Search
Close this search box.
0
0
Subtotal: $0.00
No products in the cart.
Search
Close this search box.
0
0
Subtotal: $0.00
No products in the cart.

A conversation with a fragrance founder

Subscribe to The Common Scents Podcast
Love the Podcast?

window.RTP_CONFIG = {link: 'tamar', mode: 'button'};

In this episode of The Common Scents podcast, Tamar talks with Ryan Handis, creator of Broken Anatomy Perfumes, about their journeys into fragrance, their overcoming of adversity, and the parallels between the two brands.

[00:00:16.577] – TAMAR:
Hey, everybody, super excited bringing in Episode 57 of the Common Scents podcast. And this one is going to be a different one. The reason why is Common Scents podcast really talks about stories of transformation, stories of career shifts, stories about self-care. And while we’re not going to drop that at all in this particular podcast, this particular podcast, I connected with Ryan. He is actually in the fragrance world. We connected in a completely different environment. I was super excited. He started his own thing. I started my own thing. We aligned; the stars aligned for us in that front. And I think that there’s a really good opportunity for us to talk about our journeys, learn about Ryan’s journey. I certainly don’t know yet. I’ve seen his stuff. It’s been amazing. He’s going to share that. So thank you so much for coming.

[00:01:04.667] – Ryan Handis:
Hi. Yes. Thanks for having me on here.

[00:01:07.097] – TAMAR:
Yeah. Where are you physically? Tell me a little bit more about that and what you do and who you are.

[00:01:13.097] – Ryan Handis:
My one year old back here, she’s doing good, just eating. So we’re from Cottonwood, Arizona. So we are about 15 miles east of Sedona, which a lot of people know more about than Cottonwood. So we’re in the desert, which is nice because we get lots of cool desert rains and it’s just it’s a good time. Yeah, cool.

[00:01:36.537] – TAMAR:
And tell me, what do you do? Because you work in the fragrance world. So tell me a little more about that.

[00:01:40.877] – Ryan Handis:
OK, so in the fragrance world, I am the founder and perfumer of Broken Anatomy Perfumes and I say perfumer. I haven’t gone to perfume school and I’m self trained so I’m more of a perfume artist. I guess I wouldn’t say “official perfumer by trade,” but needless to say, I do enjoy creating things that are kind of off the wall and different as well. I started reviewing fragrances in 2017 and I really just wanted to, I guess, expand on that. I kind of got bored of it and ran into some personal issues in my own life and I thought, I need a change and I think I have the tools to do this. One thing I learned in the perfume school that I was watching online was that if you want to do it, you can. And that’s the only requirement, is that you want to do it. You have the passion for it. So that’s really it. Yeah.

[00:02:38.967] – TAMAR:
Yes. That’s a good story.

[00:02:39.437] – Ryan Handis:
And we’ve been around for about a year and well, sorry, we launched last November, but I’ve been around working on this for about the past year. So it’s been it’s been a while in the making. We’ve really officially only been in business since November of last year. So we’re pretty new.

[00:02:59.177] – TAMAR:
2019 or November 2020?

[00:03:01.817] – Ryan Handis:
20. Sorry.

[00:03:02.237] – TAMAR:
Yeah. Wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Because I had seen your stuff and I was, I’ve been pretty impressed. I mean you have to check his packaging out. It’s just, it’s so cool. It’s like hieroglyphicky. It’s like it’s really cool stuff. Yeah.

[00:03:17.357] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah, thanks.

[00:03:17.837] – TAMAR:
My story is very—you don’t know my story so I’ll share it here. I don’t know. I wasn’t into fragrance and fragrance reviews at all. It just sort of fell into my lap. You know, as a father I guess you’ll relate maybe. I don’t know if you will. You might, you might not, but having children, I have four and I fell into a postpartum depression after the birth of my first one, but I didn’t really have the awareness of it until finally, like, I hit a rock bottom, basically due to other things and kind of external influences, that kind of like really seized my depression and made it a lot worse. And the one thing that saved my life was perfume. Perfume changed me, perfume.

[00:03:56.817] – Ryan Handis:
Wow.

