How Ffern is making branding feel less like advertising and more like cinema

Ffern’s slow and seasonal approach to advertising has long made the traditional campaign look tired. The natural fragrance maker’s gentle mission to bring perfumery back to its artisan roots has seeped into its own distinctly contemplative style of filmmaking, one that feels less like advertising and more like cinema.

With the brand’s origins in co-founders Emily Cameron and Owen Mears’ upbringing on a farm in Somerset and a shared childhood spent making films in the surrounding fields, this overlap between fragrance making and filmmaking is something that has shaped Ffern’s world from the very beginning. As they now position themselves as filmmakers just as much as fragrance makers, the perfume brand has a full team dedicated to producing films in-house, (as well as an online cinema where you can watch them), asserting their commitment to the craft in a run of enamouring shorts that have arrived with each season’s launch – films that have separated its brand world from every other fast-paced ad.

From dancers skating on ice in Winter 25’s A Dance on Wild Ice to acrobats vaulting through trees in Autumn 25’s A Wild Apple Heist, the brands dedication to shooting the real thing – under water or through rain or shine on a remote Scottish island – has allowed them to capture what Emily calls “some of the most beautiful and fleeting moments in nature”, just like their fragrances.

This commitment to the magic that emerges from working with “real people in real conditions”, is perhaps what’s become so welcoming about the brand’s visual world. While Ffern spends as much time documenting behind the scenes as it does the final show, the skill and craft that goes into its filmmaking is increasingly transparent – something we can trust when they tell stories that invite us to escape elsewhere. To uncover more about the brands connection to cinema, we speak to Emily about how Ffern’s insistence on doing things properly is giving its films a texture that’s mirroring the craft of its perfume and why its immersive style of storytelling is creating a new kind of branding: one that turns to film to create things that can’t easily be replicated.

INT: How does Ffern’s overall creative approach trickle down into the films you make? What parallels have you found between fragrance making and film making?

EC: We’re obsessive about finding the most beautiful, natural ingredients. The Rose de Mai we’ve grown for our Spring 26 fragrance comes from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, where it’s only picked during a few weeks in the spring because that’s when its aromatic intensity is greatest. Our films, like our fragrances, aim to capture some of the most beautiful and fleeting moments in nature, to rejoice in that experience and make nature the star.

We’ve never made a film in which the landscape hasn’t been at the centre. Our Winter 26 film, The Lighthouse Keeper was shot on location on the Isle of Skye and starred the wonderful Ruth Wilson, an actor we’ve both admired for so long. Her character was an embodiment of that dialogue between humans and the wild, changing elements of the landscape surrounding her.

INT: Your recent release for Winter 2026 saw you venture up to the Isle of Skye to film through wild weather on the remote Scottish island for The Lighthouse Keeper. The design of each of Ffern’s films always celebrates the land and the effects of the season. Why has it been important to go and shoot ‘the real thing’, to capture campaigns in these kinds of landscapes?

EC: We love exploring how the seasons shape the landscape. The world would be such a sterile and bleak place if the seasons didn’t give it that undulation. In The Lighthouse Keeper, we wanted to capture that elemental feeling. The weather gave us so much that you can almost feel the rain on your face when you watch it.

The actors we work with always have such a deep appreciation for nature themselves and their responses can be so genuine. That’s something we’ll always love and want to explore. We say the best thing to do in winter is to put on your boots and go outside into the wild weather – it takes you out of yourself. If we can show people doing that in our films, maybe we can encourage that sort of connection with the elements in our audiences.