When we began building Read Fragrances, we knew we weren’t simply launching another fragrance brand. We were creating a modern fragrance house at the intersection of scent, storytelling, and social impact—a brand designed to help people connect fragrance to their moods, memories, and evolving life chapters.
Choosing where to introduce Read Fragrances to a wider audience mattered just as much as creating the fragrances themselves. That is why launching on Target.com feels both intentional and deeply meaningful.
A Full-Circle Founder Moment
This is not our founder’s first experience with Target. As a second-time founder, Mabel Frías previously built a beauty brand that reached major retailers, including Target. That journey taught her how powerful retail distribution can be—but it also taught us that getting onto a shelf is only one part of building a lasting brand.
The real work lies in understanding our customers, creating products they genuinely want, and developing the operational discipline required to grow responsibly.
We carried those lessons with us when creating Read Fragrances. This time, we returned to retail with more experience, greater clarity, and a stronger understanding of the kind of company we wanted to build. Launching Read Fragrances on Target.com is a full-circle moment, but it is also the beginning of an entirely new chapter.
Meeting Customers Where Beauty Discovery Already Happens
Fragrance is personal, but discovering it is often communal. We learn about new scents through friends, creators, reviews, sampling, and the retailers we already trust.
Target has become a destination where customers explore beauty, wellness, personal care, and emerging brands. Launching on Target.com allows Read Fragrances to enter that discovery journey in a place that already feels familiar and accessible to millions of shoppers.
It also makes it easier for someone encountering Read Fragrances for the first time to explore the brand, begin with a discovery set, identify the scents that speak to them, and eventually build a fragrance wardrobe of their own.
For us, the discovery set is especially important. Fragrance cannot be fully understood through a screen. Sampling gives customers the freedom to live with each scent, notice how it develops on their skin, and decide which fragrance feels most like their current chapter. Target.com gives us the opportunity to introduce that experience to a broader audience.
Growing With Intention
As a team, we are thoughtful about growth. We do not believe every opportunity is the right one simply because it offers greater visibility. The right partnership should align with our customers, values, and long-term vision.
Launching digitally gives Read Fragrances the opportunity to grow with intention. We can learn from customer behavior, understand which scents and formats resonate most, and continue strengthening the business as awareness expands. It is a strategic step that pairs the reach of a national retailer with the focus and agility of an emerging brand.
This launch is about creating access without losing intimacy. Even as Read Fragrances reaches more customers, we want every interaction with the brand to feel personal—from discovering a scent to connecting it with a memory, mood, or moment.
Representation Belongs in Every Category
Founded by Mabel Frías, a first-generation Dominican American woman and second-time entrepreneur, Read Fragrances understands the importance of seeing founders with different stories, backgrounds, and perspectives represented in major retail spaces.
Read Fragrances was created from a distinct point of view: fragrance can be beautiful and sensorial while also carrying meaning. Our stories deserve to be bottled, displayed, gifted, and discovered. Our brands deserve the opportunity to compete, grow, and become part of customers’ everyday lives.
Being available on Target.com brings that belief into a larger marketplace. It reinforces that representation is not only about being seen—it is also about building enduring companies, creating economic opportunities, and showing the next generation of founders what is possible.
Fragrance With a Greater Purpose
Social impact is part of the foundation of Read Fragrances. Through our partnership with First Book, every fragrance purchase helps support literacy and confidence-building initiatives and the next generation of readers, dreamers, artists, and storytellers.
That connection is central to our name and mission. Reading allows us to imagine new worlds; fragrance can return us to a memory, express a mood, or inspire a new version of ourselves. By bringing the two together, we are creating a brand that invites customers to smell good, feel something, and contribute to something larger.
Launching on Target.com gives more customers the opportunity to participate in that mission with every purchase.
The Next Chapter Starts Here
We chose to launch Read Fragrances on Target.com because it represents reach, trust, discovery, and possibility. It is a platform where an emerging fragrance house can meet new customers while continuing to build thoughtfully.
For us, this moment is both strategic and emotional. Our founder knows what it takes to reach national retail—and what it means to return with the wisdom earned from building, losing, healing, and beginning again.
Read Fragrances is not simply entering a new sales channel. We are opening the next chapter of our story—and inviting more people to find the scent that belongs in theirs.
— The Read Fragrances Team
