Steve DeMercado

A summer job at Naarden

Michael Simpson, his business partner, tells how Steve DeMercado got into perfumery. In the summer of his senior year of high school, as the bass player in a rock band, he was playing at a party at the fragrance house Naarden when a power outage cut the concert short.

He struck up a conversation with Johann Hydel, a perfumer the house had just hired. The two men hit it off at once, and Johann Hydel offered him a summer job as a compounder, the position in which the perfumer’s formulas are weighed and assembled.

Fragrance Resources

Steve DeMercado was a perfumer at Fragrance Resources when the Guess brand presented Guess Man, launched in 2006, as his composition. Michael Simpson, who came from marketing at Coty, worked alongside him there; together they developed fragrances and product concepts for a wide range of clients.

Michael Simpson describes him as the winner of several FiFi Awards and the creator of fragrances for Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Givenchy and Michael Kors. By 2019, the two men had shared twenty years of work and music: their band, Waiting for Gracie, brought together friends from the industry.

OK Fine Fragrances, perfume from the barrel

In May 2019, Steve DeMercado and Michael Simpson launched OK Fine Fragrances, an independent brand that presents itself as the first devoted to perfumes aged in American oak barrels, a process borrowed from wine, whiskey and bourbon.

Each barrel is seasoned with a spirit chosen to respond to the juice: bourbon for the double vanilla and the smoked oud, rum for the patchouli, mezcal for the amber. Steve DeMercado monitors the maturation like a master distiller, until he judges the wood’s work complete.

Batches are limited to 75 bottles; the brand maintains that none can be reproduced identically, which Steve DeMercado presents as the most stimulating part of the process.