“I could play you a track to tell you how it smells,” says Tomi Ahmed, the co-founder of Iiuvo, an experimental fragrance brand that tests the limits of what a perfume can be. The 29-year-old is describing Woodgrain, one of a trio of scented candles that kick-started the company he set up with his friend Leo Gibbon in 2015. Wearing a subtly frayed Celine suit with black Birkenstocks and a Chicago White Sox cap, Ahmed lists the references behind the sultry blend of cardamom, myrrh and tonka bean: the Texas rapper Bun B, Iceberg Slim’s 1967 memoir “Pimp: The Story of My Life” and the woody interior of a Cadillac. “It’s amazing the layers of influences that go into just creating a candle,” Amed says of the scent, which was designed to evoke Southern rap.

The brand’s mission is equally nuanced. The idea behind the company, which takes its name from the Latin word iuvō, meaning “to help, gratify, please and delight,” stems from a series of missteps: Ahmed, looking to apologize to a former girlfriend, bought her a candle; Gibbon, the scent-obsessed son of a florist, called him out on his choice. This sparked a long debate about scent that evolved, with the help of Ahmed’s energy and creative vision, into a plan to propel Gibbon’s dream of making a fragrance into a reality. Now the brand — which released its first installment of gender-neutral perfumes (Soigné, Gilot and Fonteyn) in 2017 and is sold at Harrods and Selfridges in London and Totokaelo in Seattle and New York — is spreading its reach to include exhibitions and albums.

The sparsely furnished loft in Hoxton, in North East London, which serves as Ahmed’s home and company headquarters, is filled with clues about the collective’s creative lives. Stacks of speakers, keyboards and turntables flank the double-height windows that overlook a basin of the Regent’s Canal, while a neon typographical canvas sits on the floor, propped against a wall. Its creator, the Mexican artist Stefan Brüggemann, collaborated with the brand on the creation of one of its best-selling candles, which has dark, glitter-flecked wax and notes of Sichuan pepper. With an expletive name that’s a satirical nod to the banal pleasantries that permeate daily conversation — and a sendup of the overly mannered world of fragrance — it is currently being reconfigured into a woody, spicy and slightly fruity perfume for release this fall. “It’s about levity,” Ahmed says, laughing. “You can’t be overly serious in this game.”