D.S. & Durga

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History of the house

D.S. & Durga was founded in 2007 in Brooklyn (United States) by David Seth Moltz and Kavi Ahuja Moltz. The name pairs the perfumer's initials, D.S., with Durga, the Hindu warrior goddess Kavi adopted as her signature alias. The house started in a small apartment in Bushwick, the Brooklyn neighborhood that was then home to a cluster of independent music, design and craft studios in the late 2000s.

David Moltz, a musician with a long-standing interest in natural materials, is a self-taught perfumer. He never enrolled at an institutional perfumery school. He built his method through direct experimentation, beginning with hand-mixed scented preparations offered as gifts, which drew enough enthusiastic responses to seed the project. Kavi Moltz, trained as an architect, took on creative direction and visual identity from the first releases, designing bottles, labels and the overall art direction of the house.

The editorial idea of the house was set early: each perfume tells a short story anchored in a place, a scene, a character or a musical reference. This narrative approach, claimed as such by the founders, separates D.S. & Durga from the French and British references of niche perfumery. Compositions reach into American landscapes, Anglo-American literature, indie and classic rock, regional flora and reimagined mythologies, building a catalog that reads more like a short-story collection than a traditional fragrance range.

Early launches established the tone. Cowboy Grass (2008) framed a green aromatic accord modeled on the high plains of the American West. Burning Barbershop (2010) staged a fictional barber-shop fire set in 1891. Bowmakers (2012) evoked the workshop of a violin-bow maker, with rosin, varnish and aged wood. The catalog grew steadily to several dozen perfumes, complemented by a line of scented candles that received its own critical reception in the international press.

Across the 2010s, D.S. & Durga moved out of the confidential New York circuit and into curated niche distribution in the United States, the United Kingdom and continental Europe. The international fashion and culture press built sustained editorial coverage of the house. After a first outside investment from Monogram Capital in 2018, the London-based investment firm Manzanita Capital, already a shareholder of several niche perfume houses, acquired a majority stake in D.S. & Durga in 2024 without modifying the creative direction held by the founders.

Notable perfumes

The full D.S. & Durga catalog is composed by David Seth Moltz, the sole perfumer of the house. The seven compositions below form a reference selection.

Olfactory signature

D.S. & Durga writes a narrative American niche signature, where each composition functions as a short olfactory story rather than a fragrance derived from a master accord. The catalog is built perfume by perfume, with a title, a geography and a written brief that frames the wear. This editorial logic takes priority over the construction of vertical product ranges or of a single olfactory saga, and it has defined the identity of the house since the first releases.

Three stylistic axes run through the work. The first is a green and herbaceous axis anchored in American landscapes, illustrated by Cowboy Grass (2008) and Big Sur Eucalyptus (2023). The second is a woody smoky and mineral axis, gathering Burning Barbershop (2010), Bowmakers (2013) and Debaser (2015), where rosin, dry wood and aromatic herbs build the spine of the composition. The third is a floral axis, structured around the eponymous Durga (2017), which places a white tuberose, jasmine and ylang accord at the center of a green frame.

The signature of the house also rests on an artisanal mode of production and on a strong literary apparatus. David Moltz claims a self-taught approach to the craft, without a school certification or an industrial laboratory behind him, and works in small batches inside the Brooklyn workshop. The written brief that accompanies each perfume, on the official site and in press communications, is treated as part of the composition itself, not as a marketing layer added on top.

A narrative American niche perfume house built on self-taught practice, short olfactory stories and a Brooklyn workshop kept at small scale since 2007.

Key characteristics

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