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The Entrepreneurs
Dimitri Weber on Australia’s first luxury perfume house and the Kylie Minogue effect
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- [00:02]
Tom Edwards
In April, Monocle hosts the Entrepreneurs Live in Shanghai, a one day conference bringing together founders, investors and innovators shaping businesses across China and the wider region. Join us there and visit monocle.com conference for more. Hello and welcome to the Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio. The show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Today's program is a tour of the senses. First, we'll head down under to meet the founder of an Australian fragrance house hoping to put Aussie perfume on the map where he says it rightfully belongs.
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Dimitri Weber
Australia is the biggest export country in the world in sandalwood. So all the sandalwood you find today in all the fragrances in all the department stores in the world, I would say 90% comes from Australia.
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Tom Edwards
And later we'll head to Paris to hear from a former luxury executive about her pivot into the world where chocolate
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Sonra Mielenhausen
simplicity is where the true mastery begins. And for me, it's luxury.
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Tom Edwards
This is the entrepreneurs with me. Tom Edwards, You're listening to the entrepreneurs. With an astonishing 24,000 native species of plants, Australia's flora is one of its most compelling natural assets. Given this extraordinary variety of botanicals, it's perhaps surprising that it's not regarded as a hotbed of high end perfume. This thought occurred a little over a decade ago to one high end perfumier, Dimitri Weber, a Franco Belgian with a wealth of experience in European perfume who went to Australia on a work trip and decided he didn't want to go home. Dimitri founded Goldfield and Banks, intended as Australia's first luxury perfume house and as a showcase for the country's distinctive popular palette of scents. As Goldfield and banks launches its 10th anniversary fragrance, Rose Magnitude, Dimitri Weber spoke to Monocle's own aromatic Australian, it says here Andrew Muller at Midori House. Andrew began by asking Dimitri how strange it is that more perfumes not produced in Australia from Australian ingredients.
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Dimitri Weber
The country is very old and it's got an untapped flora that's been, I mean, explored in skincare, I would say, but never in perfumery. We've got amazing ingredients that have never been used in perfumery before. And you know, nobody knows, but Australia is the biggest export country in the world in sandalwood. So all the sandalwood you find today in all the fragrances in all the department stores in the world, I would say 90% comes from Australia. Even the Indian sandalwood today is completely harvested and distilled in Australia. But not many people know that and we've got so many other things we have our own lavender fields. We have the biggest lavender fields on the planet in Australia.
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Andrew Muller
Okay, I did not know that.
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Dimitri Weber
Well, there you go. So it's a really, really rich botanical culture in Australia. And my role in this with Goldfield and Manx is really to share this beauty with the world.
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Andrew Muller
Alert listeners will by now have picked up from your accent that you probably weren't born and raised in Australia. So how did this begin for you? How did you end up in Australia the first time?
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Dimitri Weber
Well, I was born French, Belgian, French father, Belgian mother. And I lived in Europe for many, many years and I moved 14 years ago and I worked in the fragrance industry for 30, more than 30 years. And one of the brands that I was working with, which a very high end luxury jewelry brand, sent me to Australia to host a PR event and that's how I ended up in Australia.
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Andrew Muller
Did it strike you instantly though, that here was somewhere that had been under exploited, underutilized as somewhere that people could make high end scent?
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Dimitri Weber
Totally. I was always very intrigued by those ingredients coming from Australia. It's so far away. You know, we have an ingredient, a beautiful tiny little flower called boronia flowers that we find in Tasmania. They were used for the very first time in 1964 in Dior fragrance. So Dior was basically the first couture house to use an Australian ingredient. And then followed with the launch of opium in 1974, which was the first brand to openly use an Australian native sandalwood, which wasn't very much explored before that. So there's lots of, lots of stories and lots of things that come from Australia. But it's a very interesting botanical culture. It's very complex, it's very difficult. Not everything is to be used in fragrances because, you know, it smells very terrible, therapeutical or pharmaceutical. But we've got some incredible ingredients.
