An Opportunity Lost
What happened with House of Puente?
Let’s start from the beginning. In late 2022, after more than 15 years of studying perfumery, I decided to take the plunge and start Puente Perfumes. The goal was to be a niche, luxury perfume house that creates classically inspired fragrances. After starting the business and launching my first perfume, Medusa, I reached out to an old client of mine which I use to do graphic design work for. Since he was a businessman, I wanted to introduce the idea to him and see what he thought. After smelling some of the perfumes and looking more into the niche perfumery market, he proposed a business partnership where he would own the business, invest capital, and I would be creative director and a shareholder.
Then he asked me, “how big do you want Puente Perfumes to be”. To which I answered “For the first 2 to 3 years I want to keep things small to give us time to create a few more perfumes, understand our clientele, and put any investments and money from sales towards getting a location to produce the fragrances, create plenty of inventory, and make sure the foundation of the business is in good shape… after that, we can go as big as you want.” Sounds reasonable, right? But alas, that’s not what happened. Shortly after the initial investment he began creating a lot of unnecessary overhead and began hiring people for all sorts of projects that I felt were not necessary at that moment.
Let’s step back for a second. As I had mentioned above, I did graphic design work for him. That’s because graphic design and branding was my profession for many years. In fact, we met because he was starting an HR business and needed branding design work which I created and was successfully used for over 15 years until he sold the business. So, in short, I know design and branding.
Why did I bring this up? Because one of the things that we discussed was that I would create the look and feel for Puente Perfumes. Not only would this make the brand feel more authentic and be more in line with the vision of the artist, but, would also save the business a lot of money. Instead of letting me handle my own brand design he decided to hire an outside designer to create the branding of what became House of Puente. Did she do a good job? Yes. Do I think she’s a good designer and would work with her again in the future if needed? Absolutely yes… but… $40,000 later in design fees and photography (let alone the other several thousand dollars being spent on a monthly basis on other contractors) put the finances of the business in a tough spot. There was now not enough money to buy what we needed to make inventory, and, my personal finances were also being severely affected.
(Let’s just say my rent was behind, my electricity was behind, and I was at risk of having my power shut off)
Anyway, as you can imagine, this brought severe strain to our business relationship. I fought him many times, asking him to please put priorities in place and to stop spending so much money. His response was that this is how you grow a business and that I should trust him.
After a good two years of this pattern and seeing how things were getting worse, I decided to take legal action with hopes that I could remove him as manager. I had some success in the beginning and was able to temporarily take control, however, after the final hearing, I was unable to stay as sole manager permanently and he regained full control of the company once more. At this point, I was ready to just walk away from it all, but, after a very heated discussion with him, I decided to give it one more chance and see if things would change… they didn’t… and the same patterns of mismanagement started up again shortly after.
Enough was enough… The business had no money for me to create the perfumes, ship them, nor pay myself so after much thought I decided to leave House of Puente and focus solely on Votum. To my surprise, shortly after, all products on the website were put out of stock, customer emails were not being answered and eventually being returned entirely, and as of recently, the website itself is gone.
It’s puzzling to me why he would fight to keep control and ownership of the business only to let it die once I decided to leave. Whatever the reason, it looks like House of Puente is done and gone. If he has any plans to resurrect it in the future or make something new out of it, I don’t know.