Introducing Scent Society

We’ve wanted a loyalty program for Element Brooklyn for a long time, but we kept running into a problem with the usual model. Most loyalty programs are another way of rewarding spending: every dollar earns points, more spending unlocks a higher tier, and the most valuable customer is simply the person who buys the most.

That structure makes sense for plenty of companies. It felt slightly backwards for a business built around refilling.

Our goal has always been to make the container the least interesting part of a repeat purchase. You buy a dispenser once, keep it for as long as possible, and come back for what goes inside. So when we finally designed our own program, we decided that the behavior worth rewarding wasn’t buying more. It was refilling more.

The result is Scent Society, our members-only fragrance community.

Impact Points instead of spending points

Every eligible refill now earns Impact Points, calculated from the packaging you avoid by refilling an existing container instead of replacing it. For our plastic refill pouches, that works out to roughly one point for every gram of plastic kept out of circulation. Candle refills are weighted separately, because glass has a very different weight and recycling profile. Every eligible product page shows exactly how many points it earns.

In practice, a 34 oz hand soap refill such as Mandarin Crush earns 40 points, a 17 oz refill earns 20, and a candle refill earns between 20 and 30.

Earn 500 Impact Points within any rolling twelve-month period and you automatically receive a year of Scent Society membership. Initial dispensers, accessories and other non-refill products don’t earn points, because the benefit we’re trying to recognize happens when a container gets used again rather than replaced.

We like this system because the incentives are unusually literal. The same action that reduces packaging also moves you closer to membership.

What membership unlocks

Scent Society gives members access to products that aren’t part of the regular collection: fragrances and formats we can make in smaller quantities, or want to experiment with before deciding whether they belong in the permanent range.

The first exclusives are Jardín Azteca Hand Soap, our green tomato-vine fragrance; the Disco Lily Candle Refill, built around tuberose; and the Custom Engraved Candle Vessel, with more member-only releases on the way.

There’s a practical reason for making some products this way. Not every fragrance needs to become a permanent, high-volume part of the collection, and some of the things we most enjoy making are too specialized to produce at enormous scale. Scent Society gives those ideas somewhere to live, and gives our most engaged customers the first chance to try them. Over time, we also want members to have a say in what we develop next.

Two ways to join

If you refill regularly, there’s nothing extra to buy. Your Impact Points accumulate automatically, and as soon as you reach 500 within a twelve-month window, membership unlocks for a year.

If you’d rather join straight away, there’s also a $40 annual membership. Paid members get the same access from the day they join and keep earning Impact Points through their membership year, so it’s entirely possible to qualify through refilling by the time a paid year ends.

The membership fee also funds the development of new fragrances and packaging for the Society. We wanted to be explicit about that. Rather than charging for permission to collect more points, we use the fee to pay for the small-run experiments that members are joining to get in the first place.

Explore Scent Society

Loyalty to the refill, not the bottle

There’s an unavoidable tension in making physical products sustainably. Most businesses benefit financially when customers replace things more often, while the better environmental outcome is usually to make an object last and sell less of the material around it. We’ve written before about why reuse beats recycling, and why we chose durable plastic for our dispensers.

We can’t remove that tension altogether, but we can at least avoid building a loyalty program that rewards the wrong side of it. In Scent Society, your tenth refill counts for far more than a tenth dispenser.

That feels much closer to the kind of loyalty program we wanted to run.