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Andrew Muller
So where did you even start though? What were the first steps you took?
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Dimitri Weber
Oh, God, Good question. So I, I, oh my God. Well, I've been, like I said, I was working in this industry for so many years, so I had a lot of experience. I was very fortunate to work at some beautiful fragrance houses where I was involved in development and education, in PR and you know, and we had the best trainings and best schools, you know, in those companies. So I had experience in retail, experience in education, in marketing, communication, pr, name it, even in product development at the end because I had my own company as well in product development. So this allowed me to take a chance on creating my own fragrance brand, which I didn't really know. I mean, I didn't really wanted it in the beginning because, you know, why would I give up my beautiful privileged life that I had before to settle
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Andrew Muller
a question I was going to ask in Australia?
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Dimitri Weber
Because, you know, it's a risk. And I just took €20,000 and I just, you know, opened this little, tiny little business. And today we still haven't had funding or anything, never went to the bank for anything. So I'm very proud of having achieved that. Like, with such a small amount of money, you can achieve beautiful things. But, you know, it's passion, I think it's passion that drove me to really create my own brand. The passion for the country, for Australia, to really showcase the world that, you know, what perfumery doesn't necessarily have to be French, it can also be Australian. Obviously, the expertise, the French expertise is what we apply even today, even for our own brand. We manufacture in France because of, you know, you can't have luxury without manufacturing in France, especially fragrances. But showcasing all these beautiful ingredients, that's what I wanted. But you know what, it's knowledge. I started by looking and finding my first perfumer. I was looking for a perfume house in Australia, like a supplier of ingredients, a supplier of essences. And then I bought my glass from France and my caps from France and I started doing my packaging. So I really. It was. And I didn't know anyone in this country. I met my partner back then and that was basically it. And I had one friend and a few friends that I met in my first trip, but that was it. I didn't know anybody in the industry and it was a tough time, I can tell you that.
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Andrew Muller
But how tough was it? Because you're on the other side of the world. You've given up the life and profession and career you had. You've tried to start this business out of nothing. And it's a business that nobody in Australia has really tried to establish before, at least not in this way. When you pitch this to people, how did they generally respond? Were they enthusiastic, slightly baffled? Where were the spectrum of reactions?
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Dimitri Weber
Exactly. You know, I did my market research for about a year before taking the step and crafting and creating this brand. Obviously, I think from a consumer perspective, the consumer was definitely ready for it. Even local Australians were very keen and very happy that finally someone would create a beautiful luxury fragrance house overseas. Obviously, people were extremely keen because anything Australia or anything Australian makes people dream. You know, we used to have the American dream in the 80s and now it's. We have the Australian dream. So people Dream of Australia. And I knew that, you know, I mean, fashion was booming in Australia. Fashion. Australian fashion houses were booming. Like Zimmerman, for example. Skincare with Aesop is an Australian brand. So these brands have boomed. And I knew there was a gap with fragrances, and I've always, always known trends, and I knew that Australian fragrances would be the next trend. But it was interesting because the local retailers in Australia didn't believe in it. That was funny. I mean, all the markets from the UK and Harrods and, and, you know, even Barney's was one of my first retailers, they believed in the brand straight away. But the local retailers in Australia were a little bit skeptical. But the consumer was ready. And that to me.
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Andrew Muller
Why were the local retailers skeptical? Did they have this idea that people just think scent is inherently European?
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Dimitri Weber
100%. 100%.
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Andrew Muller
That's interesting, because I would have thought, hoped by now that Australians would have got over that idea of instinctive deference.
