A Natural History of the Scentsa: Fragrances Publisher Gets Huntington Capital Financing to Expand Technology Platform

Just as Greg was reporting the $5 million in financing that San Diego’s Huntington Capital arranged for custom publisher RPI in Tukwila, WA, the firm was providing similar financing for Crescent House Publishing of Carlsbad, CA.

Both deals came out of Huntington Capital Fund II, the $78 million fund the boutique lender and private equity investor formed in late 2008. The firm has provided funding for 15 companies out of the fund so far, according to Huntington managing partner Morgan Miller.

Huntington usually avoids financing deals with risky technology ventures, instead preferring to provide capital to mature companies that need growth capital to expand their businesses. In the case of Crescent House Publishing, the 18-year-old Carlsbad publisher has spent the past five years developing Scentsa, a technology software and services platform focused on marketing fragrances and perfumes. After securing some key customers, the company is using the capital to expand the deployment of its interactive touch-screen displays, according to Huntington. The firm did not specify the amount of the financing, but Miller says it’s less than $5 million.

The Crescent House Publishing story reminds me of a similar metamorphosis at San Diego’s Mitchell International, a company founded in 1946 to sell automotive parts pricing catalogs. Under a transformation that began 50 years later, Mitchell developed Web-based payments processing system and other software for automotive repair shops. Today the company’s software and services supports millions of online transactions each month among insurance claims administrators, damage appraisers, and auto repair specialists.

Jan Moran
Jan Moran

Jan Moran, a fragrance expert and consultant in Carlsbad, founded Crescent House Publishing in 1992. She told the perfume blog “Now Smell This” in 2005 that she formed her own publishing house because she was unable to find a publisher willing to print “Fabulous Fragrances,” a book she published in 1994 as her comprehensive “ode” to perfumes for shoppers and retailers. (Her retail customers included department stores like Nordstrom, Nieman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue, among others.)

Moran followed up with a second volume, “Fabulous Fragrances II,” which she published in 2000. By 2005, however, Moran saw that the unrealized value of her labor was really

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.