Having honed his craft at Aesop, To My Ships founder Daniel Bense drew on scenes from classical literature to create a range of elevated and exquisitely fragranced deodorants
- Who is it? To My Ships is the personal care brand founded by Daniel Bense, spanning deodorant, body wash and fragrance
- Why do I want it? Precisely fragranced, intelligently conceived products which align the literary with the bodily, the cerebral with the sensual
- Where can I find it? To My Ships is available to purchase via the brand’s own website, in-store at Liberty London, as well as at other international stockists
Who is it? Founder Daniel Bense never set out to build a personal care brand from armpits – but while surveying the bathroom cabinet, he found himself returning to deodorant: a category that, for all its intimacy and complexity, remains dominated by cheap, sterile formulations. “I thought, could we take this less pretty area of personal care and really elevate it,” he reflects, laughing, “treat fragrance and armpits with a bit of poetry and a bit of technical intelligence?” And so, To My Ships was born, a lyrical world of deodorant, body wash, fragrance – and now antiperspirant – which aligns the literary with the bodily, the cerebral with the sensual.
Bense’s path to founding To My Ships wound a worldly arc – from South Africa to Finland to Australia, where his position at Aesop eventually saw him relocate to London. It was his time at the cult Melbourne-founded brand that perhaps planted the seed for his own venture: teaching that conviction could be held in balance with commercial pragmatism; that a brand could be a living philosophy as much as a set of products. So, after a stint at the British heritage menswear label Sunspel, and then as a consultant, Bense responded to the niggling sense he had that it was finally time to gather a small, highly aligned team and begin something of his own – not so much a disruption as a reimagination.
The name To My Ships is clipped from a line in Homer’s Iliad, and each series of products similarly adopts a koan-like epithet from the epic (Of the Gods, Stand Up Bravely). If Bense first delved into the ancient narrative, fittingly, on a holiday in Athens – a friend’s recounting of the book became the unexpected backbone of their trip – it also became the implicit creative compass of his brand. “There is just so much to take out of the classics,” he explains. “It’s this master work that has beauty in it, an advocacy for calm and solid, civilised living.” Each of his products is so intelligently braided with beauty and function, structure and restraint, that to use it feels more like ritual – a small act of meaning in a noisy world.
Why do I want it? In an industry heavily tagged with the language of performance and transformation, To My Ships offers something refreshingly delicate: care, in its most essential and emotionally intelligent form. A precise scent forms the basis of each series of deodorant and body wash, designed with the intention to be worn across the body and not just under the arms. Working with perfumer Céline Barel, each fragrance begins not with a brief in the traditional sense, but with a piece of text, a scene, a piece of music – an associative world rather than a fixed outcome. Just as Bense pulls a universe from fragments of the Iliad, Barel draws out unexpected materials – like polygonum in Of the Gods – and shapes them into scents that feel both composed yet strangely stirring.
Following the success of its first two deodorants, in roll-on and spray format, the brand recently released its first antiperspirant – for those who prefer not to sweat at all. Bense is candid about the polarising discourse around aluminium salts. “Aluminium gets a bad rap but we’ve looked at all the research and all the science and we think it’s super safe.” He sees the launch not as a compromise, but an extension of the brand’s fundamental respect for choice. “We wanted to create the best and the most bulletproof out there,” he says. “Some people just don’t want to sweat, some want to avoid aluminium. We wanted to offer both, without prescribing purity.”
And that same ethos runs through the brand’s approach to packaging: recycled aluminium bottles are sourced from a manufacturer in Bilbao, clear glass vessels that are harder to work with but easier to recycle, minimalist refills designed to be reused or separated without fuss. The roll-on deodorant can be refilled by hand, and the bottles are sized generously to reduce waste. “We tried to really think about the life cycle of the product, not just the use of it,” Bense explains, “and if something feels good to hold and use, you’re more likely to keep the object.”
Where can I find it? To My Ships is available to purchase via the brand’s own website, in-store at Liberty London, as well as at other international stockists.
