Story of modern India through the scent of rainy days, musty bookstores

What do three men who used to work in tech, management consulting and finance know about perfume?

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Plenty, it seems. The scents ($168 for 50ml) from Rahasya Fragrances (rahasyafragrances.com) are elegant yet complex, with backstories rich in heart and history.

Fresh yet woody, Cutting Rain was inspired by memories of sipping tea in India's monsoon rain. Meanwhile, Oud Mangifera captures the feeling of scarfing mangoes on lazy summer days through a blend of davana, mango, blackcurrant, leather, incense and oud.

Inspired by modern India, Rahasya (which means "secret" in Hindi and Sanskrit) made its retail debut as the first Singaporean brand at home-grown luxury fragrance retailer Amaris, in stores and online, in April.

Friends Sai Pogaru, 31, Sachit Sood, 32, and Utkarsh Vijayvargiya, 33, ditched their corporate careers to start the niche perfume brand in January 2024. Though none of them had a background in beauty or fragrance, they were perfume lovers bound by a desire to put niche Indian perfumery on the map.

A philosophy, politics and economics graduate from Yale-NUS College, Mr Pogaru worked in advertising for Meta and TikTok. Mr Sood was a management consultant with Boston Consulting Group who had previously founded an education platform in London. Mr Vijayvargiya was formerly in product management and insurance tech. In 2023, Mr Pogaru quit his job to travel for 10 months. On his travels, he followed his nose to fragrance stores in Europe and found there was not enough Indian representation in perfumery.

Chats with his co-founders lamenting the lack of representation turned into a business idea. They decided to make Rahasya an ode to modern India through the lens of third-culture kids who grew up abroad.