The Making of Funmi Monet: Creating Her Own Luxury

Funmi Monet spent years teaching the internet how to smell. Then she enrolled in one of the most prestigious perfume schools in the world, built a fragrance house around Nigerian Heritage, and sold out every single product at Sephora in six hours.

The math was supposed to work like this.

A retailer looks at its sales data, decides what a new brand is likely to move, and places an order sized to the forecast. For Influxious, that order was meant to carry the brand through the entire launch quarter.

"They said, okay, based on our previous sales data, this should last about three months," she says.

It lasted six hours.

Not one product. Not one size. Four fragrances, four travel sizes and a discovery set, nine SKUs in total, gone almost immediately.

"They were like, Funmi, we knew you would do well, but we didn't think you would do this well," she says. "It's very unusual for someone to sell out of all the SKUs at the same time. 'Usually one fragrance sells out, or one size sells out,' they said, 'but all of them?'"

Fragrance is the most competitive real estate in prestige beauty right now. Circana data shows the category drove 37 percent of the industry's dollar gains through September 2025, with mini and discovery sets up 41 percent in the third quarter. Funmi launched into the loudest aisle in the store, in the exact format the category was fighting over, and cleared it.

What happened next is the part most founders never see coming, and the part she had already planned for. A sellout is not a celebration, it's an inventory emergency. The retailer comes back for two or three times the original order, and a brand that shipped everything it had is staring down months of empty shelf space.

So Influxious never shipped everything it had.

"What we did that was pretty smart is we kind of reserved our units," she says. "We won't sell everything at the same time, because otherwise you sell all your units and then what happens? We know we get new inventory roughly every three months. So whatever we have on hand has to stretch three months."

That is a supply chain decision, made by a woman who, two years ago, was a licensed therapist with a very large audience and no experience manufacturing anything.

She is clear-eyed about how she looked walking into that room. The founders Sephora tends to bring in arrive with several million followers. Funmi arrived with a creative brief and 700,000 across platforms.

"I was like, okay, this is going to be a slow and steady wins the race type of situation," she says. "That's what I thought. And to be honest, that's what Sephora thought too."

Both of them were wrong, and the reason has very little to do with follower counts and everything to do with two years of work nobody watching could see.

She has been making content since 2018. Then the world shut down. Around the same time, friends pointed out that the newest platform in the world, TikTok, had almost nobody talking seriously about perfume. She took the lane. It took her.

By 2022 she had her first collaboration fragrance, Exalte, and it landed well enough that Sephora noticed.

"With collaborations, you're responsible for the creative and the marketing, but the brand you partner with does all of the production," she says. "But when you become a founder and the CEO of a business, now you're responsible for the creative, but also for the processes that it takes to get the product to the people that you're selling to."

She assumed she needed two or three more collaborations before she would know enough to go out on her own. In 2024, Sephora suggested otherwise.

"A light bulb went off," she says. "And it was so scary."

The fear was specific. She had not gone to school for business. She had gone to school to become a therapist.

"My mindset really had to change," she says. "I had to go from being purely a creative to also becoming a businesswoman. What does it actually take to create these products that I've spent years recommending? How do I want people to experience my brand, and what do I need to do to make sure that's how they actually experience it?"

Fragrance was never a coin flip between categories. It was the one space in beauty where nobody has to look like you to trust you.

"With makeup, people follow you because you have a similar skin tone. With hair, a similar hair type. With skincare, because you have acne like they do," she says. "But with fragrance, it doesn't matter how you look. It doesn't matter your background, your religion, your age, race or gender. People just have a desire to smell good."

That universality is also what made the gap so obvious. Western perfumery still runs on European validation, on the right French house and the right perfumer's name attached to the bottle. African raw materials including jasmine, vanilla, frankincense and pepper have been foundational to modern perfumery for generations, but as BeautyMatter noted this spring, authorship has rarely followed origin.

"It was a very white space," she says. "And then just the idea of being able to center my experiences, in my Black womanhood, but also as a person that exists in the diaspora."

The numbers describe the same room. McKinsey found that Black brands account for roughly 2.5 percent of beauty industry revenue while Black consumers drive 11.1 percent of total beauty spending, and make up only 4 to 7 percent of what any retailer carries. Fine fragrance has trailed even that. Brown Girl Jane became the first Black woman founded fine fragrance brand to enter Sephora in 2024. The lane Funmi is building in is roughly two years old.

Two things had to be true at once. The story had to be hers, and the product had to be unimpeachable.

"We wanted to solidify this idea that a Black-owned fragrance brand feels luxurious, at a more prestige price point, and that it's something you could find globally. Whether you walk into a Sephora in the US or France, or a niche perfume shop in Nigeria or Ghana."

The bridge between those two ambitions turned out to be a root.

Funmi had planned to build one hero fragrance around Nigerian ginger. Her perfumer had a better idea: run it through everything, as a golden thread. She pushed back at first, worried the collection would read as repetitive, until she understood what he was proposing. Ginger would not be the subject of every fragrance. It would be the accent that lifts everything else.

Nigerian ginger is young ginger, and young ginger behaves differently. Brighter, zestier, closer to citrus, with heat that arrives fast and clean. It is a cooking ingredient before it is a perfume note, the sharpness underneath a dish rather than the dish itself. In Gold Standard it is the star. In Well Loved it sparks against cardamom, in Magic Hour it sharpens a chili pepper note, and in High Life it pushes warmth through pink pepper.

"It felt like I literally put a part of myself in each fragrance," she says.