[00:03:57.797] – TAMAR:
And I said to myself, I want to do something in perfume. I want to launch a perfume brand specifically because I wanted to help people. [To] kind of figure out scents to make it—it’s not about wearing it for other people, but wearing it for yourself, which I’m sure you completely identify with. I’m sure you understand that 100%. A lot of people do. I would say the majority of people do it because they want it for other people. You can see that in the fragrance world, everyone’s like, oh, “what should I wear if I want to go on a date with this person?” You know? And it’s this, right? I don’t think it’s about that. I don’t think it should be about that. It should be about doing it because you want to wake up in the morning and you want to make a concentrated effort to accomplish something throughout the day, and if things get difficult, especially when, like for me, I’m working out and I actually take the opportunity to sniff my wrists because it grounds me in that way. When I’m like sitting here and I have like one hundred and seventy beats per minute of my heart rate, that’s the philosophy that people don’t really take. And I think it’s important to kind of reset yourself and even when the going gets tough. So that’s my story and that’s kind of why I did it. But in the way you did, you’re like, no. Most people I don’t think there’s very few people that really can get the training to become a perfumer unless they’re working as an apprentice at one of these perfume shops. You do have to be self-trained. You did have to figure it out. And for me, I don’t have the patience for that. So I outsourced that part.

[00:05:20.587] – Ryan Handis:
Right on.

[00:05:20.587] – TAMAR:
Yeah, cool. Well, yeah, I would love to learn a little bit about—you know, you came from that, that space. What were your what was your life like before that? What were you doing before you went into this whole perfume thing in the fragrance world? Like what did you train in officially like school wise and all these things?

[00:05:40.807] – Ryan Handis:
So in 2011 I started as a part time firefighter. And that’s kind of where my life took off from leaving home, not being a kid anymore, going to college. And I got married in 2011 as well to my wife, Liberty, and she’s pretty much seen me through my whole entire career. And I’d say that’s that’s where a lot of the brokenness sort of came from in my own life, was was just seeing it. And other people you see neglect and abuse and car accidents with, children and young adults that lose their lives right in front of you. And you see the brokenness around you that’s really hidden from a lot of people. And I really think that I wanted to kind of exemplify that and say, look, it’s OK, it’s OK that we’re all broken, but we’re never lost. And and that’s what’s on my coin, you know, “always broken, never lost,” because we’re not. We’re not lost. We all have a divine purpose. And that’s what I want my perfume to kind of remind people of and say, hey, you know, we do have a greater purpose. And that’s that’s where the stories come from in my perfume: Burnt Remedy, Chasing Memories, Brain Dance, they all sort of have their own different stories and feelings that come to the table. That’s kind of our philosophy is just being one with everybody and being honest and open and saying, we’re right here with you, we’re going through this life together and let’s do it.

[00:07:04.507] – TAMAR:
Yeah. You know, there’s a big alignment with Tamar also. The perfume that I ended up calling Intense, which was appropriately named in the end of the day, it was going to be called Flawed. I still probably am going to have a flawed perfume. OK, but the it’s smoky; it’s a smokiness as a firefighter, I guess you have that, but it is pretty intense. So my mother, for example, she won’t, she’s like, “that’s way too intense for me.” But a lot of people think it works. It works out very well. The whole idea is that it’s supposed to— the names of my perfumes right now [are] Quirky and Intense and hopefully we’ll go out and get more. But it’s about embodying the fact that we’re not perfect and to appreciate who we are and to appreciate that through the experience of like for me, it’s scent. It’s totally like it’s great that you have that. That important.

[00:07:58.387] – TAMAR:
I don’t think—a lot of these perfumes don’t have these stories. They don’t really talk about [this]. It’s all the external stuff, the seduction, the sexualization. I’ve seen your products. I follow you on Instagram. That marketing is that you and I take, it’s very different. I think it’s about time that the industry gets disrupted in this way. They start to feel that, just remember, remember who you are.

[00:08:25.027] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s that’s exactly what it comes down to: remembering who you are. And, for us, we’re a Christian brand. You know, I don’t really advertise that on my Instagram, but for us, it’s remembering who God is and who we are and or who he is in our lives. And with that brokenness, we are whole in Him as well, which is that’s really cool. We don’t of course we don’t push it on others, of course. But that’s just our own personal feelings aside from the brand.

