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Happy Belated Summer Solstice, Firn Friends (…“Fronds”?)! And in the spirit of being late to things, after 10 years of Firn, I'm excited to finally send out my first-ever (!) newsletter. WOOT. I won't commit to sending out a regular newsletter anytime soon, but I hope to do one on some sort of loose schedule in the future. Perhaps quarterly/seasonally? Semi-annually? Feel free to tell me what frequency you'd prefer and I'll take it into real consideration. The last thing I want to do is bombard you. Here's an overview of what I'll be covering in this letter to you in case you feel like scrolling to any headers: 10% off through the rest of the year to celebrate a decade of Oregon-inspired landscapes and experiences 🌲 Summer events and outreach New Firn stuff coming soon! New fragrance releases, a reformulation, and a new bottle size ANOTHER PEFUME LINE (I’m very excited about this) Important but slightly less exciting stuff: Concluding words of gratitude
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10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY DISCOUNT CODE THROUGH THE REST OF 2026
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First and foremost, let's get started with the discount to celebrate a decade of Oregon-inspired landscapes and experiences. The discount code is 10YEARS10%OFF and it applies to everything on the website. Thank you for celebrating this milestone with me!
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Firn will be at the Mountain Rose Herbs Mercantile in Eugene on the first Saturdays of August and September (August 1st and September 5th). Come try the full line of all natural Oregon-inspired 100% plant-based perfumes, drink some delicious herbal tea provided by Mountain Rose Herbs, and peruse the beautiful Mercantile. Testers will be available, as will full-size perfumes for sale. HUGE thanks to the MRH team for inviting Firn to this super-special artisan pop-up event series! (My wonderful husband will be joining me as the Firn Booth Babe.)
I hope you'll come visit. Meeting people who are passionate about nature and scent is one of my favorite things to do!
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NEW FRAGRANCE RELEASES AND A REFORMULATION
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NEW FRAGRANCE RELEASES Woodnote: My favorite migratory songbirds, the Swainson's Thrush, are currently doing their annual migration along the West Coast. While they're elusive and difficult to spot, you can hear these tiny birds when hiking in nearby forests and along riparian areas of Western Oregon's rivers and creeks. If you've never heard their call, here's a link to it. It's absolutely beautiful. They're often referred to as "Fair Birds" if you've been to the Oregon Country Fair. This scent will either be named "Woodnote", which means "a melodic birdsong" (but sounds very similar to another perfume I have called Wood Smoke), or "Swainson's Thrush" (real creative, right? Haha.) This scent combines Cedar with Balsam Fir, Porcini, and Cardamom absolutes. There are some other magical materials in there, but the overall composition intends to carry wearers and sniffers of this fragrance along on a spiraling melody upward into the trees.
First Rain: For the last two years, I've been working on my olfactory interpretation of the first rain of the season in a nearby wetland where I take my evening walks. Yup, it has petrichor in it, but it also has the minty brightness of pennyroyal and the warm agrestic qualities of hay and flouve. There's also oakwood and a few other tree-sourced ingredients. I brought a bottle of this to a recent event for visitors to sample, and one kind person said it gave her goosebumps in a good way, so that’s cool! Kahvesi: Kahvesi is the name for Turkish coffee. Does it replicate something in Oregon? Not exactly, but when combined with the fragrance in the next bullet point, it does! (More on that below.) When I was a teenager, my dad took me out of school for a couple weeks to go on an incredible life-changing trip to the Middle East, including Turkey. We drank Turkish coffee, which is beautifully thick and infused with cardamom. This perfume, inspired by Turkish coffee, is rich, sweet, and almost chocolatey. I use an exceptional vanilla absolute that includes boatloads of crushed vanilla beans to add gourmand depth and coziness. Kretek: Kretek is the crackling sound clove cigarettes make when they’re being smoked. Two years after my trip to Turkey, my friends and I discovered a coffee shop in southeast Portland called the Pied Cow. We'd sit in the courtyard and smoke hookah and clove cigarettes. Plumes of smoke (sometimes spiced, sometimes fruity) would curl into the air over our table while we'd get amped up on sugar and caffeine in the form of affogatos late into the evening. Such rebels. Here’s the fun part: When combined, Kretek and Kahvesi take me back to sitting in the Pied Cow's courtyard, a core memory of mine from growing up in the Portland area. I don't recall whether Turkish coffee was an offering on the Pied Cow’s menu, but I remember smelling cardamom and coffee together often while walking through the avant garde neighborhood with its old craftsman bungalows. Someone recently smelled Kretek and Kahvesi together and said "This smells like the 90s" which is exactly what I was going for. The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland — and now in Firn!
