The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
“My first memory of beauty is choosing my mum’s fragrances when I was six,” perfumer Dimitri Weber tells me. “They had to be very feminine. My mum absolutely loved Nina by Nina Ricci, L’Air du Temps, Anais Anais by Cacharel, Dioressence… that’s my first memory of fragrance. My mum was very, we say in French ‘coquette.’ She would always have the perfect lipstick, the perfect makeup, and would always smell beautiful- still today, she smells amazing.”
Dimitri, whose mother is Belgian and father is French, spent much of his upbringing living on a boat. “Very often that boat was in Paris,” Dimitri says. That’s where I received my first small, little vial, from a brand called Jacomo, and I still have that vial.
“The other memory that I have is of the smell of the canals. The smell of the rivers in France and the lochs. The walls of those lochs had a strong algae smell, it was very natural. I can always, still, recall that smell every single day.”
Despite a vested interest in scent and, more specifically, perfume, Dimitri fell into the world of fragrance. “I was very fortunate to meet an amazing woman who used to do the PR for YSL,” he explains of his first role within the fragrance industry. “She knew that I was absolutely passionate about fragrances and was very driven, and she offered me the opportunity to work for the company at a very early age. I didn’t know anything about fragrances- only that I loved them. It was very interesting to discover the world of fragrance- the marketing, and the business behind the fragrances. It was very different back then to how it is today. Everything was very ‘pretty.’ Everything was amazing in the 90s. The fragrance industry was booming and you only had a few big brands- Thierry Mugler, Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Dior and a few others like Issey Miyake. It was the golden age of the industry. Anything was possible. I learned so much. I will forever be grateful for that opportunity.”
It was during the 1990s that Dimitri worked behind the scenes at the house of YSL- a time that saw Yves Saint Laurent still working in-house on scent development. “Yves Saint Laurent was still alive and working,” Dimitri recalls. “He was still actively involved in the creation of the fragrances. Before I left, one of his last creations was Baby Doll. He was very involved in that project. Afterwards, the brand was sold to Gucci. That was the end- things started changing.”
As the industry began to shift, Dimitri sought a role with the man who he credits as “changing the whole industry”- Tom Ford. “For a few years, I was the press spokesperson for the brand. He is just the master. He’s extremely smart. When he launched his collection of fragrances, the range was very small. It was considered extremely niche, but very well curated. After that, a lot of the other brands started doing their own collections, and it changed the whole industry. I so admire that man. He’s a brain, he’s bright, he’s amazing.”
The reason for Tom Ford’s success, Dimitri believes, is his passion. “When you’re passionate, that passion is contagious. If there is no passion in a brand, you fall out of the boat. You can feel when a brand is genuine, and you can feel when a fragrance designer is genuine and passionate.”
After years working for the aforementioned as well as Narciso Rodriguez, Issey Miyake and Jean Paul Gaultier, 2015 saw Dimitri permanently relocate to Australia- for love. “I met my partner here when I was on a business trip,” he tells me. “I went back to Europe, to Belgium, and I was nearing 40 and I thought ‘Maybe it’s time to just change your life- sell your property, sell your company, why not?’ I just did it! I had a job for the first year, then I quickly became self employed again as I have been for 15 years. I wanted to be free again and to have my own company. I wanted to create a fragrance brand, because the country was inspirational enough for me to start working on a project on my own.”
Given his affinity for fragrance, Dimitri had made a habit of collecting locally produced perfumes whenever he travelled. What struck him about Australia was the lack of local fragrances derived from raw, Australian botanicals.
“I was shopping around, as you do when you travel. The first thing you do is walk into a department store and you look for something local. I like buying local brands. I was here, and I was looking for a beautiful, prestige fragrance brand. I thought ‘What’s going on here? There’s nothing.’ And there really was nothing. It’s funny, because the country offers so much in terms of botanicals and raw materials. Australia is probably the biggest exporter of Sandalwood in the world. Western Australia supplies most of the Sandalwood in the fragrance industry. It’s present in a lot of the brands and fragrances that we’ve known and worn for years.
“It wasn’t that Australians were reluctant [to embrace local fragrances], it’s more that there wasn’t an offering. What was missing here was French expertise- how to create a beautiful, luxury fragrance brand by using botanicals and raw materials.”
In response to that lack of options and with the aim of delivering that French expertise to the Australian market, the year 2016 marked the launch of Dimitri’s own fragrance house- Goldfield & Banks, the name of which pays homage to Australia’s first botanist.
“I was thinking of Joseph Banks coming to Australia for the first time in the 18th century on Captain Cook’s ship,” he tells me. “Can you imagine being in the 18th century and coming to a country like Australia, which is very rugged and untouched? He was a noble man. I was imagining him being all dressed up with his coat and beautiful shirts, and arriving in this country and into this scenery. It must have been amazing for him to discover the beauty of the nature. There’s nothing here that compares to anything we’ve seen in Europe or the United States. Of course, every continent has its own trees and birds but today, in the outback, there are no pigeons- we have gorgeous, coloured birds. Everything is at its most extreme here.
