Dear friends,

It’s no big mystery that running the Art and Olfaction Awards is not an easy task. We’re a very small non-profit, with an unpaid 'staff' of one person (me!) supported by a tiny but powerful board of directors, as well as our team of judges, our friends-slash-volunteers, our past participants, and our partners. 

The awards themselves were only founded a few short years ago in 2014. As far as these things go, we’re still a tiny baby. And, like tiny babies you have known and loved, we’re learning as we go along.

We do not nor have we ever pretended to be bigger than we are. Yet we also have modest reason to think that we are slowly succeeding at what we are trying to do, namely to provide a structure to celebrate the work of artisan, independent and experimental perfumers - one that takes them seriously, and treats them with respect - regardless of their marketing budgets and commercial reach.

Every year running these awards has presented a fresh set of learning experiences. Year one, for example, presented us with the challenge of setting up the structures for judging, submitting, getting the word out, and the task of producing our first ceremony. In year two we launched the experimental category, and learned how to best navigate the difficulties inherent in judging projects that straddled the worlds of scent and art.

Over the few years of our existence we have received good, thoughtful feedback from our community which has always engendered specific actions on our part. Examples of our response to feedback are numerous, but include bringing in more international judges, revising our judging structures, and refining our definition of 'artisan' and 'independent' (my personal obsession). We know that we can always do better and we are, at the very least, good at organizational self-improvement.

Why are we posting about this, you may be wondering.

Well, now - in year 3 - we have been presented with what feels like our biggest challenge yet. This comes in the form of a conflict the likes of which is unprecedented in our modest institutional history. This conflict has given us cause to believe that we have outgrown the submission rules we have been using for the past three years (read them here).

In short: As our submission pool has grown, we are being presented with situations that we did not anticipate when we wrote the rules.

We are treating this conflict as a painful but valid piece of feedback, and like all the feedback we receive, it will have clear results:

1. We will refine our submission rules so there is no room for doubt as to what perfumes qualify and what perfumes do not.
2. We will better define our policy on reformulations and flankers.
3. We will form a team of volunteer researchers who will review submissions before putting them into the judging pool, to make sure there is no doubt that they fit the submission criteria.

As an organization, and as individuals, we learn from experience. This experience, painful as it has been (and still is), has taught us a lot. It has also prompted us to enlist the help of a contract attorney, who will be reviewing and picking apart our rules before we launch submissions for the 2017 awards. We will also be calling upon members of our community, past submitters and finalists to give us feedback. This work starts in June.

In the meantime, we are extremely excited to celebrate the 2016 finalists - a group of perfumes and projects that have come to us from all around the world, and that have gone through months of anonymous judging to get to where they are.

We cannot wait to honor these fine projects with you, on May 7, 2016, at Hammer Museum.

Best,
Saskia Wilson-Brown
Director, The Art and Olfaction Awards
On behalf of the board of directors

ps. For those of you who cannot make it to the ceremony in person, the awards will be streaming live on Hammer Museum's website on May 7, 2016, starting 7:30pm PST. We will post more information about it soon!