Cologne Kings Are Making Dollars and Scents

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Meet the young hustlers turning good smells and hungry classmates into their own payday

Some teenagers look at a $200 bottle of cologne and ask their parents for money. Others look at it and ask, “How hard can this be to make?”

That second group deserves our attention. And possibly a small business loan.

Meet the Cologne Kings: young entrepreneurs figuring out how to blend, bottle, brand, and sell a little confidence. They’re chasing spending money without waiting for a manager to hand them a name tag and a Saturday shift.

The old movie version of teenage hustling came with suspicious packages and terrible decisions. This version comes with fragrance notes and repeat customers. Frankly, I like the upgrade.

Smells Like Entrepreneurial Spirit

Drew Goetz spotted the opportunity while he was still in high school: classmates wanted expensive fragrances, but their wallets had not received the memo.

According to Milwaukee Magazine’s March 2025 profile, he launched Urbane Aromatics in early 2024, developing two scents in his parents’ garage with help from his father, a compound pharmacist. By the time he was a college freshman, his fragrances were selling at craft fairs and independent retailers, priced at $55 for a 3.4-ounce bottle. [1]

That’s an impressive progression from “Dad, can I have some money?” to “Dad, we need to discuss production.”

The appeal makes perfect sense. Teenagers want to smell grown, expensive, and vaguely unavailable. Preferably without spending their entire bank balance.

Fragrance is a business built around something they already understand: presentation. A haircut, the right sneakers, a good scent—these are social signals. Birds have elaborate feathers. Teenage boys have cologne and a suspiciously detailed opinion about their fade.

You can laugh at the ritual. You should respect the kid who figures out how to supply it.

The backpack is open for business. Meet the Cologne Kings—young hustlers turning homemade scents into spending money, one good impression at a time. Between the bottles, brownies, and bags of chips, these kids are learning that their next payday doesn’t have to come with a name tag.

Bottle It Yourself

At Mira Costa High School, freshman Mokhtari took the hands-on route with Sunny Fragrances. In May 2025, the school newspaper La Vista profiled her handcrafted perfume line, available through her website.

“I carefully blend, bottle, and label each product myself to ensure quality and consistency,” Mokhtari said. [2]

Production. Packaging. Quality control. Some adults need three departments and a conference call to accomplish that sentence.

And yes, the Cologne Kings club has room for queens.

In Chennai, 14-year-old Khushi Lalwani developed her URA perfume line after starting with a DIY kit, EdexLive reported in 2019.

“I sold 20 bottles to the people in our apartment,” she said. [3]

Twenty bottles. A real beginning. She found customers close to home and gave them something she had created.

We celebrate teenagers for winning games, getting grades, and remembering to take the trash out before the second announcement. Turning an idea into something people buy deserves applause, too.

The Backpack Boutique

Cj Rouse’s fragrance-oil business started at Derby High School in Connecticut and followed him into college, according to a May 2026 Crescent magazine profile.

His operation includes assembling small roll-on bottles and mixing fragrance oils inspired by popular scents. He sells around campus and occasionally ships to former classmates and out-of-state customers. [4]

“I always have a couple on me,” Rouse told Crescent. [4]

That is a salesman’s sentence. Somebody asks what smells good, and he’s ready.

A small bottle lets customers try a scent without making a department-store-sized commitment. Meanwhile, the seller learns what people like, what they’ll pay, and what brings them back.

That’s business education with immediate feedback. Your customer either buys it or suddenly remembers they’re late for class.

Give the Snack Hustlers Their Flowers

The fragrance crowd sells confidence. The snack crowd serves a customer who has been staring at the clock since breakfast.

Both deserve respect.

In 2021, The Vanguard profiled Tasha Roseman and James Pernelus selling candy and snacks to classmates. Roseman reported cumulative profits of a little under $1,000 since the business began.

“We were selling things that the school didn’t offer,” she said. [5]

There it is: find something people want and make it convenient.

Candy, chips, drinks, cookies, brownies—the product doesn’t need a dramatic origin story. Sometimes your competitive advantage is having a bag of chips when somebody really wants a bag of chips.

The school eventually shut down their operation, so permission matters. But the initiative is worth encouraging. Give these kids an approved outlet and let them learn.

Digital hustlers belong here, too. Original artwork, video edits, templates, and game assets offer other ways to turn a skill into cash. Some teenagers need inventory. Others need a laptop and a customer who can explain what “make it pop” means.

A Better Kind of Flex

We don’t have solid evidence that student cologne and snack sellers generally out-earn high school drug dealers. But we don’t need that scoreboard to recognize a better opportunity.

These young entrepreneurs are learning to make money from creativity, convenience, and trust. They can build a customer list that survives graduation. They can tell their parents what they sell without rehearsing a cover story.

And “without a job” doesn’t mean without work. Blending, bottling, baking, selling, and tracking expenses take effort. The difference is that the effort builds something of their own.

So salute the Cologne Kings, the perfume queens, and the kid whose backpack has better snack options than the cafeteria.

They’ve discovered something useful early: you can create your own payday.

And if your business leaves people smelling better, feeling sharper, or enjoying a brownie?

That’s a pretty good day’s work before you’ve even graduated.

Editor’s source notes

The quotes in my article come from published interviews, not interviews conducted by us at NY Style Magazine. Ages, school status, prices, and earnings refer to the reporting dates. “Cologne Kings” is our editorial label. No source establishes a general earnings advantage over student drug sellers. These fragrance makers are not all documented school-campus sellers; Rouse’s campus sales and production details were reported during college.