Fifteen Percent

Fifteen percent of the profit from every Aphrodisiac order goes to organizations working on behalf of women and children. It applies to every order, in every season, at full price and on sale.

This page explains how that works, where the money goes, how we choose, and what we publish so you can check that all of it is true.

The Commitment

The fifteen percent has no end date. It is not a campaign or a launch promotion. A fixed share of what we earn on every order leaves the business and goes to the organizations listed below.

We settled on the figure before we made a single bottle. Most brands decide on giving after they know their margins, so giving becomes whatever is left over. We built the fifteen percent into the cost of each fragrance from the start. It is accounted for alongside the perfume oil, the glass, and the freight. It does not shrink in a slow month, and it is not quietly paused during a sale.

You Are Not Being Asked to Donate

There is no box to check at checkout, no rounding up, and no optional donation added to your total. The price you see is the price you pay.

We want to be blunt about why. A lot of retail giving is set up so that the customer pays and the brand takes the credit. You round up at the register or buy the special edition, the money comes out of your pocket, and the brand puts the charity's logo on its website. We don't want to work that way.

The commitment sits on our side of the transaction. Buying a fragrance you actually want is the whole of your part in it. We handle the rest, and we report on it.

How the Fifteen Percent Is Worked Out

Profit on an order is what remains after the cost of the fragrance, payment processing fees, packaging, and shipping. Fifteen percent of that number is set aside the day the order is confirmed.

It sits in a separate account, apart from our operating funds. This is deliberate. Money that stays in the main account gets spent on the emergency of the week, and every business has one every week. Money that has already been moved is much harder to talk yourself out of.

We donate quarterly rather than per order, because sending nine dollars at a time costs the receiving organization more in administration than it gains in funding. Small charities spend real staff hours processing tiny gifts. Sending one larger amount each quarter means more of it survives the journey.

Why Women and Children

The stories behind our six spells are thousands of years old, and many of them are about women whose lives were decided by someone else. Isolde was promised to a king she had never met. Rachel and Leah were given in marriage by their father as payment for a man's labor. For many women and girls today, that lack of choice is still ordinary life.

Women and children carry a disproportionate share of the consequences in almost every crisis, whether it is conflict, displacement, disaster, or the everyday grind of poverty. They are the last to be resourced and the first to be overlooked when funding tightens.

The problem is structural too. Organizations led by and serving women tend to be smaller, newer, and less connected to large institutional funders. They compete with each other for a narrow pool of grant money on annual cycles, with reporting requirements that eat up the time of staff who should be doing the work. A shelter director should not be spending February writing a grant application to fund March.

Unrestricted, predictable money is what these organizations ask for most and receive least. That is what we want to be a small source of.

Where the Money Goes

Each quarter, the fifteen percent is divided equally between five organizations, one for each area of need we fund. All five receive unrestricted gifts, so they decide where the money is needed most.

Shelter and protection: Sanctuary for Families. A shelter's largest cost is almost always staff, and staff is the hardest thing to raise money for because donors prefer to fund objects. Survivors of violence also need legal representation, case management, and long term support. That work is slow, expensive, and almost impossible to photograph, which is exactly why it is chronically underfunded. Sanctuary for Families does all of it in New York, our home city, for survivors of domestic violence and trafficking and their children.

Maternal health: Fistula Foundation. In much of the world, whether a birth is survivable depends on distance and whether there is a vehicle. When a long labor goes without care, it can leave a woman with an obstetric fistula, an injury that leaves her incontinent and often shut out by her community. Fistula Foundation funds the surgery that repairs it, working through local surgeons and hospitals across Africa and Asia.

Girls' education: CAMFED. School fees are often the smallest cost of keeping a girl in school. The larger costs are uniforms, books, transport, and replacing the income she might otherwise earn. CAMFED covers fees, uniforms, and books for girls in some of the poorest rural communities in Africa, and the young women it has supported go on to support the next generation of girls.

Child nutrition: Helen Keller Intl. Malnutrition weakens a child's immune system, so ordinary illnesses become dangerous. Helen Keller Intl works on nutrition and child health, and the independent charity evaluator GiveWell names its vitamin A program a top charity for reducing deaths among children under five.

Women-led groups: Global Fund for Women. Some of the most important work is done by small local groups that no brand our size could find or vet on its own. Global Fund for Women passes our gift on as flexible grants to women-led organizations around the world, reaching groups that larger funders often overlook.

How We Choose

We apply five tests to any organization before we send money.

It is a registered charity. We can verify its registration and read its filings.

Its accounts are public. We look at what share of spending reaches programs, and we read the notes rather than just the headline percentage, because a very low overhead ratio can mean an organization is underinvesting in its own staff.

It works directly with the people it serves, or funds local organizations that do. We want money to pass through as few hands as possible.

It can use unrestricted funding. We don't tell a shelter how to spend a grant. The people running it know better than we do.

Our money makes a difference there. We look for work with a real funding gap, where an extra gift changes what gets done.

How the List Changes

These five are our partners for our first year. Every January we review each one against the tests above. Some will stay for years, and some will be replaced when the need is greater elsewhere. Any change will be announced on this page before it happens.

We review the list instead of fixing it forever because need moves. A crisis pulls attention and funding toward one region and away from everywhere else, and the places that fall out of the news are the places that quietly lose their budgets. A giving program locked to one list would stay pointed wherever the world happened to be looking the year it started.

What We Publish, and When

Every quarter we publish three things on this page: the total amount donated, the organizations that received it, and how much each one received. We publish dollar amounts and names, not percentages or claims about impact.

Our first report will go up at the close of our first full quarter of sales, and every quarter after that. Until then, this page is a promise and nothing more, and we would rather say so plainly than imply a history we haven't earned yet.

What Happens in a Bad Quarter

Fifteen percent of a small profit is a small number. In a slow quarter the figure we publish will be modest, and we will publish it anyway.

We are saying this in advance because going quiet in a bad quarter is exactly how a giving program turns into a marketing program. If the number is embarrassing, it still gets published. If we ever fall short of fifteen percent, we will say so here rather than take the page down.

What This Is Not

We are not a nonprofit. We are a fragrance brand that has committed a fixed share of its profit, and we would rather you understand the difference than assume something more flattering.

Buying perfume is not an act of charity. It is a purchase. The giving is a decision we made about how to run the business, and it would be dishonest to hand you the moral credit for it.

We will never use photographs of the people these organizations serve to sell perfume. That kind of imagery works, and we have decided against it, because dignity should not be a marketing tool.

Common Questions

Can I choose which organization my order supports?

No, and this is deliberate. Letting customers direct the money sounds fair, but in practice it pushes funding toward causes that photograph well and away from the ones that don't. We pool the money and split it as described above.

Is my purchase tax deductible?

No. You are buying a fragrance, not making a donation. The donation is ours, made from our profit.

Why fifteen percent, and not ten or fifty?

Fifteen is the largest share we can commit to permanently without putting the business at risk, and permanence is the point. A brand that pledges fifty percent for one season and then disappears does less good than one that gives fifteen for a decade.

What if I return my order?

The amount set aside is reversed along with your refund. Nothing is donated on a sale that did not ultimately happen.

Do these charities endorse Aphrodisiac?

No. We are a donor to these organizations, not a partner they have chosen to promote. Naming them here tells you where our money goes. It does not mean they endorse our products.

The Aim

We are not chasing a headline number in our launch year. What we want is for this to keep running, unchanged and unannounced, long after it stops being remarkable that it exists. The real test is whether the quarterly reports on this page are still appearing ten years from now.

Questions about our giving can be sent to info@aphrodisiacnewyork.com.