My passion for perfumery.

I didn’t want any other article than the one I’m about to write. I want to explain how Daring Light came about, and why. I appreciate you taking the time to read me.

We are facing an unprecedented crisis in our current capitalist economy due to COVID, and that is the closing of businesses and the millions of job layoffs. And I suffered all this this last year 2020.

In Spain, if a company has difficulties in times of economic crisis, it can apply a mechanism called Expediente de Regulación de Empleo (ERE, translated; Employment Regulation Procedure), which, under economic, technical, organisational or force majeure circumstances, can reduce the working hours of its workers, suspend the employment contracts of its workers or in the worst case, terminate the employment contracts of the aforementioned workers.

In Spain, the EREs have been in vogue throughout 2020 and this 2021 it seems that they will gradually slow down due to the vaccines, and the future that finally seems to be arriving.

Well, with the appearance of the future ERE in September 2020 in my previous job as an employee, and the imminent dismissal of 56 workers (me among them, of course), panic set in. In the middle of the pandemic, it is the biggest disaster to see your stability in danger, and even more so with many personal and couple goals in place.

After a few days of uncertainty, as there were still several months to go before the negotiations between the workers’ unions and the company came to a successful conclusion, I began to reorient my future course. I am a person with many hobbies, but only one that allows me to travel without leaving my place (along with my beloved reading), and that is perfumery. I love perfumes that have already been created and those that I create myself.

In those days of uncertainty, I imagined myself as the owner of my own business, and it was very nice but financially lethal. Firstly, I didn’t have the capital for such a long journey, and secondly, it was daring to embark on a new business in the middle of a pandemic.

In Spain, due to the taxes we all pay in our payrolls, we have the right, if we find ourselves without work, to receive an income paid by the State for the time you have accumulated and for a maximum of two years, called “unemployment benefit”.

In my mind there was the possibility of allowing myself to endure the crisis by receiving the unemployment benefit I had for two years and try to find a job… it blackened me to think about it.

So, I looked into starting my own company, a new online shop selling fine perfumery, home fragrances and other activities. Transferring my passion into a way of life that allows me to make a subsistence. Creating a participative online boutique, where the customer doesn’t just come to buy, but also participates in it. A light was inside me, a light of daring, courage and confidence. A very dark future, but something was beginning to brighten. And Daring Light, that’s what it is. Daring, and entrepreneurship.

Buy perfumes with total confidence and online.

I started to get in touch with hundreds of contacts in those days. Very exciting days as I was receiving great support for my initiative, and negative ones until I had the shop visible and online.

As I said before, unemployment benefit allows you to have income when you don’t have it, but it has another variable, which is that it allows you to have all or part of the capital of that benefit in a single payment, for the creation of a company. To do this, you have to present a project called Memoria Explicativa to a State agency called Servicio Público de Empleo Estatal, with budgets and tedious nights of writing it up. After a few weeks, they have to assess its viability and if it is favourable, they will accept it and give you the one-off payment.

They accepted my project and considered it viable on 28 February 2021. I was overjoyed, but I also felt dizzy again, as the project was about to take shape.

So, what you have in front of you is thanks to a tool that my country allows me, and to the funds I have set aside.

A risky bet, perhaps, but an exciting one. And one of which I am very proud.

An online perfume shop is not just about one factor.

All the brands, commercial agents, who supported me at the time, are the ones with whom Daring Light is part of, and a few others who will gradually join. For this I thank them enormously for their support.

With the writing of this text, I want to encourage all the people that, faced with a distortion in their working life, are capable of overcoming it and reorienting their lives.

I invite you to Daring Light, to ask me what you want and if that spark exists in you, to keep it burning.

THANK YOU.

Sergio Martínez Anaya.