Marco Vidal founded The Merchant of Venice out of an unusually specific origin point: the Venetian Perfume Museum, which gives the brand a claim most modern fragrance houses can't make to being culturally rooted rather than built purely as a commercial play. Vidal leads the brand's olfactory development and describes its position bluntly: “a unique brand, it has a style that is like no other,” tied directly to Venice's centuries of arts and craft history rather than a generic luxury signifier.
The brand now sells in more than 50 countries, built through partnerships with major international perfume houses and their perfumers, led on the creative side by perfumer Nicola Pozzani. Development runs through detailed olfactory briefs that partner houses respond to with proposals, refined back and forth until a scent matches what Vidal is after. Its Accordi di Profumo collection specifically sources ingredients through Givaudan's Sourcing4Good program, which channels sourcing dollars back to the local farming communities the raw materials come from.
Vidal is exacting about what “Venice” is actually supposed to smell like in a bottle. Describing the Gold Regatta fragrance, he put it plainly: “this is the smell of frozen seaweed in winter” — a specificity that runs through how the house talks about scent generally, less mood-board abstraction than an attempt to bottle an actual place.
