Upscale Deodorant Brand To My Ships Smells the Future

Reported by Vogue.

The bathroom shelf has always been a study in hierarchy — luxury serums and designer fragrances up front, functional standbys tucked behind. That arrangement is quietly being dismantled. Across beauty, the so-called basics are having a serious glow-up, and the brands leading that charge aren't waiting for the prestige category to make room. According to Vogue, the global beauty and personal care market is projected to hit $704 billion by 2027, with deodorants alone forecast to grow 6.9% to $31 billion — numbers that make "functional" feel like a serious underestimate.

Into that gap stepped Daniel Bense, a former Aesop and Sunspel executive who launched personal care and fragrance brand To My Ships in 2024. The premise: your deodorant deserves the same consideration as your perfume. Starting with natural deodorant — aluminum-free, alcohol-free, designed with Milan-based research studio Formafantasma — the brand has since expanded into antiperspirants, hand and body wash, and fragrance. Eighteen months in, it's stocked in 120 doors across 25 countries, ships to 41, and the US has already become its second-largest market. Bense's target: £15 million in revenue by year five, doubling annually to get there.

The Fragrance Play

The brand's newest launch, The Incessant Anxiety Geranium — arriving May 27 — is its third scent, and each fragrance in the lineup begins as a deodorant formulation before being amplified into an eau de parfum. "We're building a fragrance wardrobe that complements your deodorant and bodycare products," Bense says. Every perfume uses fewer than five key ingredients, a deliberate restraint in a market that launched 4,000 new fragrances last year (up from 400 not long ago). The philosophy is intimacy over spectacle — scents that sit close to the skin, unfolding slowly rather than announcing themselves. Caroline Weintraub, VP at True Beauty Ventures, notes that fragrance continues to outperform across price points, with refillable formats and elevated body products representing real white space — exactly where To My Ships is operating.

The brand's 20% refill rate, rare for a label not yet two years old, is Bense's preferred metric for success. It signals something harder to manufacture than sales: actual habit change. Which is, admittedly, the toughest part of the pitch — getting people to rethink what they put on one of the body's most sensitive areas. Natural deodorants have a credibility problem, largely because transition periods and inconsistent formulas have burned early adopters. The word-of-mouth is strong, Bense admits, but "it requires people to tell a story about their armpits, which they're not so used to doing." Packaging in clear glass — UV-unprotected by design, minimally labeled to reduce ink and glue — compounds the technical challenge, even as it reinforces the brand's material honesty.

Deodorants currently account for 40% of revenue, with fragrance and body wash splitting the remaining 60% evenly — a balance that reflects the brand's intent to be a full body-care wardrobe rather than a single hero product. Premium, Bense insists, is not the same as luxury gone soft: it's the tier where ingredient integrity still means something, and where a £35 deodorant is a value proposition, not a vanity purchase.

When a brand can make you reconsider what you roll on before you leave the house, it's not just selling deodorant — it's rewriting what self-care actually costs.

Read the original at Vogue.