Zoologist Perfumes: The Toronto Game Developer Who Turned Animal Kingdom into a Collaborative Perfume House

Victor Wong was a 3D modeler for video games when he started Zoologist Perfumes in Toronto in 2013. He had a collection of animal figurines, a memory of a primary school music class in Hong Kong where his teacher played Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals and asked students to guess which piece represented which creature, and what he initially described as a hobby. That hobby has since consumed him. By the time he spoke to Fragrantica’s Sergey Borisov in 2018, Wong had already quit his day job — he told Borisov he left game development when he realized he couldn’t manage both, and that the manufacturing side of the business had become physically demanding full-time labor he does himself: diluting perfume compounds received from collaborating perfumers, filtering, bottling, labeling, and packaging every unit.

That detail matters. Zoologist is not a brand where someone writes a brief and hands it to a lab. Wong handles the production end with his own hands, at scale, after the creative work is done with outside perfumers.

The Collaborative Model

The structural idea behind Zoologist is simple and relatively unusual: each fragrance is built around a specific animal, and each one is made with a different collaborating perfumer. Wong functions as art director and creative brief — he decides the animal, the conceptual angle, the emotional territory — and then finds a perfumer whose sensibility fits the subject. The result is a catalog where the house has a consistent thematic identity (animals, nature, the weird and the wild) but no single house style. One fragrance might read as dark and animalic; another might be bright and herbaceous. The animal is the constraint, and the perfumer shapes everything within it.

This is genuinely different from how most indie houses operate. Many one-person operations work with a single perfumer for the life of the brand, or the founder is the perfumer. Wong is neither a trained perfumer nor attached to one collaborator. He’s closer to a creative director, which gives Zoologist a range of voices across its catalog that would be impossible if one nose made everything.

Bat, and What the Award Actually Means

The fragrance that put Zoologist on the map in fragrance circles is Bat, made in collaboration with Ellen Covey of Olympic Orchids Artisan Perfumes. In 2016, Bat won the Art & Olfaction Award in the Independent category. The Art & Olfaction Awards are run by a nonprofit dedicated to independent and artisan perfumery, and the Independent category specifically covers small-batch or self-distributed work — it’s not a trade award handed out by a committee of retailers. Winning it in 2016, when Zoologist was only a few years old, was a meaningful signal that the project was taken seriously by people who spend their professional lives evaluating this work.

What Bat actually smells like has been covered extensively in fragrance communities. The conceit is a nocturnal creature, a cave, damp stone, the edge of something biological. Covey is known for working with unusual and challenging materials, and Bat reflects that. It is not a crowd-pleaser in any conventional sense, which is partly why it resonated: the award recognized a fragrance that committed fully to its concept rather than softening it for commercial appeal.

The grounding text from the sources reviewed here doesn’t provide a full confirmed note list for Bat, so rather than invent one, it’s worth saying plainly: if you want the specifics, the Fragrantica listing for Bat has the notes, the community ratings, and years of wear reports from people who have tested it in different conditions.

The Rest of the Catalog

Beyond Bat, Zoologist has built out a substantial range. The site currently sells perfumes, attars, deluxe bottles, samples, and travel sprays, which tells you something about how seriously the house takes accessibility: samples are a standard offering, not an afterthought. Attars — oil-based, alcohol-free concentrations with roots in Middle Eastern and South Asian perfumery — represent a distinct product line rather than just a flanker format.

The geographic reach is wide. The shop ships to dozens of countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific, with local currency options for several regions including Canada (CAD), Israel (ILS), Qatar (QAR), Saudi Arabia (SAR), and the UAE (AED).

How to Actually Buy It

Zoologist sells direct through zoologistperfumes.com. That’s the primary channel, and based on the available information, it’s where you should start. The site lists a “Where to Buy” page that may include authorized retail partners in your region — worth checking if you’d prefer a local stockist or want to smell something before committing.

Amazon availability for Zoologist is not confirmed here. Treat the direct site as the reliable source and don’t assume marketplace listings are current or authorized.

Samples are available on the site and are the sensible starting point for a house where each fragrance is genuinely different from the last. You’re not buying a house signature; you’re choosing a collaboration.

For more context on how Zoologist fits into the wider landscape of genuinely independent perfume projects, see our overview of niche fragrance houses worth knowing.