Scentbird’s CEO Is Also a Spiritual Guru. Not All Customers Are Pleased.

Scentbird co-founder and chief govt Mariya Nurislamova is not any stranger to the entrepreneurship talking circuit. She usually takes the stage at enterprise conferences and shares her views on podcasts, the place she expounds on how she approaches fundraising, advertising, branding and merchandise at her start-up, which sells subscriptions to obtain perfume samples from manufacturers resembling Burberry and D.S. & Durga.

On the similar time, Nurislamova has constructed a parallel following as a guru, who talks to some 300,000 followers throughout YouTube, Spotify, TikTok and Instagram about extraterrestrials and the way we’re all dwelling in “the Matrix,” together with wellness tropes resembling meditation, chakras and crystals. On these channels, she describes herself as a “religious trainer, intuitive, channel and author.”

The founder’s two worlds not often intersected till just lately. However Nurislamova’s extra excessive religious musings have begun making the rounds on social media; YouTube movies dissecting her views have garnered over 670,000 views. For the primary time, giant numbers of Scentbird clients and model ambassadors are seeing clips of Nurislamova’s beliefs.

Many don’t like what they’re seeing.

“I gained’t be working with them transferring ahead if they provide me something sooner or later,” wrote YouTuber Zachary Michael, an influencer who had labored with Scentbird. He shared the remark underneath a video about Nurislamova posted final week by the channel Keya’s World, which is concentrated on debunking religious guru claims.

The video, and others prefer it, comb by TikTok posts and 603 YouTube movies shared by Nurislamova since Could 2020. They present her asserting it’s potential to “heal your self” from most cancers or AIDS in seven days, that miscarriage is a “alternative” and never an “accident” and that abortion will negatively impression one’s karma. These clips are posted alongside concepts resembling “consuming honey makes you a greater particular person,” that crooked enamel will not be “random,” “tomatoes and potatoes are right here to maintain you sick” and “espresso is dangerous to your aura.”

Nurislamova’s views on “the Matrix” have attracted essentially the most consideration. She incessantly endorses the concept people live inside a video game-like, “digital reality-type system,” as she calls it in one among her movies. It was whereas discussing this idea in a Could 2022 video together with her husband, Scentbird co-founder and chief product officer Sergei Gusev, that she described Hitler as “the best – one of many larger – sources of information of 3D planet earth warfare.”

“Are you aware what number of hundreds of thousands of souls benefited from studying from the expertise he has created? So is he evil? Probably not. I don’t suppose so,” she mentioned.

When requested by The Enterprise of Magnificence about that assertion, Nurislamova mentioned, “Movies are actually taken out of context, so that they take a really small portion of what really was mentioned, and once you take away the context, the message actually adjustments.” She additionally said, “As a result of I understand all the pieces as oneness, in fact, homicide will not be okay. Completely freaking not. I might by no means endorse that. By no means, ever in a billion years.”

Complaints about Nurislamova’s viewpoints are to date contained to feedback sections on social media, and wonder and perfume Reddit threads. However her movies current a jarring distinction with Scentbird, a 10-year-old enterprise that payments itself the “Netflix of perfume,” the place clients can choose to obtain samples by way of mail for a month-to-month charge. In contrast to many wellness manufacturers that may be discovered at Goop or Erewhon, the closest Scentbird involves mystical, new-age advertising language is a “scent horoscope” suggestion instrument on its web site.

The corporate emerged throughout the mid-2010s growth in subscription trend and wonder packing containers, taking part within the tech incubator Y Combinator and elevating $25 million from enterprise capital companies together with Goodwater Capital, Rainfall Ventures, FundersClub, Soma Capital and others.

Nurislamova informed The Enterprise of Magnificence that Scentbird has had progress of “45 to 50 p.c year-over-year for the previous two years,” and that the corporate has been worthwhile since 2019. She mentioned income is “properly above $100 million” yearly with over 700,000 subscribers.

She mentioned she doesn’t carry her beliefs into the office, and used solely her first title on most of her spirituality content material in an effort to “defend Scentbird.” She famous, “I’d be shocked if my traders knew,” and that they “know my character.” A number of traders contacted by The Enterprise of Magnificence didn’t reply to requests for remark. Whereas Gusev seems incessantly in her spirituality movies, the place she says he hypnotised her to carry her right into a “deep theta state,” she mentioned Andrei Rebrov, a co-founder and chief know-how officer, “didn’t know I had an account till two days in the past.” Rebrov didn’t present a response by the point of publication. A fourth co-founder, Rachel ten Brink, left the corporate in 2019 and didn’t reply to a request for remark.

“My title was actually not all that a lot on the market,” Nurislamova mentioned.

Origin Story

Nurislamova says on her YouTube channel that she had a religious “awakening” in 2018. She mentioned she started watching movies about astral projection and finally had visions in a dream involving a spirit chatting with her.

She started posting on the brand new accounts early within the pandemic, a time when conspiracy theories, new-age spirituality and pseudoscientific well being content material have been taking off on-line. One among her earliest podcasts in 2020, recorded with Gusev, criticised Covid-19 measures together with mask-wearing and stay-inside insurance policies, saying a “sufferer mentality” and “underlying power” would make it extra more likely to contract Covid-19 or improve its severity.

Nurislamova informed The Enterprise of Magnificence “I’m not a conspiracy theorist.” Nevertheless, the topics of her lots of of movies have ranged extensively, and infrequently dovetail with beliefs held by right-wing conspiracy theorists. That features her current exploration of the “Starseed” concept that posits the existence of human-alien hybrids, a perception system held by the “Q-Anon Shaman” made well-known by his uncommon look on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, amongst others. She describes her perception in “customer souls coming from all varieties of planets, constellations, star methods, totally different galaxies, even.”

Nurislamova has constructed a enterprise round her beliefs, together with books and occasions. Final month, she held a 28-person, religious retreat in Glastonbury that, for $1,111, promised to “faucet into the magical energies related to Glastonbury.” She costs $3,000 for a personal on-line spirit-channelling session and $125,000 for a “one-on-one in-person transformational retreat.”

However to a special viewers, lots of her statements are weird, and offensive.

In a Jun. 6 video receiving over 100,000 views, YouTuber Noor Jasmine, who has executed sponsored content material for Scentbird previously, referred to as out Nurislamova’s claims made about hair color, together with “it’s exhausting for folks with black hair color to be intuitive in decision-making. They’re additionally not pretty much as good at discernment. Issues like dancing and transferring their physique comes very naturally; issues like sports activities come very naturally.”

“For those who guys have watched my channel, you’ll know that Scentbird has sponsored plenty of my movies,” mentioned Jasmine within the 38-minute video. When commenters on a current sponsored put up alerted her to Nurislamova’s content material, “I used to be like, ‘rattling,’ like actually? This sucks. … I actually like Scentbird,” she mentioned.

Whereas Nurislamova mentioned she did her finest to maintain her two worlds separate, now that her content material is being instantly linked together with her model, she doesn’t plan to take something down.

“I believe it’s a great factor, really, that this entire convergence is going on,” she mentioned. “I believe it was only a matter of time. … I’m glad that it’s coming to the floor that I’m each of these issues.”