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Dimitri Weber
Well, there are a few things you've got the ignorance, like, people are not. No offense, but a lot of people that work in the industry haven't really traveled much. They have this idea of luxury perfumery being only French and a bit Italian, a bit of London, and that's about it. But it takes education, it takes time. And obviously I think for them it was new. And I remember people looking at me like I was an alien. Like, what's this guy doing? What does he want with his perfumes? What is he going to do? What is he going to achieve with this? But, you know, I mean, I've been in this industry, in luxury retail for before that, 20 years. And I knew I was going to make it. You know, I didn't. I didn't hesitate. Like, I didn't have. I wasn't reluctant. I was. I was ready for it. And I was going to prove them wrong. But you know what? They always told me that anything from Australia has to go overseas first. Nicole Kidman, for example, who. She struggled a lot being accepted in her own country. You know, Kylie Minogue has been the same. You know, they had to make name and fame overseas before being accepted in Australia. And now everybody thinks of them as, you know, as an icon. She's one of ours or he's one of ours. And now it's the same with me. So I had to go overseas, prove myself, you know, that the brand was, you know, legitimate and out there before coming back. And now everybody is, like, super proud of Goldfield and Banks. So that's interesting.
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Andrew Muller
I did want to ask about the name, because it's fairly obviously evocative of Australia at a couple of levels. Goldfields harken back to as much European history as Australia has. This is the gold rushes of the 18th and 19th century. Banks, I'm guessing, is some sort of allusion to Joseph Banks, who was the botanist who.
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Dimitri Weber
Look, you've got it all.
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Andrew Muller
The botanist who sailed with Captain Cook. Exactly how much thought went into the name, though? Like, how many other ideas did you write down and then scribble out?
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Dimitri Weber
No, that was the one and only idea, and I worked on it for about a year. But the gold fields, going back to the gold fields, for me, it was more sandalwood. The tree grows only on fields of gold, so you need the gold in the soil in order for the tree to grow. And that, to me, is very much of the land. You know, Australia is about the land and the earth. And so I wanted to have something very, very earthy in the name of my fragrance house. And then Joseph Banks. You're absolutely right. I mean, I just. I feel like a new version of Joseph Banks. He did it with botanical culture. He came back to Europe with more than 33,000 pieces of plants and pots and shrubs and whatever, and showcasing Europeans, you know, all the beauty of the Pacific region. So now I'm doing the same with my little oils. You know, I travel back to Europe with my new oils and I make, you know, and I share these new essential oils with my retailers and my customers. And it's like an explorer, I feel like.
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Andrew Muller
Yeah, well, I mean, how much actual physical exploring is still involved in the job? Are you traveling around Australia a lot, trying to find new ingredients, etc.
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Dimitri Weber
Absolutely. I did more so in the beginning, in the first, because the brand is nearly 10 years old. So the first five, six years, I would travel a lot in the country. I still do, but I either look for new ingredients, but we have the privilege today that a lot of suppliers come to us, which is amazing. They come to us and they say, look, we've got this incredible flower. This is incredible essential oil of this and such and such wood species. Can you do something with it? You are probably the only perfume house that we know of in Australia that can do something with our oils. And it's interesting. But traveling in Australia is so inspiring. It's such a huge country and, you know, I mean, you are, in a way, Australian. So it's such a vast and very inspiring country. And you know what? It brings exoticism to the perfume world. You know, fashion has always been Very diverse. You have fashion brands from all over the world, but fragrances has always been very French. And I think today the world and especially the new generation is absolutely open to new brands coming from Korea, from Australia, from China, from India. There's beautiful Indian brands, there's Middle Eastern brands. And putting Australia on the map in the perfume world was. It's a huge achievement.
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Andrew Muller
Well, at which point we should talk about your 10th anniversary, because you have a scent, I guess, celebrating that this is Rose Magnitude.
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Dimitri Weber
Well, this is sort of like the prelude. We've got another one coming up at the end of the year to really, you know, celebrate the 10 years of the brand. But Rose Magnitude is. It's an incredible fragrance. I mean, we really, really celebrate the beauty of those incredible salt pink lakes in South Australia. You know, the interpretation of a very muddy, earthy, weathered rose. You know, because when you think of a French rose and you think of an Australian rose, and we have roses, we grow roses in Victoria. We've got an incredible distillery of rose oil in Victoria. You think of rose in a different way when you think of an Australian rose. And that's what I wanted to express in this new fragrance. It's a weathered rose. It's one that has. It's a very resilient rose because you can be, especially in Victoria, it can snow in the same day. You have the heat, you have the cold and the wind.
