Wellington-based Jamie Frater is the founder of a luxury perfume brand, Frater.

The self-taught perfumer is a former software engineer who set up a successful trivia website, Listverse, in 2007 which he sold to US tech giant, Ranker, three years ago.

The 47-year-old tells Sarah Catherall he has also been a professional opera singer and had a stint in a Catholic seminary training to be a priest.

Your first profession was as an opera singer. When did you start singing?

As a child, I was bullied quite a lot. I went to a Catholic school, which was like a rugby school and I never really fitted in. Singing lessons got me out of class and being around the bullies at lunchtime. I was the youngest of five and my family was also very musical.

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My oldest sister sang at the local pub in the 1980s, and my older brother, Stewart, played the guitar. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I left school. I didn’t get very good grades.

My singing teacher encouraged me to audition for (Wellington Polytechnic) music school and I got in. Later, I applied and got into the Royal College of Music in London. In the mid-2000s, while I was studying, I came back from London a few times to perform with the NZSO and I came third in the Lexus Song Quest in 2007.

What made you launch a trivia website?

I taught myself to programme in the early 1990s when the internet was quite a new thing. After I stopped opera singing, I was living in London working as a programmer and I was at my brother’s place and he had a book about top 10 trivia information .

I thought it was a great idea to create a top 10 trivia website, as there was nothing like it out there. It cost me $5 a month to run it in 2007.

Within six months, Listverse was making so much money that I quit my job. It was getting 30 million page views a month.

In between software and singing, you had a stint in a Catholic seminary, training to be a priest?

Mum and I used to go to a retired priest’s house, Father Anderson, for Sunday mass. It was a traditional Latin mass as he belonged to the Society of Saint Pius X.

He was one of the most influential people in my life. I felt like I had come home. It made me think that might be my calling so I went to a seminary in Goulburn, in Australia. I didn’t stay long because I realised that life was not for me. Now I’m a deeply believing Catholic, but I’m a bit lapsed in my practice.

How did your love of perfume come about?

When I was young, my older brother, Andrew, had a job working at the post office and he wore a three-piece suit. He was 12 years older than me and I idolised him.

He wore cologne to work. I would sneak into his room and do a tidy up and splash his perfume on. Mum wore Tabu perfume, which I loved. It was one of the great perfumes of that time – now you can buy it for $20 at a pharmacy.

One of my brothers wore Jovan Sex Appeal and I snuck it to intermediate school when there were TV ads at the time for Panache. The boys started calling me Panache, and that became my nickname, which is funny now given what I’m doing.

Later, when I dressed for work, I would pick out my suit and my socks and also my perfume and I very much saw perfume as an accessory.

Why did you decide to become a perfumer?

I’m a collector. I’ve got hundreds of perfumes in cabinets and boxes in my house. I decided that I wanted to learn more about perfumes.

I bought a bottle of L’Origan, which was created in 1905. I had an epiphany that in that bottle were all these essential oils and perfume chemicals that 100 years before men and women were harvesting.

And here I was smelling it. It was a little bit of them that I was holding and I found there was something beautiful about that.

What is special about your scents?

It’s been a decade-long journey. We’ve got 12 perfumes in our inaugural collection. Some have taken a few years to perfect, the result of 30 different trials for each.

The difference with Frater Perfumes is I’m using a number of historic perfumery bases, such as dianthine (a spicy note) and ambriene samuelson (from the early 1900s) in my scents. I extract them using alcohol rather than water, which is a technique from the late 19th century. The French rose and French jasmine I use are like essential oils and they are rare and unusual.

You say that Frater Perfumes is a combination of your life experiences?

Yes, I bought frater.com in 1994 at a time when it was unusual to buy a domain name. For the first time, all these years later, I’m using the site. The Listverse sale was good enough that it could fund my perfume creations, which has not been cheap. I also like to think that some people will be spiritually uplifted by my perfumes.

Do you still sing?

Yes, at home and in the shower.

Frater Perfumes are sold exclusively at World and at frater.com .