Detroit Wick to open an AI scent studio inside Hudson's Detroit this September

Detroit Wick wants you to walk into a room downtown, answer a few odd questions, and leave holding a fragrance that has never existed before.

The Corktown fragrance and sensory company is opening Every Human Detroit, an AI-guided scent creation experience, inside the Hudson's Detroit tower this September, as first reported by dBusiness. The studio sits along Nick Gilbert Way at 4000 Nick Gilbert Way.

Here is the concept. Visitors answer a series of personal, random, and memory-driven prompts, and a proprietary machine the company calls ScentRobot blends a fragrance live, in front of them. The formulation is meant to be watched, so guests see the scent come together in real time. With up to 500 billion possible combinations, no two fragrances come out the same.

When the blend is done, guests take home a packaged, one-of-a-kind fragrance set. An animated character, generated for that specific scent and projected onto the wall, stands in as its identity. The space is built to engage all five senses: smell, sight, sound, touch, and taste.

The two companies come at this from different directions. Detroit Wick is headquartered in the Blanco Building in Corktown, at 2564 Michigan Avenue just west of Michigan Central Station, and co-founders Doug and Hilary Schwartz have run it for more than 12 years. Every Human, the AI scent platform behind the technology, was founded in 2018 by artist-technologist Frederik Duerinck and scent designer Anahita Mekanik. Detroit is its debut standalone U.S. location.

Doug Schwartz framed the partnership as an extension of that work. "This partnership is a natural evolution to what we've been doing in the city of Detroit for over 12 years, creating fragrance and manufacturing scent-related products," he told dBusiness.

For the Hudson's Detroit tower, it is a reason for the curious to come inside one of the city's newest buildings and make something they can carry out the door.

Every Human Detroit plans to take walk-ins along with private bookings for team building, corporate outings, and special occasions, typically hosting 10 to 30 guests. Sessions run from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. Details and reservations are at everyhumandetroit.com.