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Andrew Muller
Well, as people say of the weather in Melbourne, if you don't like it, wait 10 minutes. But beyond the roses, the advance blurb for Rose Magnitude also promises, and I quote, raspberry, Egyptian cumin, buckwheat, papyrus, sandalwood, vanilla and tonka bean, among others, which did prompt the question for me, at least with any scent. But if we focus on Rose Magnitude, how do you know when it's finished? Because this has got to be one of those infuriating features in which there's always something else you can add or subtract. You can always tinker a little bit more with it.
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Dimitri Weber
I know nothing is finished. It's like every artist, you know, I think we're never happy at the end, but you have to stop at some point. I think in particular this fragrance we worked really hard with. My perfumer, his name is Clement Marx. He's from this incredible perfume house, Robert in Paris, in Grasse. Really. He was very understanding because I'm very demanding and when I have something in my mind, no, it has to be perfect. So it was more the balance between raspberry, because initially I'm not A big fan of raspberry and roses, like, it's not my cup of tea. But obviously you need those ingredients to obtain a certain result, certain feeling of the fragrance. It was really back and forth, tweaking all these top notes, the heart notes, to come up to the best possible formula. But it's not an easy thing. But we were very. At the end, we were satisfied, obviously, and I'm very happy with this fragrance. And obviously it's a beautiful success and people love it so far, and that's a great thing. But it's very hard to know when a formula is finished because you can always make it better. Even today, when I think about. I've been traveling in Europe now for two weeks, and even now I'm thinking, oh, maybe I should have done this, maybe I should have changed that, and maybe I should have asked this and that, and that's how it goes. It's a process.
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Andrew Muller
It is an extraordinary story, obviously. And I'm just wondering, as well as you think of the future of the business, whether that story is an important part of the appeal. When. When you sell a cent, are you hoping people are buying more than just the bottle? They're buying into the idea of Goldfield and Banks. They're buying into the idea of Australia as well.
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Dimitri Weber
100%. I mean, first of all, they buy into a fragrance, a perfume, a formula, a quality. Today we have such a privilege to work with those amazing perfume houses who always offer the best of their ingredients to us and ob some Australian ingredients, which is incredible. So fragrance is number one, because, you know, you might not like. I mean, even though. Even if you're attracted by a campaign or by a bottle or storytelling, if the fragrance doesn't suit you, it doesn't suit. You know, as an Australian brand, we work really hard, and that's my passion, is to really work hard on this beautiful story and expressing that in through a beautiful campaign. And of course, you want. The thing is, not many people travel to Australia because it's so far away. The least I can do is to work hard on the assets and work with photographers, with production houses, creating films to really give our audience a sample of what Australia is really like. I think that's very important because, you know, a French perfume house, you can take the train, you take the Eurostar, you go to Paris, and everybody knows the Eiffel Tower, everybody knows the Cote d', Azur, but nobody knows Australia. And. And there is still a mystery around Australia. And I like that. I love the fact that people come to me and say, look, I will probably never go to Australia because it's so far away, but thanks to your fragrances, I can imagine how beautiful this country is. And that to me is the best compliment you can get.
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Tom Edwards
That was Dimitri Weber, the founder and creative director of Goldfield and Banks. And you can find out more by heading to goldfieldandbanks.com. You're listening to the entrepreneurs. Sonra Mielenhausen is the founder of Plaque, a Paris based bean to bar chocolate maker with two boutiques in the French capital, including one in the second, not too far from Monocle's own bureau in the city. After a career at LVMH working with brands like Tag Heuer and Dior, Sonra traded high end horology and fashion for cacao. After a transatlantic discovery of a new back to basics approach to chocolate, Sonra stopped by Monocle's Paris studio to tell our Laura Kramer about creating an immersive chocolate experience and drawing flavor inspiration from the world of French gastronomy. She began by taking Laura back to the start of the journey.
