Our story

Ivana Sofia is a South African fragrance house. We compose, blend and bottle sixty eau de parfum fragrances at our own factory in Eikenhof, on the southern edge of Johannesburg, and we sell them directly to the people who wear them.

The brand began with a plain observation. South Africans love fragrance, and the fragrances they love have quietly become something you save up for. A bottle that costs more than a week of groceries is not really a luxury any more, it is a decision. We wanted to make something you could wear on an ordinary Tuesday.

Why our fragrances cost what they do

The price of a designer bottle is only partly the liquid inside it. A great deal of it is everything arranged around the liquid: campaigns, celebrity faces, magazine pages, heavy moulded glass, a lacquered box, an importer, a retailer and a lit shelf in a shopping centre. All of that is paid for long before the bottle reaches you.

We carry almost none of it. There is no advertising budget. Our glass is plain, light and honest. There is no importer and no retail markup, because the bottle travels from our blending room to your front door and stops nowhere in between.

What is left is the fragrance itself, made properly, and a price that reflects that and nothing else: R70 for 30ml, R120 for 50ml and R200 for 100ml, whichever of the sixty you choose.

A-grade French oils

Every fragrance we make is built from A-grade French fragrance oils, the grade the established houses work with. Good oil is the reason a scent holds its shape through a working day instead of thinning out an hour after you put it on, and it is the one place where spending less would show immediately. So we do not.

What "inspired by" honestly means

Each Ivana Sofia fragrance is an original composition, created in response to a designer scent that a great many people already love. We name that scent openly on the product page, because it is the single most useful thing we can tell you: if the character of one appeals to you, the other very likely will too.

It is worth being just as clear about what this is not. Ours is not the original product and is never sold as one. Our fragrances carry our own names, our own labels and our own formulations. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any of the designer houses we reference. Those names are their owners' trademarks, and we use them for one reason only: to describe scent character in words you already understand.

Where to start

If you already know the fragrance you love, find its pairing in the inspired-by directory. If you are starting from nothing in particular, the scent finder takes about a minute, and the fragrance wheel explains why you keep reaching for the same kind of scent without realising it.

You are also welcome to see how the fragrances are made, or to ask us anything. We answer our own email.