Tauer Perfumes

History of the house

Tauer Perfumes was founded in 2005 in Zurich (Switzerland) by Andy Tauer. The founder is a chemist by training, holding a doctorate from ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Switzerland), and was at the time working part-time in a parallel scientific career. The house started as a one-person studio, where Andy Tauer composed, blended and bottled each fragrance himself. That initial configuration still defines Tauer Perfumes production today (Fragrantica designer page, tauerperfumes.com About Us, accessed 2026-05-22).

Andy Tauer is a self-taught perfumer. He never trained at a perfumery institution, neither at ISIPCA in Versailles (France) nor in-house at a major fragrance composition company such as Givaudan or Firmenich. His entry into perfumery is publicly documented and was triggered by a trip to Africa with his mother around 2000. Before departure, he ordered Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume by Mandy Aftel, published the year after his trip. Reading the book against the scent of frangipani in bloom, a moment Andy Tauer has recounted in several interviews, triggered a personal composition project. Several years of self-directed experimentation led to the formal founding of the house in 2005 (tauerperfumes.com About Us, Perfume Encyclopedia profile, accessed 2026-05-22).

The first perfumes were signed and launched in 2005. Le Maroc pour Elle opened the catalogue, followed almost immediately by L'Air du Desert Marocain, a warm resinous oriental built around incense, labdanum and ambery materials, inspired by Andy Tauer's travels in Morocco. The second release later received five stars in Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, the reference English-language perfume criticism volume of the period. That review installed Tauer Perfumes on the international map of independent niche perfumery (Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Fragrantica designer page).

The production rhythm has remained artisanal and the house has expanded gradually from its Zurich studio. Andy Tauer launched a personal blog on the official website in 2006, titled From the Lab, where he discusses his trials, his launches and his material choices. This direct line between perfumer and reader was rare at the time in the broader fragrance industry, and prefigured the editorial transparency that a portion of independent perfumery would adopt during the 2010s (tauerperfumes.com blog archive, accessed 2026-05-22).

Tauer Perfumes remains an independent house, with no acquisition by a luxury group and no external investor publicly documented to date. Distribution has broadened to a selective international network of niche fragrance retailers, including Jovoy in Paris (France), Roullier White in London (United Kingdom), Luckyscent in Los Angeles (United States) and First in Fragrance in Hamburg (Germany), alongside direct sales on tauerperfumes.com. The company is registered in Switzerland under the corporate name TAUER GmbH (Tauer Perfumes Imprint, accessed 2026-05-22).

Notable perfumes

The Tauer Perfumes catalogue brings together several dozen compositions signed by Andy Tauer since 2005. The following nine releases are independently documented on Fragrantica, Parfumo and Basenotes, with consistent attribution and launch year across the three sources.

L'Air du Desert Marocain (2005) is the cult composition of the house: a warm resinous oriental built around coriander, cumin, petitgrain, cistus labdanum, jasmine, cedar, vetiver and an ambery base. Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez awarded it five stars in Perfumes: The Guide, describing the composition as a landmark of the incense oriental genre. Lonestar Memories (2006) set a smoky leather birch accord that is still cited as a category reference. Une Rose Chypree (2009) reworks the classical chypre structure around rose as the central material. Au Coeur du Desert (2016) offers a concentrated attar reading of the ambery resinous signature of the house.

Olfactive signature

Tauer Perfumes practices artisanal perfumery with a warm resinous oriental writing, built on a generous use of resins, incense, ambers and aromatic materials. Compositions rely on natural materials dosed in full presence, alongside a select few synthetic molecules chosen for their tenacity or projection. Andy Tauer regularly describes his juices as dense, warm and persistent, and structures his perfumes around ambery resinous cores that remain recognisable from one launch to the next (tauerperfumes.com About Us, Now Smell This reviews, accessed 2026-05-22).

Three stylistic axes structure the house. The first is the warm ambery oriental axis, built around cistus labdanum, amber, incense and cedarwood, exemplified by L'Air du Desert Marocain (2005) and Au Coeur du Desert (2016). The second is the rose and chypre axis, which reframes rose as a central material within an ambery woody setting, illustrated by Une Rose Chypree (2009) and Une Rose Vermeille (2010). The third is the smoky leather axis, less frequent in the catalogue, anchored by Lonestar Memories (2006) and its leather birch smoky accord.

The handmade character is claimed as an identity marker. Juices are composed, macerated, filtered and bottled in the Zurich studio, under Andy Tauer's direct responsibility. The house communicates regularly on its limited production volumes, on its blending stages and on the absence of industrial outsourcing for critical operations. This artisanal positioning feeds the direct editorial communication via the founder's blog, without any conventional advertising campaign.

An artisanal perfume house held by a single perfumer, anchored in Zurich and recognized by its warm oriental resins.

Key characteristics

Frequently asked questions

See also