The House
Built in Silicon Valley. Worn everywhere.
A fragrance house at the intersection of art, engineering, and connection.
Swirl Works is a fragrance house in Menlo Park, California. We make perfume. We teach people how to make perfume. And we bring fragrance into rooms where people are trying to connect, whether that's a corporate boardroom, a wedding, or a Saturday afternoon with friends.
We opened in 2020 at the Allied Arts Guild, a half-hidden arts compound tucked behind wisteria and clay tiles in the middle of Silicon Valley. In 2025, we added a second home inside the Rosewood Sand Hill, one of the most recognized luxury hotels on the Peninsula.
Our work sits in two worlds. On one side: retail. Vanilla Flight, our signature collection of five vanillas, lets customers build a custom three-scent flight that becomes theirs. On the other: corporate. Executive scent experiences designed for teams at Databricks, Nike, Levi's Stadium, and dozens of companies across the Bay Area who want something their people will actually remember.
Fragrance is personal. It triggers memory faster than any other sense. We use that. Not to sell a bottle, but to give someone a moment they keep coming back to.
The Perfumer
Kori Shaw.
Kori Shaw is a mechanical engineer, classically trained French perfumer, and AI builder. She holds a BS from MIT and an MS from UC Berkeley, both in mechanical engineering, with a specialization in semiconductor manufacturing.
She spent two decades in Silicon Valley building things. Venture capital. Hardware. Software advisory. And then she went to France and learned how to build something else entirely.
Trained under a private French perfumer across four countries (France, Spain, Dominican Republic, and Belize), Kori studied raw materials at their source: lavender in Provence, beeswax distillation in Barcelona, vanilla cultivation in the Caribbean. She blends classically, by hand, and formulates every scent Swirl Works produces.
Today she splits her time between the studio, the road, and the lab. She has put fragrance in front of thousands of professionals through corporate experiences and public events. What people love shapes what she makes next. That feedback loop, engineer to perfumer to audience and back, is the engine behind everything.
Kori lives in Atherton, California.
Kori Shaw, Silicon Valley's unique perfumer, is bridging the gap between technology and scent.
Modern Luxury Magazine
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