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Sonra Mielenhausen
We started in 2019, Nicola and I, because I have another co founder that is my partner in life and in business too, Nicolas Rosier Chabert. We had a previous life before plaque. It's our second life now. It's really about a love story. Plaque for chocolate between us two, we decided to, in French we say tout plaque pour ferro chose. So left everything to do a new thing. So we changed our life to do chocolate. And so we started to work two years before launching the manufacturer and the first chocolate that is in the second district of Paris. Before, I worked a lot in the LVMH group for Tag, Heure NC and Dior. There I learned, yes, you know, French excellence. And I'm very proud of what I've done at Plaque. But it's only the beginning, you know,
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Laura Kramer
it is just the beginning. And 2019 it started. But why did you decide chocolate at that time? Because you have this luxury background. You said, you know, watches, Dior, why the chocolate?
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Sonra Mielenhausen
We were chocolate lovers. So first the love for the product and then a nutrition we discovered. And it came really from the United States or Canada and from North America and not from French people. That people were starting to do chocolate another way with a lot of purity and back to basics with a very simple way and taking it back to what it should be. So. So white chocolate should be something else as cocoa bean and sugar. We discovered this new taste going to Brooklyn, tasting the Math Brothers Dandelion in San Francisco or Palette du Bean in Canada, and Cantu, another brand. And we say, wow, what is this date? We thought we were chocolate specialists, but no final note. And then we discovered that chocolate could be less luxury and cold luxury and traditional. And we created something for us. And we had a sense that a lot of other people want the same that us. So it was. The place is very important too. For you went to plaque. So it's really an experience and a sensual experience. It was really important to us to see how we make chocolate, to feel it, to taste it and to smell it. And the place was made to be able to come every day to have a single chocolate. Just drink a chocolate, eat a small pastry. So it's not chocolate. Only for pure chocolate lovers. And we are not too elitist. And I eat some chocolate from different origin. We love chocolate and we want to share this with people. And that's why it was so. It was love for chocolate, business intuition, a new taste, a new way to do it. And let's go.
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Laura Kramer
And if there are people planning a trip to Paris soon, I do suggest coming to the plaque store in the 2nd arrondissement. I walked in and I was blown away by the intense smell of the chocolate that just absolutely envelops you. It's great to see the open line, the hospitality of your lovely staff. They helped us try different chocolates. One of the ones that I tried was so phenomenal. It was quite surprising. Praline with black olives and what's the third ingredient?
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Sonra Mielenhausen
Nuts? Hazelnuts. Azelnuts from Italy? Yes.
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Laura Kramer
Oh, my goodness. How did you come up with that concoction? You wouldn't think black olives and chocolate. It was sublime.
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Sonra Mielenhausen
Thank you. It's one of my favorite too, because it's very salty. And I love the mix between. A lot of people ask us since the beginning, I plaque to do dark chocolate with salt because it's bestseller, for example, even at Lindt. But we don't want to perhaps one time. But yes, with this praline, we feel we manage something. My inspiration and I I really found it in restaurants, not in a French pastry, but it's really. I have a passion for restaurant and chef. We have a lot of chance because we are in Paris and there are a lot of good restaurants of new chef, a new cuisine. And since. Yes, perhaps now 15 years, there is really a booming with the back to basic chef really working on raw products. And so I went to a restaurant and I tasted a chocolate souffle with a praline hazelnuts and Dice black olive praline made by a French chef, but a woman that is coming from Marseille, so the South. So that's why she worked this combination. And yes, it was so crazy that I said, we have to do something like this in our chocolate. So. And another inspiration was, for example, the mix of dark sesame and buckwheat. It was the same. It was a dessert in a restaurant, mixing both. We worked the dark sesame apart, and we worked already the Sarazin buckwheat apart, but we hadn't the idea to mix it. And we make a chocolate bar that is mixing it. And it's great too.
