“Are you sure we are in the right spot?”
I assure photographer Sarah Killip that we have the correct address. But I know I don’t sound quite convincing. We are standing outside of what seems to be an old restaurant or storefront in Canandaigua. We peek in the window. “I see perfume bottles!” I yell.
That’s when Arthur Clayton Emerick pulls up and assures us that we are indeed at the right place. That “right place” is the home of luxury perfume house Jinx.
“This storefront is so funny. It’s never been successful,” Emerick says with a laugh. “It’s been an auxiliary catering kitchen for Lincoln Hill Farms. It’s been a pizza place, a clothing store. But retail just doesn’t work out here.”
As he unlocks the door, we walk into Emerick’s humble workshop where he mixes and bottles high-end fragrance that sells all over the world.
Emerick, a Michigan native, came to Rochester in 2008 after the coffee shop he owned closed. A friend was a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, and he invited Emerick to join him in the Flower City for a fresh start. Emerick always loved the world of scent, but in 2015 he discovered D.S. & Durga, a fragrance company making unusual perfumes with intriguing scents such as Burning Barber Shop and Cowboy Grass. At the same time, he was collecting vintage and antique French perfumes. Some he would resell but others he kept for his personal collection. Today he owns thousands of vintage and new release perfumes.
But Emerick didn’t want to just collect and appreciate perfume—he wanted to create his own. “I think the idea had been floating around in my head since the beginning of 2019, but I didn’t start actualizing it until 2020.”
He immersed himself in the world of scent and fine perfume from around the world. Emerick studied and learned about ingredients and blending. “I’m heavily influenced by Middle Eastern perfume,” he says when discussing his personal inspiration. “But I’m also influenced by French perfume, Indian perfume, and Japanese perfume, specifically.”
His business soon grew too big for blending and experimenting at his South Wedge kitchen table after his bartending gig at John’s Tex Mex. Today, Jinx has loyal customers worldwide, and all of his blends are hand mixed in his Canandaigua studio.
When it comes to the actual fragrances, his process is creative and organic. “Inspiration comes from all kinds of places. It could be walking my dog in the woods, or it could be in a busy market in Portugal; those are both real instances.”
Next, he gathers materials and ingredients to start blending while taking meticulous notes. “Probably after twenty or thirty tries, I’ll land on what I want. Then once I get to what I want, [I think] about the marketing angle. How do I want to present it? What do I want the design to look like?“
Then I draw on a tablet to come up with some loose ideas, and I send that off to one or two of my designers. We’re ping-ponging ideas back and forth, and then eventually we’ll land on something.”
His average batch size is five liters, and all of his perfumes are gender neutral. “I’m very intentional and careful about my marketing. When I market, I’m not speaking to men or women. It doesn’t matter. Most of my marketing is visual. It’s about texture, it’s about color, it’s about feeling.”
Jinx scents incorporate many different ingredients, but some of Emerick’s most luxurious components are oud, ambergris, musk, and rose.
While customers cannot currently walk into a (585)-area storefront and buy a Jinx fragrance, they can purchase them online. And if you are headed to Dubai, London, Dhaka, Paris, or Hong Kong, you can find it in fine fragrance boutiques. The success of Jinx worldwide has pleasantly surprised Emerick, who initially had a slow-growth busi-ness plan. That “slow growth” turned into rapid growth very quickly, and now he travels the world selling and creating some of the finest perfumes available. jinxsmells.com
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of (585).
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