A Scent That Felt Like Home
Maya Wally didn’t set out to become a perfumer. She set out to find a scent that felt like home — and ended up founding one of Switzerland’s most talked-about fragrance maisons.
For Maya, fragrance was always a language. Oud — the woody, resinous warmth of agarwood — carried memory, celebration, and meaning. It was a scent she associated with the most precious moments, and one she felt was almost unknown in the country she had made her home.
The Moment Everything Changed
“It was our honeymoon in Dubai,” Maya recalls. “Ali and I were walking through the souks, and the smell of real oud stopped me completely. I stood there and thought: why does no one in Switzerland know this fragrance? Why is the finest wood in the world almost unknown in the country I live in?”
That question became an obsession. And obsessions, for Maya, tend to become things.
From an Idea to Kollbrunn
The early work happened at home. Maya conceived her first fragrance, Oud Amal, herself — the vision, the direction, the feeling it had to evoke. To bring the composition to its final form, she worked with a trained perfumer. The vision was hers; the craft of building it, a collaboration.
That became the model for everything that followed. M’OUD Switzerland was registered in Kollbrunn, in the canton of Zürich, as a GmbH with two founders: Maya and Ali Wally.
How M’OUD Is Made
“People ask me: how can oud be Swiss?” Maya says. “My answer is always the same: Switzerland doesn’t change the oud. Switzerland adds precision, consistency, and craft. The soul is still completely Middle Eastern.”
Maya is the creative vision behind every M’OUD fragrance — the nose that sets the direction. For the technical composition she works with Patrick Müller, perfumer at LUZI, one of Switzerland’s most respected fragrance houses. Maya conceives; Patrick composes. In 2024, M’OUD Switzerland received Swiss Label certification — the crossbow mark — confirming that more than 70% of the value creation takes place on Swiss soil.
One Bottle, One Tree
From the beginning, Maya was clear that M’OUD would give back to the source of its core ingredient. Agarwood comes from the Aquilaria tree — a species under enormous pressure from overharvesting. In March 2024, M’OUD Switzerland launched its certified tree-planting partnership with One Tree Planted: for every bottle sold, one tree is planted.
“The tree that gives us our ingredient — we plant more of them. That’s the only logic that makes sense to me.”
What Comes Next
Maya is not particularly interested in rapid scaling. M’OUD’s Oud Amal Intense is a strictly limited, numbered edition. Not as a marketing tactic — as a genuine expression of what limited means.
“When something is truly limited, you care for it differently. You wear it on the days that matter. That’s how oud should be worn.”
New releases are in development. But the core philosophy remains unchanged: authentic oud, Swiss craft, and a deep respect for the ingredient that started everything.
M’OUD Switzerland. Where every bottle tells a story — and plants a tree.
Explore the collection at moud.swiss