ENTRY 004

THE ARCHIVE IS BECOMING REAL

A lot can happen in a month.

For a while, Echo & Sin existed mostly in notebooks, conversations, sketches and plans.

Five fragrances we hadn't made yet.

A garage we kept calling The Archive even though it didn't look much like one.

Boxes arriving at the door containing pieces of something that didn't quite exist.

Over the last month, that's started to change.

The plans are becoming physical. The boxes are being opened. The equipment is finding a home.

And The Archive is becoming real.

THE ARCHIVE

The biggest change is the room we're standing in.

Work has finally begun on converting our garage into The Archive — the place where Echo & Sin will actually be made.

What started as bare brick, old shelving and a garage full of everything garages seem to accumulate is slowly becoming our workspace.

Walls have changed. Benches are taking shape. Equipment is finding its place. The room is getting darker, stranger and much more us.

There is still work to do, but we're now nearing the point where The Archive stops being a building project and starts becoming a working fragrance studio.

And that's a slightly surreal sentence to write.

We also need to give a huge amount of credit to Sandor, Danielle's dad, who has done a lot of the actual construction work that's got us this far.

I've been struggling badly with sciatica during much of the build, which has meant I've had to take far more of a back seat physically than I ever intended. It's been frustrating watching jobs happen that I'd normally want to get stuck into myself, but sometimes you have to accept your limitations and let somebody else pick up the tools.

Without Sandor's time, effort and willingness to help us turn a slightly ridiculous idea for a garage fragrance studio into an actual room, The Archive wouldn't be anywhere near where it is now.

So, genuinely — thank you, Sandor.

There will eventually be bottles of Echo & Sin leaving a room that he helped us build.

That's something we won't forget.

We always wanted to document this part rather than hide the beginning behind polished photographs and pretend Echo & Sin appeared fully formed.

It didn't.

There has been dust. Paint. Heat. Deliveries. Empty bank accounts. Questionable decisions. A temporarily fairly useless Pete. And a garage that looked significantly worse before it started looking better.

But that's exactly why we're documenting it.

One day, if Echo & Sin becomes what we hope it can become, we want to be able to look back at these photographs and remember the people who helped us build it, as well as where the first bottles were made.

THE MATERIALS ARE HERE

At the same time as The Archive has been taking shape, boxes have started arriving.

Lots of boxes.

Perfumer's alcohol. Aroma materials. Lab equipment. Scales. Bottles. Atomisers. Gloves. Packaging.

Things we'd spent weeks researching on a screen are now physically sitting on the benches of The Archive.

Opening the fragrance materials in particular felt like another line being crossed.

These aren't finished perfumes bought from somewhere else and rebottled with our name on them.

They're the individual pieces we'll use to build Volume I: After The Lights Go Down from the ground up.

SOUNDCHECK.

BACKSTAGE.

STATIC.

ENCORE.

FADE OUT.

Five Chapters.

Five completely different ideas.

And soon, probably five very messy sets of experiments.

THE FIRST BOTTLES

We've also seen something we'd been waiting a long time to see:

ECHO & SIN on an actual fragrance bottle.

Our 5ml development atomisers arrived, followed by the printed tester labels we'd designed for them.

Black. Gold. Simple.

TESTER · NOT FOR SALE.

Seeing that label wrapped around a real bottle was a tiny moment in the grand scheme of things, but it mattered.

Because suddenly it wasn't another mock-up on a screen.

You could hold it.

The presentation boxes, Archive inserts, seals and story labels have been coming together too.

Eventually there will be 50 boxed development testers — ten for each Chapter — which will become part of the process of getting these fragrances right.

They aren't products.

They're part of the experiment.

And the people who eventually receive them will be some of the first people outside The Archive to smell Echo & Sin.

That's equal parts exciting and terrifying.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

The next stage is the one we've been building towards since this whole slightly ridiculous idea began.

We start making perfume.

Not manufacturing hundreds of bottles.

Not filling shelves with stock.

And definitely not rushing something onto the website just because we're impatient to start selling it.

We're going to experiment.

Measure.

Blend.

Smell.

Wait.

Change things.

Make versions that don't work.

Start again.

Hopefully make versions that are brilliant.

Then probably change those too.

Because from the beginning, we've said we'd rather make Echo & Sin slowly and get it right than rush something out simply because we could.

That hasn't changed.

There isn't a launch date taped to the wall of The Archive.

There isn't a countdown running somewhere behind the scenes.

When Volume I: After The Lights Go Down is ready, it'll be because we genuinely believe it's ready.

For now, though, something much more important is happening.

The construction is nearing completion.

The materials are on the bench.

The equipment is waiting.

The bottles are lined up.

And for the first time, the five Chapters that have lived in our heads for months are about to become something you can actually smell.

The lights are going on in The Archive.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Pete & Danielle
ECHO & SIN

Fragrance for the loud.
Handmade in East Yorkshire.