I’m presently sitting in the Fonte coffee shop in downtown Seattle, a self-described “micro-roaster” that was founded locally and made a name for itself through its use of high-quality beans (“the top one percent of coffee beans from around the world”) and small-batch roasting overseen by a master roaster (Steve Smith) with over twenty years experience and a passion for coffee roasting that led him to quit his job at globally sprawling Starbucks and focus on a more personal style of roasting that’s as much art as it is commerce.
It’s the perfect atmosphere for considering and writing about perfumer Mandy Aftel and the trail she’s figuratively hacked for herself through the jungle of all-natural perfumery — which brings me to a pertinent, and many times overlooked, aspect to the world of the artisans: the independent producer is often self-taught.
“When I myself became interested in the field of artisanal natural perfumery, I discovered it wasn’t taught or even understood in sanctioned perfume schools, so self-taught was all there was,” she said, in response to my question about how she might respond to people who believe that a self-taught perfumer isn’t a real perfumer — that an individual has to be educated through, and approved by, the ISIPCA to be considered a legitimate member of the industry. “In order to make a refined, luxury perfume from only pure and natural ingredients, I had to develop my own design framework over a period of years, learning the intimate details of the materials themselves by immersing myself in their quirky, nuanced complexities.”
Aftel devoted herself so thoroughly to the understanding of these raw, natural materials that she eventually founded the Natural Perfumers Guild, wrote the book “Essence & Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume” and set up shop as a luxury natural perfumer, creating high-end fragrances and scented body products from the best materials she can find — and by “best materials”, we’re talking rare and exclusive and not your mother’s eau de toilette.
Goodies from the Aftel basket
“I like to be able to use ingredients that cost $14,000 per kilo (instead of $14 per kilo). I like to search to the ends of the Earth for the very best naturals rather than source my materials from a test tube in a lab,” she said. “I have ties to and enjoy the conventional perfume industry, but some of the most precious materials are outside its price range — and friends of mine, who are brilliant perfumers in the commercial fragrance houses, can feel creatively stifled by the budget restraints of their mainstream clients.”
Which is why you smell a world of difference when you place an Aftelier perfume next to a bottle taken from a chain store shelf — Mandy’s fragrance formulae are a veritable What’s What of nature’s exotica, the likes of which you’ll rarely find at Macy’s. I asked Avery Gilbert, author of “What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life” (great book, I highly recommend it) and a personal friend of Mandy’s, what he believes sets Aftel’s work apart from the rest.
“My impression is that Mandy is quite picky about the quality of her raw materials and very enthusiastic about searching for beautiful and useful materials, cost be damned,” he said. “But what makes Mandy so good is her personal style — she’s outgoing and empathic and able to draw out a person’s responses to different materials and accords . . . Mandy’s success with commercial clients means she has applied these skills to the cold reality of the marketplace. That’s not easy.”
I also asked him what he thought of the self-taught vs. professionally educated issue when it comes to artisanal perfumery: “I don’t automatically dismiss someone because he’s self-taught. There’s no doubt a DIY amateurishness about some self-taught perfumers, but then there are lots of good DIY watercolorists and guitar players. There’s nothing wrong with someone being a successful flea-market perfumer, or online perfumer, or small business perfumer. The proof of the pudding is in the profit.”
Speaking of profit, I asked Aftel how her business has been doing since 2008, when the recession first kicked into high gear. The conventional wisdom was that independent producers like herself would be the first to get mowed down (the restaurant industry was the canary in the coal mine in this respect), with the big, established brands then reeling in all those bereft, indie-fed customers who now had nowhere else to go — but that hasn’t happened.
Etsy.com, the online site where DIY producers can sell their wares (with many of them true artists at their craft), pulled in over $12 million dollars in March of 2009, compared to just $1.6 million in March of 2008. Which is a huge leap by any standard. Yet in March of 2010, Etsy reported that $22.4 million dollars worth of goods were sold, representing an explosive 84% increase over March of 2009, and fairly proof positive (there’s Avery’s pudding, again) that the commercial appeal of handmade goods from indie producers has officially moved beyond “trend” and into “here to stay” territory.
Aftel happily mingles with customers before a presentation in Seattle
Which is good news for the likes of Aftel, who said that her own business has seen surprising growth, as well, with sales trending about 80% better today than when the recession began, though she did note that her more expensive items didn’t see as much of a sales increase, and that her regular customers have become more careful about what they purchase. “I keep in close contact with my customers, and I do see them being more careful with their purchases,” she said. “They’re being more thoughtful, and saving up for special purchases. But I have a range of price points and I basically add things that I would like to buy myself.”
When I asked her if the field of independent perfumery (not just all-natural, but independents as a whole) might be similar to the American folk art movement, sometimes referred to as “naive” or “primitive” art, that flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, practiced by self-taught painters whose style was greatly influenced by the communities in which they lived, Mandy replied, “Without a doubt. I see the current rise of this self-taught “primitivism” that you refer to in perfumery as paralleling what’s been going on in cooking for many years. The autodidactic, independent artist has thrived in every form — music, cooking, writing novels, painting.”
But when I asked if she thought that self-taught, independent perfumers were working out their own paths due to a sense of physical distance and financial isolation from the perfume centers in Grasse, France, Mandy disagreed and stated that she felt the isolation was philosophical rather than geographical or financial.
“I think many of the greatest perfumers in the past were self taught,” said Aftel, “so it seems that a dismissive reaction towards modern self-taught perfumers could stem from the development of a huge perfume industry dedicated to creating synthetic perfumes at the lowest possible price.”
Which isn’t about luxury, or beauty, or art; instead, it’s about accounting, budgets, shareholders and quarterly reports. Which is all well and good — if you’re in the business of selling insulation, or maybe paperclips.
Note: Though perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to diss the humble paperclip.
“The institutions are missing the point,” said Aftel. “Value is built on the precious, the rare, the gorgeous, the fascinating. Look at jewelry; obviously, there’s a key element of technical skill involved, but without the precious gems and fine metals, the pieces have very little actual worth.”
Aftel cited Dana Thomas’ book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, to support her assertion that the big houses and brands have lost their way when it comes to providing the consumer with the true essence of a luxury experience. “Luxury creation is built on luxury materials, but Dana Thomas wrote in her book that in order to make luxury accessible, the CEOs of these conglomerates have stripped away what made it special — unfortunately, I have to agree.”
***Read more of the Mandy Aftel interview at the following links: The Artisan Series: Mandy Aftel (Part 2) and The Artisan Series: Mandy Aftel (Part 3)