While the brand was being built, Funmi enrolled at ISIPCA in Versailles, the French institution behind some of the most celebrated noses working today, including Francis Kurkdjian of Baccarat Rouge 540. She found an intensive summer course and spent a month in the lab learning raw materials, structure, and the chemistry of how a formula holds together.

"I didn't want to feel like I was just walking in and saying, this is the vibe I want," she says. "How can I come into a meeting and say, you know what, I smelled these and I feel like there's still something missing?"

It changed the working relationship immediately. She could speak her perfumers' language, and she could hold the line on quality, which is where she gets pointed.

"People tell you this thirty dollar perfume smells exactly like this three hundred dollar perfume. They might smell the same, but they're not using the same ingredients," she says. "You can hire the most celebrated chef. But give him a thirty dollar budget and then a five hundred dollar budget, and you can't say the thirty dollar meal is going to be the same. That's how perfumery is too."

Then there is the therapist, who never really left the room. Ask Funmi what fragrance does and she will not sell you a transformation. She has watched the industry promise that a bottle will make you confident, make you someone else, and she thinks that gets the mechanism backwards.

She noticed the same signal over and over with clients. "When we don't care about what is happening to us, it shows up in how we care for ourselves too." Perfume, in that frame, is not vanity. It is evidence that someone is still showing up for themselves.

You can hear that thinking most clearly in Well Loved. Every skin scent on the market, she noticed, was described the same way: soapy, powdery, freshly bathed. She likes those fragrances. They just were not describing her skin.

"For me, my idea of a skin scent is what my mom used on my skin growing up, which is shea butter and cocoa butter," she says. "All these other fragrances make me smell like I just took a bubble bath. My own experience with clean skin is not being represented in the market."

So she built a fragrance around a question almost nobody in prestige perfumery had bothered to ask: what does well moisturized skin actually smell like? The answer had to be raw shea, not what she calls fantasy shea, the sanitized version the industry reaches for. Around it went cardamom and apricot for warmth, magnolia and tuberose for creaminess, and buttercream for sweetness, since raw shea has none of its own.

"It feels very nostalgic when you wear it," she says, "but still very elevated and chic."

High Life is Funmi's take on a night that never ends. It started at a friend's wedding in Nigeria during Detty December, when the diaspora comes home and the entire country turns into one long celebration. Someone said out loud that no one had ever bottled that feeling, and Funmi went home and started working out what that feeling is made of: music, rhythm, food, the electricity of a night that does not end the way it started.

She sent her perfumer Fela Kuti's music. The genre itself, highlife, is a fusion of Afrobeats, jazz and funk, which gave her the structure. For the notes she reached for Zobo, the hibiscus drink she grew up with, then built it out with raspberry, Turkish rose and frankincense. Blueberry musk turned out to be the hero accord in the collection.

"The way your night starts is not the way your night ends," she says. And because she is from Nigeria, none of the four were built for a season. They are meant to be worn all year, anywhere on earth.

The luxury is not only in the juice, and she knew she would not get a second chance at the shelf.

"When your packaging is on the shelf next to people who've already been established and have millions of dollars to spend, no one says, well, we'll just give her a chance and hope she'll upgrade eventually," she says. "A lot of people walk into the store and they don't know that you're a new brand."

She has roughly a thousand bottles in her personal collection, which meant she knew exactly what she wanted and exactly what she refused. Custom bottles, custom caps, custom boxes. A pressurized atomizer so the spray distributes evenly instead of soaking a shirt. Magnetic caps, for the sound and the snap when the cap meets the bottle.

"Out of all the things I spent my money on with this launch, that's the one thing I will never regret," she says about her packaging.

It was also the correct read on the market. Circana found luxury brands within prestige fragrance growing roughly 10 percent through late 2025, twice the rate of the rest of the category.

Influxious was one of eight brands in Sephora's 2025 Accelerate cohort, a six month program the retailer refocused in 2021 on founders of color as part of its Fifteen Percent Pledge commitment. That access matters more than it should have to: per Crunchbase data cited by Glossy, Black beauty founders received 5.6 percent of total US beauty funding in 2024, down from 9.56 percent in 2022.

"The biggest thing was honestly learning how to scale your business without diluting your identity," she says. She sat with founders already inside the system who told her plainly what they would do differently. "You can either learn this the easy way or the hard way. There were a lot of things I learned the easy way, because I didn't have to experience it first."

And then the thing every founder says and almost nobody executes: "I can't wear every single hat within my business."

Most brands enter a retailer like Sephora after a year or two of selling. Influxious walked in new. New, and sold out.

She has not retired from being a creator, and does not intend to. She still loves perfume, still makes recommendations, still shows up for the people who got her here.

"Some days I'm able to do everything I want to do and do it really well. Some days I feel like I'm just getting by," she says. "Some days you feel like, okay, I rocked it, and some days, I just got through it. But you did it."

At Black Beauty Founders, we believe ownership changes lives. So we asked her the only question that really matters: what has ownership given her that influence alone never could? She did not reach for the obvious answer.

"I feel empowered," she says. "When you build it yourself and you put your own money and resources in it, you don't have to answer to anybody. I don't have to compromise on how this brand is executed. I don't have to compromise on the storytelling. I don't have to account to someone who's writing my check and say, okay, they want this brand to be more palatable."

"Being able to allow Influxious to create its own lane and not follow in the footsteps of anybody else has been so important to me. If you're just like everybody else, that's not something that can resonate. And because of that, I'm also able to stay grounded in my Black womanhood, grounded in my cultural roots."

The forecast said slow and steady. The shelf said otherwise. Somewhere in Versailles, a month in a lab, a root from home and a woman who refused to walk into her own meetings unprepared, the math changed.