Founder of Helsinki Perfume Club and Charisma Helsinki.
Based in Helsinki, Finland. Maksim has a degree in Computer Science and over a decade of industry cutting-edge experience building and scaling digital products and services for millions of customers.
Now on a journey to create the next great thing in the perfume industry and for the culture.
Perfumes entered his life as a hobby in 2021, beginning with a perfume-making workshop in Berlin. That experience sparked a deep curiosity about how fragrances work at a foundational level.
"Creating perfumes is very similar to programming. There’s logic, structures, functions, and building blocks. It’s like writing code, just in its own language - something I’ve been doing throughout my professional career."
After a few months of self-studies he built a home lab stocked with raw materials for experimentation. To dive deeper, he traveled to Grasse to meet perfumers, gain inspiration, and receive one-on-one mentoring and later took perfume courses and passed certification in advanced technical know-how.
This passion soon grew into something larger: in 2022 he launched perfume-making workshops in Helsinki, which evolved into the Helsinki Perfume Club - a community uniting perfume lovers, niche brands, professionals, and enthusiasts. Today, the club is known within fragrance communities around the world.
Charisma Helsinki is the next step in this journey - with the vision of building a world-class niche perfume brand from Finland.
This journey would be much harder without support, mentoring, professional advice and just inspiring talks.
Here are people who made impact and contributed to this story so far.
Experimental Perfume Club and Founder & Perfumer Emmanuelle Moeglin who created great teaching materials and courses that helped to accelerate this journey.
Spyros Drosopoulos - Founder & Perfumer of BARUTI Perfumes and teacher at The Institute of Art & Olfaction, who is very openly sharing his experience on being an independent perfumer and creating successful perfume brand with incredible level of details.
Marie-Pierre Blanchette - Founder & Perfumer of Miskeo Parfums who is a great professional, creative mind and simply inspiring person who can always give advice, new ideas on the topic and has "hell yea, let's do it" attitude.
Marie Molchanova - a teacher at Grasse Institute of Perfumery, perfumer and founder of MAYME perfumes who is helping along the journey and sharing knowledge about technical know-how.
Pia Long - Founder & Perfumer of Olfiction and Eau de Boujee with a few decades of industry experience, who gives constructive feedback and who's an occasional speaker at Helsinki Perfume Club.
The last but not least is Helsinki Perfume Club core team (Katja, Adriana, Viktoria) who has been great support and invaluable part of the perfume culture in Finland and the club.