REFORMULATION OF GOLDEN LEAF The most recent iteration of Golden Leaf includes both Kretek and Kahvesi in it. To me, it smelled too muddled and confused, so I'll be pulling Kretek and Kahvesi from the composition, and instead returning Golden Leaf to its original and intended form: leaves, trees, and cinnamon bark. It is a smooth, spiced, less-vanillic fragrance that intends to capture the scent of crushed dried leaves underfoot in peak autumn. Imagine the deciduous trees have changed colors, and hot comforting drinks have made their official return to our welcoming hands.
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A NEW (SMALLER) BOTTLE SIZE OFFERING
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In addition to the organic 30ml organic EDPs and the organic 5ml concentrated perfume oils, 10ml organic EDPs will soon be on the website. This allows customers to try more fragrances without having to commit to a larger size. If you're like me, you may already have a significant perfume collection and cannot imagine getting through it all in a single lifetime. I love my collection of niche minis, so I've decided Firn should have these available as well. I'm currently waiting to receive the bottles, then I'll design labels that fit, etc, but they should be on the website in the coming months.
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INTRODUCING CROCUS: A NEW, SECOND PERFUME LINE!
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I've been having a bit of a soul-searching year so far and have realized that I've made some fragrances that are worthy of developing further. However, they aren't inspired by Oregon/Northwest landscapes and therefore don't align with the Firn ethos... So I’m creating a second line called Crocus Perfume Company! Crocus was inspired earlier this year by one of my favorite Flora Healing cards that hit me at a time of deep introspection and an epiphany about what I want to do with my life. I'm in the process of getting the bottles custom-printed. I’m also considering incorporating some other sensory elements, like texture and color, to align with the fragrance notes for a somewhat interactive experience. More to come!
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LESS EXCITING BUT STILL VERY IMPORTANT LOGISTIC-Y THINGS: Firn is Relocating to Yet Another Oregon Town & Update on International Shipping
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WORKSPACE RELOCATION Firn Handcrafted has been located in the Southern Willamette Valley (Corvallis and Monroe) for its entire existence. Monroe, my most recent home, is a very tiny rural town of about 740 people in the city limits, with another thousand or so in the surrounding area. Items need to travel longer due its somewhat remote location. Last year, I married my best friend who lives in the northeastern edge of the Willamette Valley (Silverton). Well, I'm finally moving in with my husband! 💚 I'm really excited about this change but it means there may be some delays with fulfilling orders as I transport all my materials North. That said, Silverton is closer to a much larger postal hub (Salem), so orders will take less time to arrive to customers once they've been shipped. In other words, there may be some short-term pains but long-term gains as far as shipping times go.
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INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING I'm receiving an increasing number of requests to ship internationally which has helped me to see that people in other parts of the world who also delight in using their noses want to experience Oregon, too. SO COOL! I love this. I've been hesitant to ship internationally because of the cost but I'm planning to seriously explore this later this year once things settle down. If you know someone who has expressed interest in trying Firn but doesn't live in the United States, please pass onto them that this is actively being assessed.
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GRATITUDE & CLOSING THOUGHTS
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The last ten years have been such a fun adventure in nature, chemistry, sensory composition, art, and design. I appreciate so very much the feedback some of you have shared with me over email, in the “Notes” field when you place orders, or through forms of social media. I aspire to scale up Firn to have a somewhat larger presence in the niche fragrance world, but only if it makes sense and still aligns with my values. I don’t want to force it. I want it to feel natural and like an organic evolution of the line, and I want it to continue to be a joy I am obsessively passionate about. I don’t want to push you away with marketing garbage. Maybe you’ll see more of Firn in your feed, or maybe you won’t… Who knows? I’m trying not to grasp at attempts to control the future so much these days. I am SO grateful to you for signing up for this newsletter, for your patience with my fits and starts in social media (oof, I SO dislike social media but it's a necessary evil of running a business), and for supporting my biggest passions: nature, perfumery, and the connections the two allow us to have with the world and with each other. Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm with me in this deeply fulfilling passion. I am so grateful to you. 🙏 ALSO, thank you for reading this far! Don't forget to apply the 10% off discount code this year if you're planning to place an order! Cheers to Ten Years and to Ten More! Lisa Lindner Founder & Formulator firnhandcrafted@gmail.com P.S. - Are you a Parfumo user? If so, please leave reviews on my fragrances! I love to read what others have to say about them, and these reviews are the best way prospective customers can read how the scents are interpreted by other enthusiasts of niche fragrance houses. THANK YOUUU!
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