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Laura Kramer
The store that I visited was your flagship, but you have a second one as well. And you also have a lab, is that correct?
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Sonra Mielenhausen
Yes, we have so two shops. So one Rive Droit Redunil and one Rive Gauche since one year now, just near from Lambeau Marche and La Grande Pastri, Rue du Charch Midi. So in the six in the two shops, we go from the bean to the chocolate. So we transform it and we make all the steps. You describe a farmer in these two shops that are manufactured shops. And then we have Eshop. Very important because it's a shop. You have to enter your E shop every day, make the merchandising, have the experience, and it's allow people to access to plaque in France and in Europe and even in the world. And then, yes, we have a lab where we need to. Yes, after the chocolate, we need to mold it in plaque or to make the praline. And we have to wrap it and we have to stock all our raw materials. So. So it's just near Rue du nil. It's 8 Rue du Faubourg Poissonniere, just near the Grandrecs. And we have a small office there too. So. Yes, exactly. And we have another lab. Sorry, it's downstairs Rue du Nil, where we make the pastry.
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Laura Kramer
I see. Okay. And tell me about your team right now. How big is the team overall?
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Sonra Mielenhausen
So we are 28 now, but most people are production people. Yeah. So really, what costs the most in plaque? You have the bin. It's. We buy the most expensive bean in the world. But what cost is. Yes. All the human work that you have at Plaque, from cultivating the bean in the country and then selling it. And when you meet our staff, it's part of. Yes, what cost a lot at Plaque, because we want people to have an experience to share this. So we are 28, but we are very few working in the office. But yes, you have sellers and production people. We wrap everything by hand. So we have a lot of people working every day on chocolate. And yes, on each step, we have to make it excellent and quality. So it's very important to have a lot of people that are taking care of the chocolate.
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Laura Kramer
Of course. And tell me about the beautiful design, because I really like how minimalist it is. Very classic. How did you come up with this? Obviously, branding, coming from a luxury background is so important.
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Sonra Mielenhausen
Yes, yes. What? I didn't make that alone, but. But it's my part. Yes. Doing the branding of the brief, the creation brief. And it's really a duo with my agency. I work with the same graphic since the beginning. I make the artistic direction because I love that. But it's really a duo. I always say you have to be clear on what you want and what it was very. For us, we wanted purity because we wanted to express that in chocolate. It's a pure chocolate. So it was very important for us to do this. And something. Yes. Very short in the name because we know that it's more strong when it's short. The boutique, you will see we wanted it very clear. So we have wood, but it's a herable. So white, a little bit rose, something from pink wood. But we wanted that the chocolate was only the strong color. And so yes, we. Everything is really thick. To express something and to tell a story and to tell what we are. And I loved one sentence that is about Antoine de Saint Exupery and it's all the plaque philosophy. Perfection isn't about adding more, it's about removing what isn't essential. So it's really sad and it's simplicity is where the true mastery begins. And really it's the philosophy of Plaque. And for me it's luxury. But I know that for a lot of other people, luxury is about something else. You have different philosophy of luxury, but for us it's really quality and make it simple, it's not so easy.
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Tom Edwards
That was Sonra Millenhausen, the co founder and CEO of plaque. And you can find out more by heading to plaqueshocolar.com. And that is all for this fragrant episode of the Entrepreneurs. We'll be back at the same time next week. The program's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Jewis. You can listen again and find out more about the show@monocle.com that's where you can subscribe to Monocle magazine and ensure you're reading more about better businesses every month. You can also follow us and catch up with the archive wherever you get your audio. If you'd like to get in touch directly, do email Laura on lrkonical.com I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye, and thanks for listening to the entrepreneurs.