Voo Visits
Roelen is the practice of Berlin-based creative David Roelen, who uses scent as a way of looking at people, intimacy and change. For this Voo Visits we met him at PAX in Neukölln to talk about his practice, his time in the Gulf and SOUK, the scent we released together for VOOFÜNFZEHN.
“My creations are one part of this process, so to say, an observation turning into invisible residue. Informed by personal experiences, they become tools for self-editing.”
Voo: When someone asks you what Roelen is, what do you actually say?
David Roelen: By now I usually say it’s a perfume brand that carries my family name. But that’s the least interesting part. For me, Roelen is a value system and a way of looking at people and relationships. A respectful dissection of the human experience.
My creations are one part of this process, so to say, an observation turning into invisible residue. Informed by personal experiences, they become tools for self-editing. If you ask people who wear Roelen, they’ll give you an entirely different definition. And that’s the point: the brand is never finished. It becomes whatever people do with it.
V: You have a new space in Neukölln now. How does it feed your work and the people around it?
D: PAX (Perfume and Exchange) feels like a quiet container for everything I’m trying to understand right now: Identity, intimacy, control, letting go, the future.
It’s part studio, part living room, part laboratory. People come in, sit down for five minutes or five hours, and something shifts. Not dramatically — just a small recalibration.
I didn’t design it as a showroom, more as a place where you can simply be a bit more yourself. And that energy feeds our work in ways I didn’t plan. The space keeps telling me what it wants to be.
V: If your studio was a scent, how would its opening, middle, and dry down feel?
D: Oh, that is a difficult one… it would be a contrast between outside and inside.
Whatever awaits you when you enter PAX has not much in common with what you witnessed on your way in.
Well, the opening could still be that moment when you walk in from the street… a little metallic, a little cold, the air still holding whatever weather Berlin decided on that day.
Settling into a blend of good coffee, oudh and some fresh notes from fragrance tests.
V: For VOOFÜNFZEHN you released SOUK with us. When you smell it now, what kind of moment or atmosphere do you sense in it?
D: SOUK is a pleasant collision of extremes. Peppermint against patchouli, mineral clarity against warm earth, brightness softened by linden blossom.
When I smell it now, I get that feeling Voo has mastered — familiarity disrupted just enough to make you pay attention. It’s the moment you enter the store and realise the energy is slightly different today. A bit louder in some corners, quieter in others. A place that shifts with the people passing through it. Certainly more than a store.
V: You spend a lot of time in the Middle East now. What pulled you there in the first place?
D: The brand has grown in popularity over the past few years in the GCC countries and it was a natural, very organic process. Business success paired with curiosity. Then it became respect.
The region has a relationship to scent that’s not decorative but lived, woven into into its fabric, into everyday gestures and social interactions. It’s not “fragrance” as the West treats it; it’s communication, inheritance, hospitality, identity. For someone like me, who works with meaning as much as with molecules, that’s irresistible.
V: Is there one moment there that changed how you think about smell?
D: It wasn’t a single moment but the overall experience. Seeing which place fragrance holds in islamic culture made me appreciate it even more than before. And it absolutely broadened my approach to creation.
V: When you see people living with your scents in their own routines, what have they done with them that you could never have scripted in the studio?
D: Everything.
I mean, people live their lives and indirectly tell their story. Some use a scent as an anchor, a future memory. Others wear it like armour. And some use it as bait. I love that. It reminds me that a fragrance only starts in the studio; it doesn’t end there.
V: Looking ahead, what is the next risk or experiment you want to take with Roelen?
D: PAX is certainly one big experiment. Th the brand is not D.L. Roelen anymore but Roelen– opening it up towards others, turning MY project into OUR platform.
Roelen was never aimed to be just a fragrance brand and to stretch the brand beyond perfume without losing the intimacy that makes people feel seen remains the goal.
I think the next chapter is about systems, not products — how people access scent, how they connect through scent and how they build personal archives.
I want to create things that feel inevitable in hindsight but slightly impossible right now. If I can stay in that tension, great. And if not, well, something new will reveal itself on the way. Embrace change.
Voo Visits is a series introducing new and old friends of Voo, like-minded creatives and people from Berlin who inspire us.
