Ariana Silvestro, a founder and chief executive of the fragrance company Scent Lab, spoke from the heart in 2018 when she told Nicholas Austin Kluender she thought they should revisit feelings they started exploring two years earlier.
“I was straight up with him,” said Ms. Silvestro, who was then working as a senior strategy associate at the urgent care company CityMD in Midtown Manhattan. “I said, ‘Hey, I feel like we never really gave this a chance.’” Mr. Kluender, now the senior director for finance at CityMD, was ready to pick up where they had left off.
Ms. Silvestro and Mr. Kluender met at CityMD in June 2016, but didn’t get to know each other until the end of that year, when Mr. Kluender, then an analyst, struck up a conversation with her at the company’s holiday party. He knew Ms. Silvestro had previously worked as a store manager at Bath & Body Works. His mother had also worked at one of the chain’s stores near his hometown, Seaford, N.Y.
“He was wondering if we had ever worked together,” Ms. Silvestro said. “He seemed so nice.”
So nice, in fact, that she hatched a plan while they chatted at the party to set him up with one of her roommates in Astoria, Queens. Dating each other felt like a bad idea to both. “We were starting our careers,” Mr. Kluender said. Neither wanted to navigate the fuzzy rules around an office romance.
But that night, Mr. Kluender, who was living with his parents in Seaford, ended up at her Astoria apartment. And not with Ms. Silvestro’s roommate. “We did have a first kiss that night,” Ms. Silvestro said.
Ms. Silvestro, 30, grew up in Plainview, N.Y. She has a bachelor’s in philosophy from St. John’s University. Mr. Kluender, 32, has a bachelor’s in business management from Farmingdale University.
Both were still working at CityMD at the start of 2018 when Ms. Silvestro suggested they find out where that first kiss might have led. Though each said they felt the stirrings of romance when chatting at company gatherings in the years in between, nothing ever transpired.
That spring, they had a first date at an Italian restaurant in Astoria. Mr. Kluender, who describes himself as shy, asked her out again a week later. At Diamond Dogs, a bar in Astoria, “I was talking a lot because I was nervous,” he said.
But Ms. Silvestro, who was actively dating on Bumble at the time, knew by the end of the evening that her instinct to rekindle the 2016 flame was the right one. “I started comparing everyone else to Nick,” she said. “That’s how I knew I was supposed to be dating him.”
Ms. Silvestro left CityMD in 2019 to help start a new company, dntl bar, a dental health provider. By then, she and Mr. Kluender were a couple.
In June 2020, after a few months spent quarantining together with her mother and younger sister in Plainview, they moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side. The following year, they bought a vacation house in Manchester, Vt., their favorite weekend getaway town.
Around the same time, “I started ideating on a fragrance brand,” Ms. Silvestro said. “I was up every night writing things down.” Mr. Kluender encouraged her.
In 2021, she conducted a small beta test in the kitchen of their Manhattan apartment. By the end of 2022, Scent Lab was up and running, and social media, especially TikTok, had taken notice. The following year, she was included on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list. They became engaged that April.
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On Oct. 5, Ms. Silvestro and Mr. Kluender were married at Hildene, the Lincoln Family Home in Manchester. Charles Ribaudo, one of the bride’s uncles who was ordained by the Universal Life Church for the event, officiated.
If their devotion to each other was in the air, so were hints of pistachios and roses, courtesy of a blend of Scent Lab’s Pistachio Dream and Cheeky Rose. Ms. Silvestro concocted the “really feminine” fragrance for the occasion, she said. A complementary, more masculine scent Mr. Kluender created had hints of cognac and fresh water.
The fragrances worked together in a way that reminded Mr. Kluender of one of the things he loves about Ms. Silvestro: her knack for balancing elements to create harmony. “Ariana is not only loving and kind,” he said. “She brings out a little outgoingness in me, and that’s an important complement in my life.”
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