[00:08:58.147] – TAMAR:
Yeah. No, I’m Jewish. I totally get it. The philosophy of [the fact that] we’re made, we’re created in God’s image is never lost upon me. We’re here. I could never have agreed, aligned with that whole philosophy, until—the best parts of you lie ahead. And then I finally hit that stride. And I’m in my thirties and all of a sudden, things go, oh my God, it’s starting to come together. But you got to believe that there’s potential there. And I think that there’s opportunity in due time that you do hit that that moment where you’re like, “yeah, that this is me. And I am as perfect as I can be. And I appreciate exactly who, how I was made. And I’m going to make the best of what’s in front of me.”

[00:09:45.817] – Ryan Handis:
Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:48.367] – TAMAR:
So I don’t know. Can you talk about you like your whole story and how you’ve kind of gone into this? And I know I talk, a big part of the podcast in general talks about like transformation. My transformation came from the experience of scent. Just curious if you have anything that kind of aligns with this whole story and stuff like that, I know we kind of met in a completely different environment and this podcast is expected to be different. But I’m curious to know if you have that defining moment where it all comes together and that’s sort of where you’re coming from with your philosophical approach toward the fragrance that you’ve had and where all that comes from because I assume that there is like there is an adversity story that kind of defines you, your “start with why” as Simon Sinek, the author, says in his book like your Why. So, just curious to hear from you about that.

[00:10:33.777] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah, absolutely. And so starting out, reviewing perfumes and stuff, you know, I was I was gradually writing poetry, taking photos, meeting new people all over the world and just kind of getting more prideful about myself and who I was and who I thought I was. It led me to make some bad decisions professionally and personally. Basically, I was giving up my wife, my kids, my house, really everything. And it came really close to that. Fortunately, I worked it out with my wife and we kind of got to the root of all of it and what was going on for me mentally. And I started going to counseling and getting help for some of that. Some of it was drinking. Some of it was just relationship sort of stuff with my wife. All along she was always steadfast. And God was too, of course. But Liberty, she was always, always steadfast and patient, even when she thought I was messing up. At the very bottom, she had a choice to make where she could have given up on me. This is before the brand, of course, but she could have given up on me personally. And didn’t. She could have left our marriage but didn’t. And she forgave the man that I was and gave me a chance to be the man that I’m supposed to be. And that’s not under my own power because I can’t do that under my own power. If it’s under my own power, I’ll turn back into the same person I was. So that sort of pretty much almost losing everything and then not only getting her back and my family back, but getting this new brand with her. We’re doing this together as a team now and getting this brand back, but getting more back than I than I had before was just such a such a huge turning point in my life. Because, now I’m not just reviewing scents and writing poetry for people who mostly don’t even appreciate it, but now I’m actually doing something and I’m doing something that’s not only benefiting my my craving to create art, but it’s benefiting a private company who pretty much rescues human trafficking victims.

[00:12:50.597] – TAMAR:
That’s amazing. Talk more about that.

[00:12:50.637] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah. So all together with all that, we have this brand. We don’t really make a lot of money off of it, but with all that happening, my point of this brand now and people ask me all this all the time, “what’s what’s your legacy?” Not “what’s your legacy,” but “what’s the purpose of your brand?” And I say, “well, my purpose is to leave a legacy for my kids and for everyone that gets to experience our family and the stories we’re telling.” And if anything, that’s the purpose of the brand. If there is a monetary purpose, I’d say we get to go travel the world someday, at least a couple of times with this brand and and use it to actually see the world that we’re put in. But yeah. And so that’s that’s kind of how it all ties together to that story. I don’t want to go too specific and do it, but yeah.

