This S’pore home fragrance brand turned luxury scents into a S$1M laundry pod business

Seven months into 2026, laundry pod brand Kapsä has made over S$1 million in revenue

When Edison Lim and Lincoln Thong launched home fragrance brand Pristine Aroma in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, they had a problem most businesses would envy: their product was so popular, yet sales were highly seasonal. 

Pristine Aroma’s reed diffusers and candles in scents like their signature Himalayan Tea, surged every Christmas but fell quiet every Jul and Aug.

The duo knew they wanted their next business’s revenue to be somewhat steadier.

The fix they landed on was taking the thing they were best at, applying it to the most ordinary chore imaginable, and building an entirely new brand around it. 

That brand became Kapsä: a capybara paw-shaped laundry pod that smells like a luxury fragrance, now stocked at supermarkets and with a significant online presence.

In under two years since launch, Kapsä has already crossed S$1 million in revenue in the first seven months of 2026.

We spoke to co-founders of Kapsä, Edison and Lincoln, both 33, to find out how a home fragrance brand became the launchpad for a laundry detergent brand, and what it actually takes to compete against laundry giants.

Turning a simple idea into a lucrative business

Home fragrance is, by nature, an occasional purchase. But laundry detergent isn’t. People wash clothes every few days regardless of the month, the mood, or whether Christmas is coming, and that predictability was what the founders wanted.

“We wanted to go into something a bit more recurring on an everyday basis,” Edison said. “There’s demand every day.”

The insight behind Kapsä was that the customer who cares enough about how their home smells to buy a premium reed diffuser is probably also the same person making laundry who cares about how their clothes smell too. 

As such, Pristine Aroma’s existing customer base was a marketing advantage that naturally formed the testing ground during the early days of Kapsä.

Eventually, Kapsä launched under Cool Brands Pte. Ltd. in early 2024, about a year after development began in 2023. 

Each pod is built around Pristine Aroma’s award-winning scents, marketed explicitly as a premium fragrance experience, coupled with powerful cleaning power.

Scent as the selling point

Most laundry brands compete on cleaning credentials. However, Kapsä leads with fragrance, and specifically with scents that don’t already exist in the category.

The first pod was formulated with Himalayan Tea, Pristine Aroma’s most famous signature scent, which customers describe as “smelling like ION Orchard.”

Kapsä also currently offers two more scents: Lush Freesia (inspired by English Pear & Freesia, reminiscent of Jo Malone), and Santal Noir (a woody, masculine scent inspired by Santal 33 by Le Labo Fragrances). Of the three, Lush Freesia has become the bestseller.

That said, Edison added that the Himalayan Tea scent is still very unique and novel to the laundry segment.

Santal Noir, on the other hand, offers a deeper, woody, masculine scent in the category of laundry detergents often dominated by floral and sweet profiles. 

“None of the other brands actually have such a woody kind of scent. Usually people go for floral, a bit more sweet, more girly kind of a scent,” Edison said. “We are more than just chasing trends, but filling the gap in the detergent scene.”

Edison positions Kapsä as more of a premium brand than budget ones, roughly comparable to Tide and Ariel.

The R&D grind behind every new scent

Moving a scent from a diffuser bottle into a laundry pod isn’t as simple as dropping Pristine Aroma’s formula into detergent. The chemistry definitely has to be formulated differently.

The scent notes need to be adjusted so they’re stable and compatible with detergent—a process that took over a year for the first Kapsä product, but now it takes about six to nine months to develop each new scent.

The co-founders shared that R&D with its own suppliers and manufacturers is done in Singapore, Malaysia, and the US, with final manufacturing taking place in China. 

In response to customer feedback, the duo created their latest offering: Magic Beads, launched in late Jul 2026—scent booster pellets designed to be used alongside the pods for customers who want their clothes to smell more intensely. 

One of the most common pieces of feedback Kapsä received on Himalayan Tea was that the scent, while lovely, was subtle.  These scent boosters are designed to keep clothes smelling fresh for up to 24 weeks when stored in a wardrobe after washing.

Winning against big detergent brands, one subscriber at a time

Competing with major laundry brands, which have decades of shelf presence, marketing budgets that dwarf any local brand’s revenue, and default consumer familiarity, is the kind of challenge that would give most founders hesitation, especially as a small brand. 

The duo doesn’t pretend it’s easy.

“It was definitely very difficult for us to try to acquire market share, to convince customers why they should use our products over Dynamo,” Lincoln said.

Kapsä’s answer is physical reach on supermarket shelves, combined with sustained subscription. 

The brand sells through its own website, on Shopee, and now through physical retail at Isetan, Giant and Cold Storage.

The co-founders acknowledged the challenges that come with stocking in supermarkets, where offline retail charges promotional and advertising fees that can run to S$10,000 a month, making profitability in that channel genuinely difficult.

That said, Edison and Lincoln are still keen on staying put in the supermarket space.

“For us to become a real household brand in the next three to five years, we really need to be on all the channels that we can,” Edison said. 

The subscription model, launched alongside the brand in 2024, is where the economics improve. Subscribers typically get a discount and the convenience of automatic replenishment, while Kapsä gets predictable demand and lower customer acquisition costs.

“Usually, people who subscribe to Kapsä, they don’t really drop off,” Edison said. “Once they try the product, once they love it, they don’t really switch back to other brands.”

Each box of 30 Kapsä pods costs S$15.90 at retail price.

4,000 boxes a month and counting

The numbers reflect how quickly Kapsä has found its footing. The brand now moves more than 4,000 boxes a month, a scale that prompted the team to upgrade their Singapore warehouse from 1,600 to 3,500 sq ft in Jun. 

The team across both brands sits at around 12 people, kept deliberately lean as the founders focus on building systems over headcount, allowing Kapsä to scale effectively.

Kapsä crossed S$1 million in revenue for 2026 year-to-date as of Jul, a milestone achieved less than two and a half years after its launch.

On the other hand, Pristine Aroma’s revenue has also grown significantly beyond the S$1.6 million figure reported in earlier years, with the brand now selling in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the US.

Kapsä is set to follow the same international path.

Looking ahead, the Cool Brands roadmap goes beyond fragrance entirely. Edison and Lincoln plan to launch a new brand potentially unrelated to scent by mid-to-late 2027, extending the direct-to-consumer group model they’ve been building since 2019.

“Our long-term goal for Cool Brands is to become a successful and sustainable D2C group of consumer goods in the next 10 years,” Edison said. “We want to come with more brands in the future.”

Lincoln’s advice for anyone thinking about starting their own brand is to just be “1% better every day. And that will improve your systems, processes, and your skill sets substantially.”

• Learn more about Kapsä here.
• Learn more about Pristine Aroma here.
• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

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Featured Image Credit: Kapsä