Salem Summer

Salem Summer is one of my fragrances that means a great deal to me. I know that everyone has their own scent in my collection that feels like a spell written for them, but Salem Summer just is one of those scents that just hits with me differently. When I was younger, I would often spend hours at the mall near my college. Sometimes, I studied, but I also got my first retail job there, and knew the ins and outs of the entire building. My first exposure to any cosmetics beyond the drugstore was at a Sephora that opened up around my junior year. I would go into the fragrance section and just marvel at all of the bottles. I eventually settled on a favorite, Cast A Spell from the handbag designer Lulu Guinness. It came in a perfectly round bottle with a castle on it. Between the name, the design, and most importantly, the scent, I was hooked. It is still one of my favorites, despite being discontinued, and I have some on a shelf in my bedroom.

When I started getting into fragrances, I learned that Cast A Spell was part of a litany of fragrances that all launched in the mid-2000s that were nicknamed “fruity-choulis” because of their top notes of fruit and their base of patchouli. Cast A Spell, being basically just blackberry and patchouli, fits this bill. So when I created Sif Sniffs, I knew I wanted to make my own fruity-chouli. And thus, Salem Summer was born.

What makes Salem Summer so interesting is when it was born. I made Salem Summer before I made any of the scents in my Fall/Winter 2024 collection, even though that whole collection was released six months earlier. Salem Summer was formulated only a month or two after I launched the website and attended my first event. I knew because of its name and everything that’s in it, that Salem Summer would have to come out in a Spring/Summer collection.

And that’s where Salem Summer remains really special for me.

When I first left the cult, I went from having events booked to having nothing and needing to find them on my own. I found Midsummer Fantasy Renaissance Faire, and that was the first event I attended on my own as a vendor. Having your first event be a Ren Faire is a choice, but I’ve never been one to turn down a challenge. Throughout the event, people would ask me, “How did you get started making perfume?”

“Well, I started it in a cult.”

Eventually, I didn’t want to answer that question that way. I was ashamed that I was in a cult. I mean, I was a therapist who was working on a second master’s to specialize in cult survivors while actively being part of a cult. How embarrassing is that? So I wanted to leave the company. I wanted to just give my formulas to my sister, Maggie, and go back to working as a therapist. See if I could get my old job back, or I could just hope for the best.

Maggie didn’t want to take over the company, and didn’t want to spend her days trying to make perfume while raising her three children. She didn’t want to spend every weekend in a tent making test strips for people. So I knew I had to make a decision.

Do I deal with the fact that I started a fragrance brand in a cult and continue doing something that I had grown to love? Or walk away and try to resume what my life was like prior to the cult’s influence?

I knew that with one option, the world wouldn’t get to meet Salem Summer. Sure, I would have fragrance ingredients in my house and always be able to make it as a side thing for friends and family, but Salem Summer would never reach the large-scale level it deserved. Salem Summer deserved to see the world, and the world deserved to meet Salem Summer.

So I stayed in business. Now the company is hitting some crazy metrics that most small businesses never accomplish. Hell, most small businesses don’t even make it past two years, and we will hit that in two months. It feels like, if anything, we are just getting started.

I owe a lot to that fragrance. Sure, I started this brand in a cult, but if I can leave the cult and know that I have found my passion not only in perfumery and the art and craft of it, but also in the wild world of being an entrepreneur, I can chalk that up to a really fun origin story.