[00:13:38.907] – Ryan Handis:
To answer your question, the OUR Rescue, which is Operation Underground Railroad, they’re a company that works with law enforcement worldwide. Operation Underground Railroad, they are an or an organization nonprofit, I believe. They run strictly off donations and they work with FBI and private law enforcement agencies to rescue human trafficked children or human trafficking victims and children alike and put them in better homes. Of course, they pursue charges against the perpetrators. I found that through a clothing launch I was kind of participating in a couple of years ago. I bought a few shirts for them and all the money was donated to this company. And I was like, man, that’s so cool that they do this. And then, of course, when I was in church, our pastors talking about multiplying what we’re given, not just adding or subtracting from it, and I thought, man, that’s that’s so cool. And that’s that applies to the brand right there. Like, I need to be doing something that’s multiplying our brand. It’s not adding to it like, “oh, let’s go take a million trips,” or subtracting from it, “let’s go buy all the stuff because we’re making money.” It’s actually multiplying our purpose, meaning it’s multiple purposes in one and so it’s adding much more depth and meaning to our legacy and also helping out with that cause so it’s really cool to be a part of it and to be able to do this.

[00:15:15.157] – TAMAR:
That’s beautiful. That’s awesome. I’m so—that’s very cool. Yeah. Cool. Cool.

[00:15:19.537] – Ryan Handis:
Thank you.

[00:15:20.287] – TAMAR:
Yeah. You know, it’s funny talking about the struggles that you kind of went through in your marriage. I also, like I said, you know, there’s so many align there’s so much alignment with your story and my story. Like when I hit my bottom, I was definitely, I was dependent upon an individual who is not in my immediate family emotionally. I was drawn into helping an individual, an external individual outside the family, and I became addicted to the high of feeling like I could do that. And it certainly had a negative impact on me where I was neglecting my family. My husband would go on trips, my children would go on trips with my husband and I would stay behind because of this desire not to, like I was feeling more satisfied on the other side. And why? I don’t know why. I guess for me personally, I latch on and become vulnerable to solving emotional challenges.

[00:16:11.047] – Ryan Handis:
Sure.

[00:16:13.057] – TAMAR:
It’s a dangerous, it’s a slippery slope for me personally. But I would say my husband could have easily walked away. My whole family knew it. It wasn’t just his family. My parents told me, you need to focus on your husband. You focus on your kids. And they’re 100 percent right. But I wasn’t really of the headspace to do that because depression was really robbing me and the visibility, I had visibility into it, but I didn’t have the… There was no desire. It’s very hard. But then that that moment when perfume kind of changed that, it was like, hey, I’ve become a better version of myself. And ever since then, the rest is history. There’s nothing to do with [the past]. But that also ended, that relationship ended in a very, very, very bad way, which brought me into a lower headspace for a while but then eventually the perfume saved me from that. So I fell into this whole, I was already in a hole. I was sort of climbing out. It’s like being stepped on when you’re like halfway up the hole. It’s hard. It was definitely difficult, but I would say thanks to the experience of knowing all my five senses and actually appreciating how my five senses, which I don’t think we all do, I think everybody has the opportunity, the ability to unravel and to unleash that, that if they could only give it give a little bit of thought into it. It’s so easy, we take it for granted all the time but I think it can change everybody. And that’s what that’s that’s how I feel anyhow.

[00:17:33.037] – Ryan Handis:
Absolutely. Yeah. Wow. And I can relate to that for sure. Yeah. Right right along the same lines. And that’s how a lot of that stuff starts, is that feeling of being needed and having purpose and even maybe a feeling of your own spouse not understanding you and feeling understood by this other person more. So it’s crazy. I can definitely relate to that and that’s how a lot of my problems started too was that exact same way. But of course, it was in the perfume industry, so it wasn’t really it wasn’t really something where I came into perfume and I got relief from it. It was kind of the problem. And there had to be a huge step back and reorganizing of my priorities and my thought process. I totally understand how you go from being on this high to being so depressed and feeling so useless and trapped like you’re the only person in the world and you can’t really tell anybody your secrets. Thankfully, like I said, my wife, she was strong enough to pull that out of me and to handle it responsibly and gently because she can see it on my face. I would come home and I’d break down and I’d have to make up a lie. I couldn’t tell her why I was. But yeah, she knew. She knew once I told her the truth about everything, she wasn’t really surprised.

[00:19:05.947] – TAMAR:
Explain that a little more, because you say it comes from the fragrance industry, so.

