Finding Friends
I live in Sydney, Australia. We all know Sunny Sydney! A bustling seaside metropolis with fluctuating weather conditions and world-renowned perfume destination, right? Right?? RIGHT???
No, it is only the former, not the latter, sadly. Not yet, anyway.
We do have good perfumers. From perfumer-owned brands to multi-hyphenates in the industry, they reside here and conduct their business here and thankfully don’t always leave for more plentiful shores overseas.
And yet, we don’t all know each other. Some of us do, and get along great! Some of us don’t even know the others exist. We are disparate and disconnected to a surprising extent, considering that our perfumer-to-population ratio is so small. Our community is not as strong a community as found elsewhere… I won’t go into the “why” or my purported reasoning, for now. I’ll just say that if we look at other comparable cities (let’s say Taipei, or perhaps Manila, or Milan, for example) we can see that there is a massive discrepancy between the state of the “community” part of the perfume community for those places and for us.
I desperately want to change this. I want us to be able to have conversations, and hang out, and exchange information, and support each other, and inspire one another. This is the only way, and I repeat, the only way we can ever put Sydney on the map as a Perfume Destination. Think of it like this: let’s say a pretty florist opens up in a town that has never had a florist before. Another florist opens up: let’s split the hypothetical here into some alternate timelines.
Timeline 1:
The new florist opens up in a nearby town. The people of one town go to their florist and the people of the other town go to their florist. Both towns have a florist and they all carry on with their daily lives.
Timeline 2:
The new florist opens up in the same town as the original florist
The original florist, annoyed by the prospect of competition, does not welcome the new florist and makes snide remarks to their regulars, who feel that they can’t go to the other florist but desperately want to see their flowers.
The regulars who want to try the new florist feel that they can’t return to the original florist as they have betrayed them.
The customer market is split relatively evenly between the florist and most people choose to go to one or the other.
Timeline 3:
The new florist opens on the same street as the original florist.
They strike up a friendly rapport and swap tips and help each other out sometimes
There is some small degree of inevitable rivalry and jealousy internally, but it is neither acted upon nor indulged in and business continues for both.
They combine forces to put on a Flower Festival for the town. Punters from nearby towns come to the flower festival.
Another florist opens on the street. It is now an attractive flower-filled street that attracts visitors from nearby towns as well as the locals.
Some cafes open up to serve the punters and it becomes a cute area with flowers and cafes
Another florist opens, as well as a plant nursery and a perfume store ;) .
The town’s florist street has now become insta-famous and is attracting tourists as well as local visitors.
The original florist expands to open an additional florist in a new town, as does the second florist, but to a different place, perhaps the Big Smoke.
The flower festival, now a biannual event, has caused a tourist flux and is incredibly popular.
The town is now a Flower Destination and people say “you should at the very least do a day trip from the Big Smoke when you travel to that region”.
See??
It is only with embracing our rivals and encouraging solidarity can we actually grow as an industry. Yes, of course we will feel envious of our peers’ successes, of course we will have moments of doubt and self pity and injustice. That is part of being a human and not something that we should project onto other people. All businesses have ups and downs ad there is no need to leave a gap unfilled just because you yourself can’t fill it.
So, it is with this mindset that I do my best to get to know my brethren in the industry and, if necessary and possible, connect them to each other.
I thus reached out to the talent behind Archer Farrar Perfumes, Katrina Cochrane. She is a bespoke perfumer like myself, but entirely natural in her materials. She services the affluent North Shore of Sydney and, as we discovered, has the exact same taste in packaging as I do (I assured her that at some point I’ll go beyond the black rectangular bottles and the handwritten labelling, just not any time soon. We agreed that we would just live as twins for now).
Katrina arrived at perfumery via the other Bacchian arts; alcohol and aromatherapy. A wine expert and gin/whiskey enthusiast, she has a nose that can sift through natural molecules like a bloodhound. She carefully selects her ingredients against a very integrous list of sustainablity criteria as well as some tight principles on quality and provenance. She offers both spray bottles and roll-ons (yes we even use the same roll-on bottle. We are ladies of class and taste!) and people can book a visit to her lovely home atelier. Like me, she has done multiple courses along the way but has otherwise Jean Carles-ed her way through hundreds of ingredients to work out combinations that can work in real time and without the extensive tweaking that a ready-made/retail-ready perfume allows.
When I reached out to her, I truly hoped I could find an ally. We custom perfumers are a little bit like misfits in the scheme of things; we are not rivals for shelf space, so we are no threat to any brand’s business, but in being so behind-the-scenes, we also do not have the public face or means to advertise by shipping out samples, etc. Hence, we don’t really “belong”, and are often overlooked as members of the perfume industry.
Katrina responded with delighted enthusiasm. I knew I would like her immediately. We met up mere days later and arrived both with gifts for each other - little things we are working on at the moment, or that we offer clients from time to time - an act of goodwill that neither of us expected from the other. It was so nice to chat to someone whose experience of life as a businesswoman so closely mirrors mine. She too has been buried in her workshop, operating almost entirely outside of the Sydney Perfumer Scene, and I look forward to bringing her into the fold as much as I have the means to do so.
I am hoping, individual by individual, we Sydney perfumers can align with the same goals and bring ourselves together for our mutual benefit. Katrina has reminded me that at the end of the day, most people are just really nice.
Perouse her delightful website and please understand: one-off perfumes themselves are a work of art. It takes many hundreds of hours to be able to make a good perfume either on-the-spot or in a very short timeframe. We cannot produce in bulk and we are not mass-scale-oriented. We compromise on profit margins to bring exclusivity and rare ingredients to a perfume.
All we ask is that you treat us as artists, not vendors.
PS. YES I know I did not reach my Monday deadline. This is because I met with Katrina on TUESDAY. YES I feel a bit silly. Next deadline: Sunday December 1, 2024.
