After graduating from Central Saint Martins with a BA in Fashion Communication founder Jessica Hannan She worked her way up in fashion, writing for The Telegraph, Independent, and finally as an editor at NET-A-PORTER. 

In 2014, Hannan decided to switch up London’s commercial pace for a more creative life in Berlin. On arrival, her love of scents drew her to the city’s Arabic perfume oil and Bakhoor shops in Berlin’s Neukolln. She started chatting regularly in a mix of broken German and sign language, with one of the perfume store owners, and by drawing flowers to explain what she wanted. He sold her oils and taught her about the intricate Arabic customs surrounding the use of scent, which is significantly more developed than Western attitudes to fragrance, and heavily influences her work today. 

Hannan noticed from sitting with clients in her studio, that hardly anyone could really articulate what they liked when it came to scent, and that our sense of smell is so underdeveloped compared to our visual and audio senses, or our instinct for food. She started categorising people’s tastes in perfume and drew comparisons with their personalities, cultural-conditioning and aesthetic tastes. 

Finally, in 2020, Hannan felt confident that she had unearthed four key ‘perfume personalities’: The Dreamer, The Lover, The Traveller and The Thinker. She sought out the expertise of Marie Le Febvre, a French classically-trained master perfumer, and one of the few women at the top of her field, whom she had interviewed years before for a magazine, and felt a creative connection.  Together in Le Febvre’s West Berlin lab, they distilled all of Hannan’s research on the four perfume personalities into the four Apotheke scents. 

With a creative collective of Berlin friends and collaborators, she created the brand’s visual identity and online quiz to help people find their signature notes, and launched in 2020. Within one week of launching she secured VOOSTORE, Isla Nails and Lovelyday, three of Berlin’s coolest stores as stockists Hannan now runs Apotheke from Somerset in the UK, with a shipping fulfillment centre in Berlin where she works regularly, Germany being the brand’s primary market, and birthplace, integral to its identity. Alongside the perfume brand, she works as a consultant within the area of psychology in perfume, and with fashion and beauty brands on scent-based activations, and fragrance design.  . 

all pics on bio page by @caryshuws