[00:19:09.217] – Ryan Handis:
Well, I don’t want to explain it too much in detail because it involves other people still in the industry. I don’t want to slander them at all. But I learned a very important lesson too. And through that other person, which is interesting because in that yearlong relationship with that person, I kind of trained myself and I was already a little bit like this, but I trained myself to really pity myself a lot more than I ever had, and after ending all that and trying to heal, I noticed I was still doing it to Liberty and it was like, man, what’s wrong with me? This wasn’t something that was to my attention until we kind of gotten the word and Liberty would say, “having pity on yourself this heavily is just as bad as being prideful, it’s it’s another form of pride. It’s just the opposite.” She’s absolutely right. So instead of spending days on end feeling sorry for myself or if she’s telling me how I’m feeling instead of feeling sorry for myself, for how she’s feeling, acknowledging her feelings and saying, “hey, I understand I’m here for you even though I did this.” And that ultimately has been the biggest challenge since then.

[00:20:29.497] – TAMAR:
But I like that quote. I really like that quote, what she said. I think that, you’re right. Pity is totally not the way you want to perceive your life. And it builds ruminations. I like to always think I’ve had people come up to me ever since I’ve talked about how I overcame depression. Not that I’m at all qualified to get people to get over depression, but I’m like, where does the question really start? When I start to look back on my life, because I’ve been depressed more than once in my life, and it starts with rumination. It starts with the way you see things. It’s all about mindset. The word mindset; these days, people are like maybe that’s like a cliche, but it’s not. It’s all about mindset. Yesterday, I will say right now, it’s March 4th. Yesterday, March 3rd was the one year anniversary that my community fell into a quarantine. We were the first city in the United States that had a community-wide quarantine. Two weeks later, the rest of our state did, and the rest of the country started to follow.

[00:21:27.077] – Ryan Handis:
Wow.

[00:21:28.867] – TAMAR:
I was featured [in] an NBC News segment last night. And the woman [newscaster], I spoke to them for forty five minutes, they ended up taking only ten seconds of my quotes. Of course, that’s how it happens. Sometimes they talk to you for five minutes, but this time they talked to me for like forty five minutes and they took two minutes out or so, but whatever it is, the whole thing was like it’s mindset. Covid could have totally been a complete [disaster]. I’m very vulnerable to having. Having had covid, like if I was in a bad, a worse mental—if I had a bad mental mindset, this totally could have devastated me because I know that I’m vulnerable that way. But it was about preparing myself mentally. I read a lot of books. Robin Sharma is probably one of my favorite authors for this, and I was in that different headspace. It again, it comes down to mindset. It really does. And they’re very difficult to do though. It is very difficult, especially in the moment. It has to define and it has to permeate you and you have to believe it. And getting yourself to believe. You might need an external physical factor. It’s not about the mental. So that’s why I say “use fragrance as a means of getting into that.”

[00:22:36.817] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. One thing I discovered was with the self-care stuff going around. And I totally understand that. For me personally, it was actually easier for me to get over my depression and stuff when I took my focus off myself and put it on God and my wife. And this is just relating to that, not saying it’s wrong to take care of yourself or to do those things. That’s not absolutely what I’m saying.

[00:23:09.037] – TAMAR:
Yeah, self care is the most important thing. But in order to do that, you have to you have like you did have to put [forth others]. Sometimes it works. I couldn’t be a better parent without focusing on myself. So it started from within which I think you recognize. But you focused on prayer. That’s that’s important.

[00:23:27.127] – Ryan Handis:
Well, exactly. I mean, you have to stop your own bleeding before you can stop someone else’s. I mean, and that’s just the thing. You can’t really be worth anything to your kids if you’re not worth anything to yourself. It’s just how it is. And there’s no way around that. And that’s OK. I was always so inwardly focused in my life and so to to kind of step back and say, wait, it’s not about me, you know, it’s not my responsibility. If I focus on my family and taking care of them and of course, learning as much as I can from my father, God, then, I don’t have to I don’t have to have the burden of making myself happy because I just naturally will be. And that has been the biggest gift that I’ve been given through through the despair of, you know, that whole year was realizing that. And it’s took a lot. I would go on drives and just cry and not know why, and then think about ways to end my life. I never did anything, never made plans. But, you know, it was it was just such a low point into some sort of think back then. And the thing now, you know what’s around me. I just I’m just so thankful to be surrounded by my family and friends like you and this brand, that can keep reminding me that I’m always broken, but I’ve never lost.

