To be different: The Different Company

by: Serguey Borisov

One of the niche perfume industry pioneers, The Different Company, celebrates its 15th year in 2015. The evolution of the brand and industry changes that took place in these years we discussed with Luc Gabriel, the president and CEO of the company, at The Different Company stand at Esxence-2015, in Milan.

Luc Gabriel: There have been basically three different phases in the last 15 years. The first part was the easy one: we created the brand and launched it. In 2000 nobody was there yet, only a few time-honored brands, so to speak, like Diptyque, Annick Goutal, L`Artisan Parfumeur, which was bought from Jean Laporte. So it was kind of very unusual and non-existent, there was no such thing as niche perfumery. This was between 2000 and 2004.

Sergey Borisov: And also you had quite the perfumer!

Jean-Claude Ellena

Luc Gabriel: Yes, we had the great in-house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena. In 2004Hermès called and took Jean-Claude Ellena on board, so he left us his daughter instead of himself. That`s changed a little bit our original direction in terms of perfumer rather than of perfume concepts. And then the crisis of 2008-2009 came. Like most brands, we had a decrease in turnover, just in those two years, even though not every brand admitted it. It was the time when all the big perfume stores were focusing on The Big Guys – L`Oreal, LVMH, Coty, etc.

Nobody paid attention to the niche market. But that was the real start of the niche market – some brands are gone (actually just a couple of them), but many more brands have launched in the last 6-7 years. It`s an explosion of niche brands in the last couple of years! We have about 160 niche brands here, at Esxence-2015 today. And we have different movements in the business. Some went in retail, with more and more retailers switching to the niche or selective market, including huge department stores in the USA, in the UK and in other countries. Also, a lot of new conceptual small boutiques or even chains emerged that are focusing on niche perfumes only: like Skins in the Netherlands, Space NK in the UK, Crème de la Crème in the Baltic countries, Jovoy in Paris and Sens Unique in France. So we have more locations where we can sell niche perfumes. But at the same time we have so many more brands that look for stores to sell their creations, and it`s getting more and more difficult for each of them. Think of a buyer of a department store – how to choose the right brands from 160 brands? That`s not easy! They have their usual parameters: Do I like the story? Do I like the bottles and visuals? Do I like the merchandising? And by the way, do I like the fragrances? [laughing] BY THE WAY, you know… And sometimes you really need to step back and think what’s the business about? It`s perfume business, after all.

And another thing, the end user is much more educated now than 10 years ago. Today we have amazingly specialized clients, some of them know so much about fragrances, even more than the sales assistants (laughing). The thing is, you cannot fool them. You just can`t. So you need a more coherent brand, to have nice packaging and presentation, and you have to have the right fragrance. So back to your question, which was: what are the challenges we`re facing as a brand of 15 years – you know, implementation, development, survival and then continue growth, staying coherent and true to our word, and that`s very difficult. We have a clear DNA, and we need to be different.

Sergey Borisov: I think it`s not easy to keep to your DNA and be different. How do you manage to stay different in a contemporary perfume world, in which almost every perfume idea has been repeated and exploited many times?

Luc Gabriel: Two things. In perfumes there're two things – the inside and the outside. The outside, the design – we have had a very specific design created by Thierry de Bachmakoff from the very beginning. And what we offer on the inside is still not common on the market till now. We started with 200 ml and 10 ml, and continued with 90 ml and 50 ml (but 10 ml and 200 ml are still in our range) – and we still have a travel leather case and aluminium case. Still nobody has it. There`re some travel sprays, but we have the only travel suitcase, if you want. The elegance inside the bottle is the signature of our brand. Whatever is made in terms of fragrance, whether people like it or not, whether it`s citrusy, floral, woody, we always have a certain kind of elegant signature. It`s a soft thing to think about, but it`s a very important thing for us to have that.

But we also offer an angle twist, a very different and specific angle. So if you smell today our rose fragrance, Rose Poivrée, that was launched 15 years ago, it is still unique in the world of rose fragrances. You know, the spiciness and the animalistic aspects in it – it is unique. If you smell Sel de Vetiver that was launched in 2006, you will find the combination of salt and two types of vetiver, and it`s still completely unique in the vetiver fragrances family. So every fragrance we tried to do had to be different in itself, so much that even 15 years afterwards, it is still different. So you`re right, we are different, but especially in the long term. Rose, Osmanthus, Iris, Jasmine – we are trying hard to be different in everything we do.

Sergey Borisov: Could you be more specific – how to be different in perfume art? It's like, when you present tribal people with designed objects, they could not distinguish them as pure art or functional design. When the same objects are shown to people of civilization, they could definitely understand where the art is pure, and where it`s functional. They have an experienced eye that helps them. Do you have an inner feeling for different things?

