Fragrance house

Roads

Roads is a contemporary lifestyle brand based in Dublin, Ireland, whose perfume business was founded by Danielle Ryan in 2013. It began as three connected but distinct businesses—fragrance, publishing, and film and entertainment—unified by an artistic and cultural creative direction. The fragrance concept grew from Ryan’s theatre work, where she explored scent as a way to create atmosphere in immersive performances before developing wearable perfumes from conceptual themes. Roads’ creative process draws on places, people, cultural movements, books, films, technology, nature, and emotions, developed collaboratively with professional perfumers and artists. Its fragrance launched at Selfridges in 2014 through an interactive installation combining scent, film, imagery, and fragrance testing. In 2015, the brand extended into home scent with its first candle collection. A notable fragrance chapter was its contemporary Africa collection, including I Am Dance, Afropolis, Big Sky, and Past | Presence, which explored African dance, urban modernity, landscape, and Nigerian literary influence through scent and commissioned box artwork. Roads is now presented as a modern, genderless perfume brand whose scents are intended as open-ended personal narratives rather than prescriptive categories.