Funmi Monet had $7 in her personal account on the morning she turned down money that came with the wrong strings attached. She had already put $225,000 of her own savings into Influxious, the fragrance house she built, covering development, formulation, testing, packaging, and branding before a single bottle was filled.
Monet is a licensed therapist who built a TikTok following of more than 500,000 reviewing perfume, after an early job behind the fragrance counter at Dillard’s. Sephora opened sales on Influxious at 3 a.m. Eastern on July 27, 2026. The allocation was gone by 9:10 a.m., six hours and 10 minutes later. The 4,500 units she had held back to sell directly sold out the next day in under 24 hours.
A 50 millilitre bottle sells for $150 and a 10 millilitre for $35. There is a $25 discovery set that carries a $25 voucher toward a full bottle. Three weeks after launch, the brand reported $1.2 million in gross sales. In late September 2026, Influxious went into 11 Sephora stores. The $1 million angel round she closed through Radix Innovation Capital came after the launch, not before it.
She refused money twice. The first time was the morning with $7 in the account. The second was when Sephora called one of the four scents, Gold Standard, a little out there for its customer. “I said no because if I considered that, then I would just be doing what everyone else is doing,” she said. Gold Standard shipped.
The production run was 30,000 units across nine SKUs, forecast to last three months. The reorder planned for October had to be moved to August, and the shift from ocean freight to air changed the cost. “Something that would have cost you $3,000 now costs you $9,000,” she said.
She named the brand almost twenty years ago, for a high school project. “Influxious comes from two words: influx and luxurious,” she said.
“Self-funding taught me discipline,” she said. She said she would probably have moved faster and learned less with outside money, and that funding it herself left her free to protect the vision. “The therapist never left the room,” she said. “She just has a fragrance company now.”
