About

Joe Radler

Independent Perfumer · Founder of Radler Parfums

I’m an independent, self-taught perfumer in Little Chute, near Appleton, Wisconsin, working where fragrance composition meets aromatic materials, chemistry and the history of perfumery.

Where it started

I grew up in Harbordale, on the south side of St. Petersburg, Florida, a dangerous part of town in the ’80s and ’90s. My first fragrance was a bottle of Tommy, bought as a kid at the Wagon Wheel flea market. My father wore Stetson for special occasions, on visits to my grandparents’ house.

My dad made custom molds for ceramics, and we used others too. I did a lot of the work: pouring slip, prepping the pieces, glazing and airbrushing little sculptures, one after another. We grew cactus, succulents and herbs as well, raising the babies and transplanting them, and we did quite a lot of it. Looking back, that was my first bench: color, finish, and things that grow.

A trade in finishes

For more than twenty years I’ve worked in auto collision repair and automotive painting: restoring surfaces, correcting imperfections, matching color by eye. That trade taught me to notice small differences in texture, balance and change over time. I listen for the same things in a perfume.

Into perfume

I collected niche and luxury perfume for years, from houses like Roja Dove and Parfums de Marly, before I began composing my own in 2022. Since then, the only people wearing my work have been my wife and our four kids. My work leans dark and architectural.

How I work

I work with both natural materials and aroma chemicals, and I don’t treat them as opposing camps. I want to know what gives a material its character, how it’s extracted, how it changes as it ages, why certain combinations work, and how a composition develops from its first impression to its drydown. I’m drawn to historical and unusual materials, and to keeping practical knowledge alive by documenting it carefully. I’m also studying the analytical side, including GC-MS and headspace techniques, as a way to understand what we actually smell.

"Perfumery is where chemistry becomes poetry, and molecules become memories. It may be the art form with the shortest road to the limbic system — reaching feeling before thought. Smell is wired unusually close to emotion."

The name

Radler is a German name, given to people from a place called Radel, Radelau or Radlau, many of them in Bavaria and Austria.

On my father’s side, the line runs back to Altengrün, near Falkenau an der Eger in Bohemia, today Sokolov in the Czech Republic. My great-great-grandfather David Charles Radler was born there in 1858, married in Milwaukee in 1890, and lived the rest of his life in Wisconsin. Five generations later, Radler Parfums is made a couple of hours north, in Little Chute, near Appleton.

What I am not

I’m not a master perfumer, a chemist or a historian. I’m an independent practitioner who studies across those fields and brings what I learn back to the bench.

What I’m building

Radler Parfums is a perfume house and a living field guide to scent: materials, molecules, extraction, history and perception, connected in one place and sourced. My formulas stay private, because they’re the house’s trade secrets. Everything else I learn, I put here. I built this site myself, piece by piece; the library alone took about 300 hours.

Written at the bench, driven by curiosity.