How Do You Extend a Watch Brand? Create a Perfume That Smells Like Watches

You might have seen Nooka watches before: Matthew Waldman, a moonlighting branding and interactive designer, started the company in 2004, around the idea of telling time as a linear graph.

Since then, they've pursued all kinds of brand extensions--watches in every color of the rainbow, with varying levels of polish and sophistication; at one point, they even made watches for Kanye West's Glow in the Dark Tour. Naturally, the're looking to expand, and they've just introduced a new line of belts and wallets (see below). But their kookiest idea was to create a scent that actually smells like the watches themselves.

"I don't know if it sounds like bullshit," says Waldman. "But the fragrance is designed." He accomplished that working with Drom, a German fragrance developer that has done work for Derek Jeter and Anna Sui, among others. In addition, he hired Pierre-Constantin Gueros as his "nose"--the expert responsible for translating an abstract vision for a scent into particular ingredients. The fragrance that resulted contains the scent of leather and minerals--to evoke watchbands and the quartz mechanism--and also top notes meant to to evoke electricity. The point, Waldman notes, is a "glam future"--to hark back to the 1960s and 1970s. "Futurism used to optimistic, not terrifying, like in Independence Day," he says. "I aspired to a chrome-coated future."

Related: Book Freshener Adds Some Real Life Smells to Your E- books