Luc Gabriel: Yes, we know a lot of fragrances from a lot of brands. Well, when people smell our new perfume I Miss Violet, they all have the same reaction. They all tell us that it is not what they expected, and they feel the very elegant violet, but it`s very different from everything they smelled before. And I am not saying that – people are saying that. Yes, it`s complex – but also somehow different. Yes, we worked with a master perfumer (Bertrand Duchaufour), and the work took a lot of back and forth, since every perfumer is a creator and does believe in his creations. So the perfume is very complex, as many other Bertrand perfumes, but also our art-direction has been added.

Sergey Borisov: You celebrate 15 years with just 15 perfumes. Is that a happy coincidence? Will we return to the times when most brands will launch one perfume in five years?

Luc Gabriel: I hope so. In 2000 we started with three fragrances, and the fourth was launched in 2004. And everyone was happy with that. Yes, the market has changed. But it`s not only a problem of the market, as the clients have changed too. They want something new, “give me more!” And we should follow the demand. When I was young, I had just two fragrances, Chanel Pour Monsieur and Eau Sauvage Dior. And now I have 6-7 bottles, with my preferred Oud Shamash as a staple (even if I don’t wear it, I need to smell it every day, it`s difficult not to wear it). We feel pressure from everywhere – the stores, the clients, the journalists and PR – and you need to resist that. You should be happy with the new perfume, if you`re not happy, just do not launch it. We launched nothing in our Classique Collection between 2011-2014, but yes, we made a few other perfumes for other collections. Different types of fragrances talk to different types of people. You cannot ask everybody to wear complex fragrances only all the time. So you create something that is a little simple for the niche concept – for the relaxation of connoisseurs or for the niche newcomers. With an elegance, with a signature, with a quality of materials – but an easy-going and little less-complex fragrance. And again we found the right perfumer for such a collection, open-minded, fresh, technically perfect, and so we made L’Esprit Cologne Collectionwith Emilie Coppermann in 2012-13. We felt like Bertrand, with his ability to create evolutions and multilayered structures, would be too excessive for that work… There are seven colognes in that collection now and I think it`s enough for now, so 2015-2016 will be empty years for our colognes. We are thinking about a new collection – maybe yes, maybe not. I have to resist that question from journalists and stores: “What’s new?”

Sergey Borisov: I do the same thing: "What is the news?" (laughing) But there are other great answers, like “I just built a new house” or “I have a baby girl, she’s so lovely!”

Luc Gabriel: Well, now we have a marketing plan! We thought that it would be nice to talk about our classic fragrances that were launched years ago. Let`s re-focus! Which of our fragrances do you like?

Sergey Borisov: I own and wear Sel de Vetiver and Bois d’Iris.

Luc Gabriel: Right. So all these 15 years are not only about new fragrances, but also about who we are. I could say that we never had a single perfume made specifically for any special country. And I`m not looking for bestsellers because I don`t know which new perfume would become a bestseller. And I never asked anyone to make a perfume “like this one, for the Middle East” or “more like that one, for my market in Asia and Japan”.

Sergey Borisov: Well, you could predict bestsellers like this: “After the Oud Craze there will be place for green fragrances like violets! I believe that green violets will be bestsellers this year!”

Luc Gabriel: We are The Different Company, and I always look for something new that fits the bill in terms of "never been made", or "another way to do something". Whether it`s an olfactive family or a new emotion. We started with Bertrand in order to create Oud – but the problem with him is that we work very slow together. So when we were ready to launch it – the wave had already started and we launched it right in the middle of the oud wave. But what we discussed with Bertrand in order to make it was that we wanted to make a perfume hovering between East and West, and Oud just happened to be a good inbetweener. It could have been something else.

When we discussed I Miss Violet, we discussed leather. I like the sensation of it, the feeling and smell of it. There are 7-8 types of it, and we wanted a vegetale leather with iris and violet notes in it. It`s not a best-selling note so we decided to make it. And we gave it our best to make sure Bertrand could express himself, and for me – to keepThe Different Company DNA.

There were some options where we could go with I Miss Violet – it could have a very sweaty, heavy leather of horses, or it could be the lightest and most delicate suede leather. So we started from that base and worked on three notes at the same time: green, watery and sensual. You could feel the leather right in the fresh top notes and in the heart notes of iris and Osmanthus, and also in the dry base notes of amber and mahagoni wood. And the link between the top and the heart is the special champagne accord, sparkling and driving you from one note to another, as the fragrance goes from the wet green top into deeper notes, becoming more dry and more green. And at the point where you think that the leather/violet is gone, after a while, a minute or two, it comes again in a different combination. You know, there`s an attraction to The Russian Mountains? This perfume develops just like that, back and forth, and that’s what Bertrand can do brilliantly and I like it in his perfumes. It`s alive, it`s breathing and vibrating by itself. That is the goal for every fragrance of The Excessive Collection, which is created by Bertrand Duchaufour for The Different Company.