Bubble Skincare Alumni Launch LeNose, Bringing Luxury Hand Soaps to the Masses

by · WWD
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With hand soap now a status symbol, three former Bubble Skincare execs are looking to shake up the market.

Bubble’s former operations, creative, and marketing execs Caroline Valentini, Lindsay St. Clair and Zee Carlstrom are launching home fragrance brand LeNose with Soap de Parfum, a collection of $10 hand soaps, with the mission of bringing high-quality soaps to the masses. They will come in five fragrances, including I’m So Fancy, My Soap Smells Like Money and Yeehaw I’m a Sandalwood Cowboy.

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“The fun thing that just got us so energized about soap was that luxury soaps had become a symbol of wealth for the people who use them. There’s a lot of signaling with them, both on social media and in real life in your home. So that symbolic nature of someone who has enough money to literally wash money down the drain, buying a $50 to $100 soap, we thought that that was the perfect symbol to answer our founding question — why can’t we all have nice things?” said Carlstrom, the brand’s chief marketing officer.

The most tongue-in-cheek scent is My Soap Smells Like Money. “It’s a $100 soap for $10, and so it is literally a soap that smells like money. It’s limited edition,” Carlstrom continued.

The rest of the range plays in the more traditional fragrance realm.

“As far as the other scents go, our whole goal was to create a really fun platform that was a combination of sophisticated luxury-inspired scents with a fun point of view on them,” said chief business officer St. Clair. “We have a tropical that’s a very fun, bright fragrance. We have a vanilla gourmand that’s a very warm, not sweet vanilla, and then we have a sandalwood. A lot of the sandalwoods that you can buy for $10 lack that complexity, and we think we nailed that. Then we have a fresh mandarin rosemary. That’s a perfect kitchen scent.”

On how they managed to achieve this without compromising on pricing, Valentini, chief executive officer, stressed that the brand isn’t compromising anywhere.

“We’re not taking an enormous markup. Our margin is tight, and that’s the risk we’re willing to bet on LeNose and really make sure that the volume is the play here,” she said.

LeNose launches direct-to-consumer and on TikTok Shop before entering Amazon in October, with plans to expand into additional home fragrance categories and retailers in the near future.

The cofounders closed a $3 million oversubscribed pre-revenue round with strategic backing from Aesop’s early investor Era, as well as Fifth Growth Fund, OpenSky Ventures and others.

“From the moment we met the team, we saw that LeNose had the potential to be a category-defining brand,” said Era Partner Claire Cherry. “We saw a rare desire to shape the cultural zeitgeist and become a leading voice in this category, akin to what the team achieved with Bubble. From our time backing brands like Seed, Boy Smells, and Maude, we know that exceptionally strong creative direction, a phenomenal product, and an accessible price point give LeNose the opportunity to disrupt a sleepy category.”

While the brand declined to comment on sales forecasts, industry sources estimated retail sales to come in between $5 million and $10 million in Year One.