Aichabelle · The Honoured List
The List.
Numbered batches. Hand-finished. By patience.
Aichabelle · The Honoured List
Numbered batches. Hand-finished. By patience.
“Every jar is a name. Every batch is a list.”
Aichabelle does not hold inventory. We do not warehouse cream. We sell by waitlist, in numbered batches small enough to remember every name on the list. When you reserve a jar, you join a list of buyers a production run is built for — from the seed in São Paulo, the Heilerde in Bavaria, the Rosa damascena in Isparta, all the way to the wax-sealed parcel on your doorstep.
It takes eight to twelve weeks. You will hear from us at every stage. You will pay forty percent less than the retail price of the same jar bought after a batch is finished. And the jar arrives numbered — one of a small run — folded into an origami envelope by a real pair of hands.
Jars / batch
Maximum run size. We do not exceed it.
Weeks / release
From the list closing to the parcel arriving.
Named farms
Brazil, Bavaria, Türkiye, the Congo basin, Ghana.
Off retail
The patience discount. List holders only.
From the field to the parcel
You are not waiting for an order. You are waiting for a batch to be made. Here is what happens in those weeks, and when you will hear from us.
What arrives with you
Six things make up the difference between buying a jar and being on the list.
Yours is signed and dated. #073 of 2,000, or wherever you land. Numbers are not assigned by speed — they are assigned in the order the list is built. The list, in order, becomes the print run.
The patience discount. The same jar, bought after a batch is finished, costs the full retail price — if there is even any of it left. List holders pay 40% less, in exchange for waiting eight to twelve weeks.
Every parcel includes a small folded-paper piece — a hummingbird, a tree, a beetle, a rose — in the colour of your jar’s tier. It is folded by hand, often by Aicha. No two are identical.
Through the wait you receive a short note from us at the close of each of the five stages: harvest, blend, test, hand-finish, dispatch. Five letters in eight weeks. No marketing — only what is happening with your batch.
If you choose, your name (or chosen initial) appears on our published list of batch holders for that run. It is the only place we publicly thank the people who make the batch possible. Opt in or out at checkout.
List holders are offered the next batch of the same product first, by email, three days before the public list opens. The number you held the first time is reserved for you, if you want it again.
A jar on the Aichabelle retail shelf, after a batch is finished, costs the full price — in line with comparable rare-active skincare from Sisley, La Mer, or Augustinus Bader. When you reserve from the list, you pay forty percent less. Not as a sale. Not as a launch discount. As a permanent term of the list.
You are not paying retail because retail covers warehousing, returns, and the assumption that not every jar will sell. None of that applies when the jar is built for you, with your number on it, after you have already said you want it.
Your card is held at reservation. We charge it the day your parcel is dispatched. If the batch does not pass our testing, the reservation is refunded in full — we do not ship anything we did not build perfectly.
Plain answers
The day your parcel is dispatched — week ten to twelve. You authorise the charge when you reserve. Until dispatch, the card is held but not debited.
Yes — until the blend stage begins (end of week two). Once production is under way, your jar is being built and we cannot return that work to the supplier.
Every reservation in the failed batch is refunded in full, and your place on the list is rolled to the next production run with no loss of number or position. We do not ship a jar we are not confident in.
Because the actives are rare and short-shelf. Iron Tree charcoal, Galago Peptide-1, the Silvavita synergy, Damascene rose oil — all are at their freshest within weeks of preparation. Warehousing means oxidation, and oxidation means a weaker jar. Numbered batches keep every active at its peak.
The second reason matters more: we do not use preservatives. The skin is the largest organ in the body, and the things we put on it become part of it. Aichabelle jars are alive in a botanical sense — the oils, the peptides, the mineral complexes are kept perishable on purpose, because that is the only state in which the healing chemistry actually works. A preserved cream is a shelf-stable cream is a less effective cream. We are not in that business.
A jar leaves our hands at peak. You receive it close to the date it was finished. It works because of that.
We could. We have chosen not to. The answer is not market sizing or capital constraints — it is the way we want to live.
Aichabelle is built on a single rule: only take what we give. We work in batches small enough that the named farms in São Paulo, the Bavarian quarry, the rose cooperative in Isparta, the Iron Tree charcoal-makers in West Africa — can all keep doing what they do without us asking them to bend their pace to ours. Scaling Aichabelle would mean asking those partners to scale, which would mean industrialising practices they have kept artisanal for generations. We will not.
The deeper reason is closer to home. We value family. We value friends. We value community. We have chosen a lifestyle that lets us focus on the things that are actually important to us — making jars that work, looking after the people who help us make them, and being present in our own lives. Getting rich for the sake of being rich is not on the list.
So Aichabelle stays small on purpose. The list system is what makes that sustainable: you fund the next batch by reserving from it, we hand-finish what you ordered, no jar is made on speculation. Two thousand jars at a time, in numbered runs, by a small team. That is the whole plan.
Only with your permission. At checkout you choose to be named, named by initial, or anonymous. The Honoured List is published per batch on this site, sorted by reservation number, and is the only place we publicly thank list holders.
Permanent, for as long as the list system is in place. Every future batch of every Aichabelle jar — cabinet, perruquerie, herbarium — will be offered at 40% off retail to list reservers. Retail pricing applies only to jars sold post-batch from any remaining stock.
Two ways. The first is the list itself — reserve a jar and subscribe to receive the five batch letters and updates from the bench. Subscribers are the spine of how we plan production, so the 40% goes to the people who let us plan.
The second — for those who would rather not be on a mailing list — is to pay the full reservation amount up-front at checkout, not at dispatch. Paying in full counts as commitment in its own way, and the 40% applies the same.
After your jar arrives, we ask one thing in return: leave a review. An honest one, on the product page. Word of mouth is the only marketing we run, and it is how we keep the list growing without raising prices. We are quietly grateful for every review.
The five letters are also archived in the account section of your profile and a final summary travels with the parcel. You won’t miss anything.
The current list is being built. You can reserve any jar at the catalogue, and the list closes when the batch is full.