If you love a luxury hand soap or candle so much you kept the bottle or vessel but can’t afford to replace it, Element Brooklyn wants to be the lower-priced alternative you put inside that might just pass for the original.

The brand compares its $20 candle refills to $70 Diptyque and $99 Byredo candles and its $27 hand soap refill to $94 worth of Aesop hand wash, putting its prices around 70% to 80% below the luxury products it references. As consumers hunt for premium experiences they can afford, bootstrapped Element Brooklyn reports its profitable and its sales are on pace to more than double this year to $19 million from $9.5 million last year.

“You can’t smell a screen. A familiar reference gives a first-time customer a way to orient themselves and reduces uncertainty,” says Element Brooklyn founder Andrew Nicol. “A reference may open the door, but the quality of the product and the strength of the refill system build the business.”

Comparison-led products generally sell better than Element Brooklyn’s original fragrances, though Nicol points out several have also been on the market the longest. Mandarin Crush, Kiso Forest and Wild Pear are among the brand’s oldest scents and have the largest returning customer bases. Nicol says Element Brooklyn has a 39% repeat-purchase rate despite roughly six-month product lifespans, with customers returning for a second purchase twice as likely to subscribe as on their first order.

The luxury comparisons place Element Brooklyn in the often-contentious conversation around dupes. Comparative advertising is generally legal in the United States as long as claims are truthful and don’t imply a false affiliation. Nicol says a small number of brands have asked Element Brooklyn to change or remove specific comparisons, and the company works with legal counsel to address those requests.

While the debate over dupes rages on, many of beauty’s gatekeepers have pushed aside doubts. Oakcha and Dossier are both known for dupes of Baccarat Rouge 540, and the former has landed at Ulta Beauty, with the latter sold at Target and Walmart. Fine’ry, the fragrance brand developed by incubator Maesa exclusively for Target, has become known for affordable scents compared to prestige fragrances such as Tom Ford Lost Cherry, Le Labo Santal 33 and Baccarat Rouge 540, too. Private equity firm American Pacific Group picked up a majority stake in Dossier earlier this year.

Still, Nicol rejects the idea that imitation defines Element Brooklyn. “A dupe brand is defined by what it imitates. Element Brooklyn is defined by what we are building,” he says. “If every comparison disappeared from our website tomorrow, the proposition would remain intact: premium, low-waste, refill-first products and one of the widest fragrance catalogs in the industry.”

“A dupe brand is defined by what it imitates. Element Brooklyn is defined by what we are building.”

Nicol maintains that the comparisons aren’t intended to suggest Element Brooklyn is affiliated with or endorsed by the luxury brands it references, a disclaimer the company includes on its product pages. He says, “A comparison describes the direction of a scent. It does not define our formulation, performance, design, service or environmental proposition.”

To critics who argue Element Brooklyn benefits from luxury brands’ creativity and name recognition, Nicol points instead to what he considers excessive price increases. Aesop’s Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash, which Element Brooklyn references for its Mandarin Crush hand soap, has risen from $39 in 2020 to $49 today.

“Luxury was supposed to signify exceptional quality, creativity and care, not simply higher prices, more elaborate packaging and more waste,” says Nicol. “People should not have to choose between a beautiful product, a responsible one and a fairly priced one.”

Nicol’s frustration with luxury pricing and single-use packaging drove him to start Element Brooklyn in 2021 after noticing expensive bottles in friends’ bathrooms, hotels and gyms, with few of them refillable. Element began with Mandarin Crush hand soap.

“These brands had been raising prices so consistently that I felt like they’d become completely untethered from what it costs to actually make the product,” says Nicol, a former corporate lawyer and travel technology company founder. “That struck me as wasteful and, frankly, a little bit insulting to the customer.”

The first year and a half were scrappy. Nicol designed the branding and packed every order himself. He recalls one attempt to ship refill pouches in padded envelopes left “a trail of soap through the hallway of the building and out onto the street.” Customers reordered anyway. “That really high repurchase rate was a really good early validation,” he says.

“Luxury was supposed to signify exceptional quality, creativity and care, not simply higher prices, more elaborate packaging and more waste.”

After hand soap, Element Brooklyn’s refills expanded to candles, diffusers, haircare and home cleaning. The brand says it has passed 500,000 single-use bottles avoided. It employs 29 full-time staff across facilities in Brooklyn and Arizona, with fulfillment operations in the United Kingdom and Australia. Its products are sold at Anthropologie, Nordstrom and Ulta Beauty online.

A business-to-business arm has become another growth pillar. Element Brooklyn’s closed-loop bulk system serves more than 800 active accounts, including Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, Ladurée and the Penny Williamsburg hotel, which buy products in gallon jugs and return empty containers to be refilled. Nicol says these accounts choose Element Brooklyn based on performance, cost and waste reduction, not its fragrance comparisons.

Nicol views the B2B distribution as a form of sampling. A hotel guest who encounters the soap may later buy it for home. Element Brooklyn doesn’t sell on Amazon, offer list-signup discounts or run promotions, aside from an annual Black Friday sale. The brand only sends one marketing message a month.

Nicol says, “We don’t feel pressure to offer deals or do business with any companies we don’t feel aligned with. Amazon’s values don’t align with ours.”

The company’s next challenge is establishing a fragrance identity that leans less on luxury references, an effort that extends to its Gallery of Scent pop-up at South Street Seaport. The space features 30 touch-activated misters dispensing individual notes and generates personalized “scent portraits” for visitors. The activation has generated more than 5,000 portraits and 290 candle-workshop bookings since opening, prompting an extension through Dec. 30.

Element Brooklyn plans to bring the concept online through a fragrance quiz, and it’s introducing a $15 discovery set on Oct. 1 containing 10 5-milliliter samples of its hand soap scents, including Mandarin Crush and tomato-vine Jardín Azteca. The set comes with free shipping and a $10 voucher toward a future purchase.

Nicol says, “Comparative references may be a useful translation tool for some online customers, but they will not be the primary language of the brand.”