Most perfume houses start with a mood board. Nissaba starts with a map. Before a perfumer is briefed, founder Sébastien Tissot chooses a place and the materials that grow there, and the perfumer is handed that regional palette instead of a marketing brief. Paraguay becomes Chaco. Madagascar becomes Grande Île. The Horn of Africa becomes Berbera.

Tissot knows where materials come from because buying them was his job. He spent a long career leading the sustainable sourcing of natural ingredients at DSM Firmenich, working on responsible supply alongside Dominique Roques, one of the best known naturals hunters in the trade. In 2021 he met Eric Stucky de Quay, formerly of L'Oréal, who took on the distribution side. The house is based in Geneva.

The name belongs to a Sumerian goddess. Nissaba began as a goddess of grain and became the patroness of writing; the house notes that clay tablets were inscribed in her praise. It is a neat fit for a brand whose whole argument is about harvests and about writing down exactly where the harvest came from.

“For me, the main responsible innovation is the business model I'm keen to implement.”

That business model is specific. Nissaba says it allocates 5 percent of its sales to sponsoring young agricultural entrepreneurs in the regions where perfume plants are grown, working through local agricultural schools. The projects named on its own site are in Paraguay, Madagascar and India. The same growers the money supports are the growers the house buys from, which is why the traceability is the product rather than a sticker on the box.

Tissot's working theory, as he has explained it in interviews, is disarmingly simple: materials that grow together in the same climate tend to work together in the same formula. So Sulawesi is patchouli, nutmeg, clove and Java vetiver from Indonesia with benzoin from Sumatra, one archipelago in one bottle. It is the reason the line hangs together even though no two fragrances share a perfumer brief.

What is actually in the bottle. The formulas run at roughly 90 percent natural origin content (Sulawesi is published at 92), diluted in certified organic French wheat alcohol. The bottles are built for refills: at participating stores you swap the empty glass for a refill and keep the cap, pump and ribbon. Grande Île won the 2023 Responsible Innovation Prize from the Fragrance Foundation France, and the house has collected sustainability recognition since.

There is no single house nose. Nissaba pairs every origin with a named perfumer on its own site, and seven of them have signed the nine fragrances: Alexandra Monet for Paraguay, Nicolas Bonneville for Indonesia, Frank Voelkl for Madagascar, Ilias Ermenidis for South India and Guatemala, Sébastien Cresp for Provence, Fabrice Pellegrin for the Alps, and Pellegrin with Coralie Spicher for Somaliland and Andalusia.