Small Business Spotlight

A Late Night Conversation
Became a Perfumery

The story of SAMAR — an indie perfumery
born from a lockdown and a late-night dream.

Where Scent Meets Story

There’s a word in Arabic — samar — that means both “fruits of paradise” and “evening conversations with friends.” It’s a word that feels made for a perfume house, which is precisely why Debbie and Na-Moya chose it. SAMAR is an indie perfumery built at the intersection of uncanny realism and dreamy fantasy, where any scent — no matter how unexpected — can become the central character of an olfactive story. But before any of that, it was just two people talking at 2 in the morning, imagining everywhere they wished they could go.

The Duo Behind the Bottle

SAMAR is a two-person operation — and those two people are life partners Debbie and Na-Moya, who built the business the same way they built their relationship: through shared curiosity and a lot of conversation.

Their bond started with a love of science fiction. Scent came later, though it turns out it was always there. They’re the kind of people who pause to smell flowers mid-walk, who start their meals with a sniff before the anticipatory first bite, who notice the warmth of the sun on fruit skin. Going deep into the world of perfumery, they say, was “a natural, if unexpected, twist in our life plan.”

Before SAMAR, Debbie worked as an IT manager at a wood products company. Na-Moya worked for the domestic violence office of the Superior Court.
They couldn’t have predicted they’d end up as perfumers — but then again, the best origin stories rarely go according to plan.

Happy Trails →

Speakeasy →

Golden Hour →

Born from a Lockdown and a Late-Night Conversation

Like a lot of people, the COVID-19 lockdown sent Debbie and Na-Moya inward. Grounded at home, they found themselves thinking about all the places they’d taken for granted — the ones they missed and the ones they still dreamed of seeing.

Scent, they reasoned, is more directly linked to memory and emotion than almost any other sense. If art could transport you somewhere, why couldn’t a perfume? They started experimenting — not to recreate familiar smells exactly, but to capture the full feeling of a memory. What emerged were scents that felt both deeply known and slightly surreal, untethered from time.

SAMAR started as a part-time project. They formulated their first perfumes and spent a year building their customer base online. Na-Moya made the leap to full-time first; Debbie joined three years later.

Getting Off the Ground

From the beginning, Debbie and Na-Moya knew that SAMAR’s work needed to be experienced in person. Their perfumes are so rooted in personal story — so specific in what they’re reaching for — that a website alone couldn’t communicate it.

Their first show was Seattle’s Revival Market on Juneteenth, an event that paid artists a stipend to participate and gain vendor experience. It turned out to be exactly what they needed.

Those early conversations shaped the work. They learned that the way someone else experiences a scent is often completely different from what you intended — and that this isn’t a failure. It’s the point.

Life Inside the Perfumery

SAMAR is still a two-person team — and everything runs through those two people. On any given day, Debbie and Na-Moya are juggling order fulfillment, bottling, compounding, content creation, and formulating new perfumes, all out of their one-bedroom apartment.

Busy seasons also bring multi-day craft markets — events that require enormous preparation but reward them with exactly what fuels them most: community. Debbie and Na-Moya are, by their own description, most fueled by being in community, so even outside of market season, they make time to volunteer, socialize, and meet new people. The business was always meant to be about more than the product.

Their favorite part of running the business? Working together.

And then there are the moments that stop everything — when customers are excited to journey across the full perfume line before finding the scent that really speaks to them. Sometimes that journey ends in tears — the good kind. It’s happened more than once, most memorably with Garden Heaux, Great Lei, and Speakeasy.

Standing Apart in a Self-Serious Industry

The perfume industry, as Debbie and Na-Moya see it, can be gatekeeping, repetitive, and overly invested in the same well-worn — and largely Western — fragrance narratives. SAMAR is a deliberate counterpoint.

They push themselves to capture the lushness of specific memories and feelings — which means accepting that not every scent is for every person. Far from treating that as a limitation, they’ve found freedom in it. They also stay connected to other perfumers, sharing resources and solving problems together, because they see the broader indie perfumery community as collaborators, not competition.

SAMAR also carries a social mission that goes beyond the bottle. A meaningful part of their work is devoted to fundraising for and volunteering with grassroots mutual aid organizations — groups providing vital services both locally and to their global community. It’s a value that runs through everything they do.

Challenges, Goals, and What Comes Next

One of SAMAR’s most tangible ongoing challenges is packaging. Their current bottles are fit for purpose and beautifully labeled — the label design is the work of their friend Elaine Mehary of Bellingham, WA, whose artwork gives each bottle its distinctive look — but the roll-on format doesn’t photograph the way spray-style bottles do on social media.

They’re working on it. New spray-format bottles and retail packaging are in development, designed to tell SAMAR’s visual story more powerfully.

In the short term, growing SAMAR’s visibility — both on social media and on retail shelves — is the priority. Long term, the dream is to bring on a few employees to handle order fulfillment and content creation, freeing Debbie and Na-Moya to focus on what they love most: formulating new perfumes.

Advice and a Name Worth Knowing

To anyone thinking about starting their own small business, Debbie and Na-Moya offer this:

And then there’s this:

As for that name — the one thing most people don’t know about SAMAR is that the brand name is also the origin story. Searching for something that was both meaningful and reflected their passion for building and enjoying community, Debbie and Na-Moya came across the Arabic word samar: “fruits of paradise” and “evening conversations with friends.” A perfume house that began as a late-night conversation about art, memory, and longing — named for exactly that kind of moment.

It fit perfectly.

Find SAMAR

SAMAR is an oil-based indie perfumery available online and at craft markets in the Pacific Northwest. If you’re the kind of person who wants their scent to go somewhere, this is the place to start.

👉 Find SAMAR on Byztopia: SAMAR

🌐 Visit their website: https://www.samarscentstudio.com/