Starting My Own Business: Brooklyn Perfume Company
Yes, I knew it would be expensive and that I would panic about money. There would be mistakes, some onerous (pricy or smelly), and there would even be unpleasant people to deal with. What I didn’t expect: the enormous number of small and large tasks to take something from a critical success amongst a few colleagues and pleased customers, to a viable business. There’s all the legal stuff, of course, but then there’s bookkeeping, there is every sort of label in its own little envelope, labels for big samples and small samples. Deciding what to print on the inkjet and what to send out… Should we stain the boxes for the samples?
While any of this can be upsetting, none of it induces the same degree of angst as does a concern about the actual product. I’ve put things of mine on in the afternoon when within an hour panic would set in and I’d be convinced something was terribly wrong: “it’s shot, there’s no tenacity, I can’t smell it!” Some of this angst is heightened by not having spent the last 10 years working with masters in Grasse. I don’t know much about perfumes later than those my mother wore in the 1950s, some which she had had since her wedding in the thirties. I remember how good people smelled then.
My vision is inspired by the smell of my mother coming back from a party stinking of natural musk. Much is made about the Proustian madeleine, but few mention the young Marcel as he lies in bed awaiting his mother to finish dinner and come up to give him his goodnight kiss. Musk evokes the feeling of relief that my mother had returned.
As I search for accords, an occasional whiff brings back those ancient perfumes (Joy, Vol de Nuit, Shalimar, Chanel 5, Chanel 19 were a few). Natural musk will hold you by the hand and walk you into a sacred garden, but forget it—it comes from killing a small and endangered Himalayan deer. A drop of civet pulls together disparate notes—especially florals—into a sophisticated bouquet, but we’re out of luck on this one too because it comes from a civet cat. This is taboo both legally and ethically because the civet cats are not treated humanely.
Other smells, less taboo, strike me with their beauty: ouds of course, natural florals, the strange animal whiff of ambergris that lends a compelling depth.
As I spend more time designing labels, worrying about hiring, keeping my head in the sand about money, the joy of olfactory exploration can easily get shunted to a small corner of a busy schedule. When I work, I need privacy and freedom from distraction (no phone) and an open-ended amount of time.
Lately I’ve been working on recreating the smell of flowers with basic perfume chemicals. I’m cheating, necessarily, by having memorized most of the ingredients that go into each flower. The game is to figure out how much to use of each compound. I’ve come up with some really revolting stuff. (One friend, straining to be diplomatic, described my jasmin as good for toilet bowl cleaner.) I do think I could elevate some of my experiments by integrating naturals.
Of course, it’s taken much longer than we had hoped to get BPC out there. We are “out there” now, in that our perfumes are available on our website, but we’ve yet to do much in the way of promotion. That is to come.