Maison: I wanted my fragrances to feel like a collection, not a spreadsheet

I collect fragrances. And for years I tracked them the way everyone does — a note in my phone, a half-abandoned spreadsheet, a mental list I'd lose. It always bugged me that these bottles that feel like objects, little luxuries you display, were getting logged like a grocery run.

So Maison is me fixing that for myself first. Point your camera at a bottle and it identifies it — that's Claude's vision model doing the work — and then you build a collection, track your wears, run your fragrance wardrobe the way watch people run theirs. It's a native app, and the whole feel is something I kept calling "Noir & Champagne" — dark, quiet, a little expensive-feeling. Because the app should feel like the shelf.

Quick note on the name. This started as Sillage. I liked it — sillage is literally the trail a fragrance leaves — but Maison is where it landed. Sometimes a name only reveals whether it fits after you've lived with it a while, and this one just felt more like the thing.

The build taught me something about taste being the hard part. The camera-identifies-the-bottle trick is genuinely impressive and it took an afternoon. Making the app feel considered — the spacing, the darkness, the restraint — took ten times longer and none of it shows up in a feature list. That's usually the ratio with anything meant to feel nice.

It's built. Next is getting it App Store ready, which, having just been through that with tab., I now have a very healthy respect for.