[00:24:53.227] – TAMAR:
You do have a community. And that’s the thing. I really, especially now in the last 365 days community has been such an important and integral part of my survival, I think they need a community. I’m not talking about—I’m talking about specifically like the fragrance community online. I’m talking about, I feel I emphasize, I sympathize with the people who aren’t online because I think that’s the way I know the sanity that we really get, especially in these hard times. So having that friend circle, as superficial as they are or whatever, like I was reading an article a few weeks ago, I don’t remember where it came from. Maybe, I don’t know. But this woman was was actually mulling over, like these social acquaintances that we kind of have, like, for example, when you’re on line at Starbucks and you’re always have this one person in front of you. You’ll never, you might exchange pleasantries, but it means nothing. But it does mean something because now you don’t have that. You’re like, “oh, I wish I had those pleasantries with this stranger.” And online, like the way you the way you say, these people that I have online communications with, I think even though it’s not the same, the context is completely digital. It’s the written word. I think we’ve already figured out how to replace that. Or not replace that, but supplement that for the time being temporarily. Yeah, I don’t know.

[00:26:23.867] – Ryan Handis:
And it’s interesting, you go so long without seeing people and you almost wonder if you don’t see other people alive, are you alive? It’s sort of a weird psychological thing. What we don’t see. If you don’t interact with people, you sort of doubt your own existence. It’s crazy. You know, we were created to be around other people. Yeah.

[00:26:46.597] – TAMAR:
Yeah. It’s an interesting dynamic for sure. So I want to ask you, because you talked about self-care to some degree. I want to ask you about your self-care regimen.

[00:26:59.267] – Ryan Handis:
Well, I don’t really have a regimen of self-care. Mostly, I just, when I can remember or have the motivation in the morning, I’ll read my Bible and, you know, I’ll try. I’m a musician, too, so I love, I just put my drums away because my kids are taking up more room. But I love playing guitar. And that’s one way that I sort of get my frustration and my feelings out. Yeah, I don’t really have a regimen specifically for self-care, but just taking care of others and focusing on the things that I love to do, that sort of makes me feel good and confident about myself and it makes me feel healthy, I suppose, especially emotionally and mentally healthy.

[00:27:53.307] – TAMAR:
The experience of scent really can help so much. And I think people just don’t benefit from that. Also, like a lot of people are like, “oh, essential oils. That’s just good enough.” But when you go in a room, you forget that it’s there. But if you take your wrist and you put it to your nose. Obviously eventually it won’t be as potent unless you try it again in a few hours or something like that. That’s what people don’t realize. You can hold it on your body the whole entire day. It changes everything.

[00:28:19.017] – Ryan Handis:
Oh, it does. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah.

[00:28:23.257] – TAMAR:
I’m really trying, it’s so trying so hard to disrupt this environment. It’s so difficult, that you understand. It’s also, I’m small, we’re both small, very niche, very indie. We’re getting out there trying to break a mold, trying to change the way people look at things. In due time, we should band together take our, you know, get in a big truck and we’ll drive down that closed fence of all the big brands. But yeah. Yeah, eventually. I have to figure it out. I’m still working on, I’m actually refining some of my messaging because it’s not reflecting what we’re talking about. And I think that that’s important because everyone’s like, “oh, you’re in a saturated space.” But no, I’m not in a saturated space because it’s a completely different way of looking at the saturated space. And that’s the difference. And I think you and I are very, very aligned with that.

[00:29:10.707] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah.

[00:29:13.467] – TAMAR:
All right. So let me just end with one final question, and I hope it’s going to be fun for you. What I would say is: if you could tell an earlier version of Ryan one thing, what would you tell him?

[00:29:26.777] – Ryan Handis:
I would tell him to stay humble. I guess given the advice that pride is the one thing that can bring a man down. And so please don’t let yourself get too prideful no matter what happens in life. Be humble, be giving, and understand that God is always there. And if you mess up, you are forgiven. But at the same time, you know, pride can ruin a man. So don’t let that ruin you because it almost ruined me a couple of years ago.

