D.S. & Durga’s next serve is a limited-edition, tennis-themed fragrance.
Launching Tuesday ahead of the U.S. Open, Crush Balls retails for $280 for a 50-ml. bottle and features notes of green grass, rosemarin, white cotton and hedge flowers.
“There’s something so inexplicable about the feeling of just smashing a ball with a racket as opposed to, say, throwing a ball hard or hitting one with a bat — you have to be so good at baseball to do that,” said D.S. & Durga cofounder David Moltz, who is more of a racquetball guy himself (the courts in Bed-Stuy’s Herbert Von King Park are his go-to spot) but whose wife and cofounder Kavi Moltz hails from a tennis family.
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“I’ve wanted to do a tennis-themed scent for a long time now,” said Moltz, whose earliest iterations of Crush Balls have occupied shelf space in his office for the better part of a decade. “It never was exactly the right time to put it out, it was always like ‘I don’t need another green, fresh fragrance in our line.'”
Each year, D.S. & Durga introduces two new fragrances — one in the spring and another in the fall. Over the past few years, though, the brand has found success incorporating smaller, 500-bottle drops into its mix to generate buzz and also “let our freak flag fly a little bit without worrying about investing all the time, money and resources of our team into a major global launch,” Moltz said.
Before Crush Balls, the brand’s limited-edition fragrances included its 2020 Rockaway Beach scent inspired by the ocean coast of Queens, New York, and Pistachio, which began as a 100-bottle run in 2022 but became a permanent addition to the line this past January due to high demand. “It’s been our most successful launch of all time,” Moltz said.
Crush Balls will be available direct-to-consumer at the brand’s three stand-alone stores in New York’s SoHo and Brooklyn and Venice Beach, California. Later this fall, the brand will open its fourth outpost on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
“Retail is so important to us — it’s always been profitable,” said Moltz, noting most of the brand’s limited-edition fragrances are exclusive to its stand-alone stores, where the rest of the lineup is at retailers Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. “When you’re bottled at a department store next to other brands, it takes a lot of investment to compete in that way, where we control our own destiny with our stores and our [website].”