A Note from Natlee

I didn’t start KITA.

I took it over in January 2023, but my relationship with fragrance and making things began long before that.

In 2006, when I was 20, I worked for a small glycerine soap and body product manufacturer in Randburg. It was the kind of small business where everybody did a bit of everything, and I really did. I made products, helped with product development, worked in the factory and the shop, did admin, and whatever else needed doing.

The owner taught me the basics of blending, and somewhere in there I fell in love with it.

I didn’t know then that I would become a perfumer. There wasn’t a grand plan behind it. I just knew I loved the process of taking different materials and finding what they could become together.

Finding my way into fragrance

Over the years, I kept learning.

I am self-taught, mostly through doing. Smelling, making, studying materials, testing, getting things wrong, trying again, and gradually understanding more about why something worked and why something didn’t.

In 2018, I started Moonflower Co, my first retail business. I was developing and making products of my own, and fragrance became an increasingly important part of that work. It was also around this time that I began blending and developing fragrances commercially.

In 2020, I started making perfume for family. That same year, I joined SA Candle Supply, where I worked in technical support and education for candle making until 2023.

That role put me on another side of the industry. I worked with makers, tested materials, troubleshot problems and helped people understand not only how to make a candle, but why it behaved the way it did.

Moonflower Co continued alongside that work and, after I took over KITA in 2023, eventually became part of KITA.

Through all of it, fragrance kept pulling me closer.

There is something about sitting at the bench with an idea that doesn’t exist yet and slowly finding it through scent that I don’t think I will ever get tired of.

Making KITA my own

When I took over KITA, I took over an existing business with its own history, products and identity.

For a while, I tried to find my place within what KITA already was. I changed things, added things and slowly put more of myself into it.

Eventually, I realised that wasn’t enough.

I needed to stop asking how my work could fit into KITA and start asking what KITA could become if I allowed the work I actually wanted to do to shape it.

That question has changed almost everything.

KITA today is becoming a Cape Town fragrance house built around fragrance creation, handcrafted production and the many ways scent can become part of a person, a brand or a space.

Some of what we have always done remains. Some things are changing completely. And there are things I still want to build that don’t exist here yet.

I’m comfortable with that.

The work I want to do

Fragrance is the part of this business I am most drawn to.

I love developing something from a brief, sitting at the bench, working through completely different directions and eventually finding the one that feels right.

I love working with materials. I have a particular interest in South African and African fragrance materials and the people and places they come from, but I don’t believe they need to be forced into every fragrance I make. They belong when they serve the work.

I also love seeing fragrance move beyond the bottle.

A scent can become part of a hotel or retail space. It can move through the candle burning in a room, the products someone uses every morning, or become a perfume that belongs to one person.

That is a large part of what KITA is becoming.

Still made by hand

As KITA grows, I want my own role to move increasingly towards fragrance creation and the creative work behind the house.

That doesn’t mean moving away from making.

Handcrafted will remain at the core of KITA. It simply means building a team around the work so that the business can grow without losing the way we make things.

Right now, Warren and I still do a little bit of everything. There are days when I’m developing a fragrance at the bench and days when we’re both in production getting an order out.

We’re building from there.

Where we are now

I don’t think KITA is finished becoming what it is going to be.

And I don’t particularly want to pretend that it is.

What I do know is that the direction feels right.

KITA is a Cape Town fragrance house. We create fragrance, manufacture fragranced products in small batches, work with individuals, brands and hospitality, and continue to make our products by hand.

And behind all of that, I still get to do the thing that caught my attention when I was 20.

I get to blend.

Natlee Moonflower
Perfumer & Creative
KITA Fragrances