D.S. & Durga: The Self-Taught Perfumer Who Built a Brooklyn House Worth Buying

David Seth Moltz was waiting tables at Pure Food and Wine — the New York raw-food restaurant that later became infamous as the “Bad Vegan” story — when he met Kavi Ahuja. He was also, at the time, a working guitarist who had toured, signed to a label, and done the full trying-to-make-it routine. What he had not done was make perfume.

That changed gradually. Moltz, a suburban kid who found himself fascinated by the plants forcing themselves through Brooklyn sidewalk cracks, started reading vintage manuals on herbs and gardening. Buried in the back of those manuals were recipes: creams, lotions, old-fashioned perfumes. As he tells it in a 2024 interview with The Creative Independent, this was the early 2000s, a moment when a whole generation was going DIY in a specifically 19th-century direction. Friends had jewelry studios. Others were making preserves. Moltz started making scent.

He taught himself. No formal training, no apprenticeship in Grasse. The approach was closer to how he learned music: improvise, trust instinct, see what holds together.

What the Name Means

“Durga” was Moltz’s pet name for Kavi. The word comes from Sanskrit and names a Hindu goddess associated with protection, strength, and war. The initials D.S. are his. The brand name, then, is essentially a love letter disguised as a product label — specific enough to mean something, cryptic enough to require asking.

Kavi’s background as a trained architect isn’t incidental to the brand’s identity. The visual and spatial thinking that comes with that training shows up in how the house positions itself: specific concepts, specific materials, specific places rather than the vague romantic-European gestures that fill so much of the fragrance market.

A House Built on Concept

D.S. & Durga formally launched in 2008, and for years operated out of their Brooklyn apartment. The brand first landed in Barneys New York in March 2015 — a meaningful validation for a self-taught operation — and subsequently picked up stockists including Bergdorf Goodman, Galleria, and London’s Liberty. The house now runs flagship retail stores in Williamsburg and Nolita in New York, and in Venice Beach, California, with an additional location in Silver Lake.

The fragrance concepts tend to be narrative-first. Debaser, one of the house’s persistent bestsellers, reads as “juicy fig and tonka” in the brand’s own shorthand. The name borrows from the Pixies, which tells you something about the founders’ cultural reference points: indie rock, not fine dining or couture.

Rose Atlantic describes itself as “saltwater floral and musk” — less a traditional rose soliflore than a coastal displacement of the flower, which is exactly the kind of lateral thinking that separates Moltz’s work from straightforward genre exercises.

The house also does location-specific exclusives. Rockaway Beach (described as “big ocean and musk”) is sold as an NYC exclusive; Wipeout! (“ginger lily and guava”) is a limited edition. These aren’t gimmicks so much as a logical extension of the founders’ interest in place as a primary ingredient.

Collaborations and the 2024 Acquisition

D.S. & Durga has collaborated with a range of partners that reflect the founders’ specific tastes rather than obvious commercial plays. In 2023, the brand worked with Guinean-American designer Armando Cabral on Mahogany Kora, and with The Carlyle hotel on a suite of haircare and bodycare products built around the hotel’s honeysuckle-scented soap. An earlier collaboration with Todd Snyder produced Young Dunes, distributed through Todd Snyder boutiques. In 2018, Duran Duran came calling for a limited-edition collection tied to four decades of the band’s music.

In 2024, London-based Manzanita Capital acquired the brand. Manzanita also owns Diptyque and MALIN+GOETZ, which puts D.S. & Durga in company with other houses that have accepted institutional backing while nominally maintaining creative independence. What that means in practice for future output remains to be seen, but through 2024 the founders remained visibly involved and the catalog showed no obvious sign of repositioning.

How to Actually Get It

The direct route is the brand’s own site, dsanddurga.com, where the full catalog including limited editions and location exclusives is available. The Brooklyn (Williamsburg) and Nolita stores are worth visiting if you’re in New York — sampling in person still beats reading descriptions online.

For initial exploration without committing to a full bottle, the house sells a customizable sample set that converts toward a full-bottle purchase, which is a sensible way to work through the catalog. Pocket perfume sprays in 10 mL sizes also lower the entry point considerably.

Some of the core releases — Debaser among them — are distributed through Amazon, which makes them accessible for Prime shipping:

Check Price on Amazon

The location-specific and limited-edition releases won’t be there, and the most interesting things in any given season probably require going direct. But if you want to start with one of the proven catalog entries, Amazon is a legitimate option.

For more context on how D.S. & Durga fits into the broader landscape of founder-led fragrance houses, see our guide to niche fragrance houses.