. “Once you try fragrances that tell a story, that go beyond the commercial brands, I don’t know if there’s a way to go back.”
And with that audience for niche perfumes only growing, Stéle’s founders say their community extends even to their would-be competitors. They have found the numerous other perfume stores around their Nolita store to be a feature, not a bug, to operating a successful boutique.
“There’s a great sense of community among all of us. For example, Scent Bar would send us people, we’ll send them people. Osswald will send us people, we’ll send them people — even D.S. & Durga,” said Levy. “We’ve worked in multiple industries, and I don’t think we’ve seen as much beauty as we’ve seen here.”