[00:29:56.347] – TAMAR:
So I hear you. I look back on some of those mistakes when I had too much pride or too much ego. And then I crashed afterwards. And then I look back and I’m like, now I don’t even want to like self promote. It’s definitely different.

[00:30:11.497] – Ryan Handis:
And what would be yours?

[00:30:12.647] – TAMAR:
I don’t know. It’s funny. No one’s ever asked me that. Um, don’t overthink anything. Just do it. When I came to my perfume, I had a lot of hesitations, a lot of hesitations and just progressing in life and doing things. And nowadays I am all about, I’ve been reading a lot of books that say, “you will regret the decisions you’ve never made.” So I make a lot of decisions, and if I regret, I don’t want to look back and say I wish I did that. I’d rather say. I’ll never say “I wish I didn’t do it. I wish I didn’t spend that much money on something.” Maybe? No, not really, because at least I’ll have the experience to speak to.

[00:30:57.467] – Ryan Handis:
Sure.

[00:30:57.977] – TAMAR:
Maybe if somebody is asking me in the next 57 episodes, I will have a different answer because I have to get a little varied here, but I think I think at the end of the day it’s all about like looking back and regretting. I don’t want to have regret. Even the mistakes that I’ve made. Almost in a way, I regret having to let myself be vulnerable and exploited like this, but if I wasn’t like that, I would just be like somebody who’s a woman who wakes up, goes to work, go to bed, does her thing and now, I mean, we all do that. But now I feel more fulfilled and now I feel I’m potentially fulfilling. I’m very mission driven, like maybe I could change the world and so I’m glad that those mistakes were made and I don’t know if I have regrets.

[00:31:41.867] – TAMAR:
I want people to know where to find you. So tell me about that.

[00:31:44.747] – Ryan Handis:
So I do a lot of my daily, my day in, day out posting on Instagram, so if you want to follow how my day is going, that sort of stuff, I’m on Instagram, @brokenanatomyperfumes, and then our website is BrokenAnatomyPerfumes.com. We do most of our shipping through there, our sales through there. And then we are also in D’or Perfumes in Glendale, California, for in-store pickup. So if you are in California, you can sample us, at D’or Perfumes in Glendale, California, but we do sell sample sets online and feel free to order one of those. They come with a cool challenge coin to remind you of everything I just talked about. We have our first three scents. We just launched Burnt Remedy yesterday, so we’re really excited to finally—[baby squeals]

[00:32:32.087] – TAMAR:
She’s excited about it, too.

[00:32:33.377] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah, she’s very excited.

[00:32:34.937] – TAMAR:
It’s awesome. I didn’t realize your store is like, it’s far away, so if I ever want to visit it, I won’t find you. You won’t be there.

[00:32:41.627] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah, it’s far away from me too. It’s OK. It’s about a six and a half, seven hour drive. It’s right by Los Angeles. So.

[00:32:49.517] – TAMAR:
Yeah, cool.

[00:32:52.517] – Ryan Handis:
But thank you for that. And I hope I get to meet you some day.

[00:32:55.787] – TAMAR:
Yeah. One day. But we just have to keep in touch and figure it all out together.

[00:33:00.197] – Ryan Handis:
Yeah absolutely.

[00:33:01.937] – TAMAR:
Story of entrepreneurs. Strength in numbers, baby.

[00:33:03.647] – Ryan Handis:
That’s right.

[00:33:04.547] – TAMAR:
Well I’m happy to support you in any way and I hope we can we can continue to do it together. We can pave that—

[00:33:10.037] – Ryan Handis:
Thank you.

[00:33:10.367] – TAMAR:
Pave the way forward together.

[00:33:11.327] – Ryan Handis:
Thank you. Appreciate that.

[00:33:13.217] – TAMAR:
All right. We’ll talk soon.

[00:33:14.777] – Ryan Handis:
OK? Sounds good.

[00:33:16.067] – TAMAR:
All right. Thanks again.

Join Our Newsletter

Sign up to our newsletter for goodies, stories, and more feel-good content.
TAMAR.