“I can imagine Joseph Banks being very overwhelmed. He took more than 30,000 species of plants, roots and shrubs back from his trip and introduced them to European society. Plants like wattle- nobody had ever seen wattle. Nobody had seen eucalyptus or bottle brush. It would be the same thing as today, someone coming from Mars and showing you a flower that grows on Mars. It would be completely foreign. I think that’s what inspired me about Joseph Banks. The brand is a tribute to Joseph Banks. Sometimes, I think that my brand started in 1770. When you smell the fragrances, you smell that history.”
Inspired by nature, Dimitri began to curate scents and build a library of raw, Australian, botanical ingredients. “It always starts with an inspiration,” he tells me of the process of scent development. “It can be a fabric, it can be a picture, it can be a landscape, it can be a raw material. For me, it’s a raw material. That’s when you actually start imagining a fragrance. You imagine the name, the story behind it, because there’s a lot more involved with the creation of fragrance than just the fragrance. Then, you start to assemble all of these elements- pictures of how you envision it, how you imagine the fragrance to be- then you start assembling little pieces like a puzzle. You bring those elements together and they’ll give you a beautiful brief to start creating your fragrance. That’s the first step.
“I take a bit of time to create a fragrance. Some people say ‘You don’t have enough fragrances,’ because I only have seven, but that’s because I take my time. It takes a year, sometimes even more, from the starting point through to the actual development and production of the fragrance.”
The fragrance that reached fruition first was Desert Rosewood, which Dimitri describes as the most difficult fragrance he has created. “I discovered a raw material, a very interesting oil- very earthy, powdery, dark in a way. It smells a bit like a cigar. It’s a very complex raw material. It was, and still is today, very difficult to combine with anything. That is probably the reason why some of the [raw] ingredients haven’t been explored in modern perfumerie, because they are just too hard. A lot of perfumers can’t be bothered with that. They want the easy stuff.
“I really wanted the fragrance to be very complex and oriental. This fragrance, for me, smells of the desert. It’s stark, but at the same time it’s very solar and it has a brightness to it with mandarin, and we have amber and vanilla in the fragrance. The summit, because every fragrance has a sunrise and a sunset, is very woody. Every batch is a little bit different. It’s like a wine.”
It’s that focus on complex ingredients that ensures Dimitri’s scents, while inspired by Australia, never verge on cliché. “There are so much more than the cliché ingredients,” he explains. “I’m not using any eucalyptus, for example. I’m much more interested in the more difficult notes and the more difficult ingredients. Blue Cypress oil, for instance- blue cypress oil is very misty and it smells a bit like incense, and it’s a raw material that nobody else uses in fragrances. But I like a challenge! I like to explore ingredients.
“When we went to Tasmania, we had the chance to work with a fabulous company called Tasmanian Essential Oils. They provide the industry with the most divine quality of brown boronia. It’s $10,000USD a kilo. It’s another ingredient that nobody knows about, because it’s in small batches.”
The beauty of small-batch-ingredients is one of the things that sets niche fragrance labels, like Goldfield & Banks, apart from the more “generic” alternatives. “What’s extremely important, especially for younger, niche brands, is the use of a lot of beautiful raw materials that you treat in all their majesty,” Dimitri believes. “You need to take the time to actually craft those fragrances, while generic fragrances have to launch every three or four months. There’s not much time to develop. There’s a lot of flankers, which is not my thing. Today, I think fragrance is a 32 billion dollar business. There are people who work for the money, and people who work for the passion. It’s hard work, it’s day and night, but I’m happy when people are happy when they wear one of my fragrances. That’s what feeds me. That makes me happy- much more so than reporting to shareholders.”
In Dimitri’s experience, consumers are growing increasingly fond of niche fragrances as they want to wear a fragrance that feels uniquely “their’s”, rather than choosing a mass produced scent with minimal point of difference. “A lot of customers don’t want to smell like their neighbours,” he explains. “People want to smell different. You get bombarded with celebrities on ad campaigns, and I think that’s very 90s. We’re getting towards 2020, and I think that’s a little bit passé- a celebrity on an ad campaign for a fragrance is becoming extremely boring. I’d rather see a beautiful person, a man or a woman, who is not a celebrity but a beautiful person with a personality that expresses the fragrance. It was once a wonderful tool, but I think the big fragrance brands may have to reinvent themselves as I’m not sure if that’s going to work in another five or six years. That’s probably the reason why customers, today, are fed up with those big, generic brands. They’re going to the niche brands, because they offer more intimate, confidential fragrances.
“The fragrance industry has changed enormously, especially over the last two or three years. There’s a lot of niche brands popping up, and customers are asking for different fragrances when they travel. The exoticism is important- people want to dream, people want something different.
“What’s amazing is that customers, today, are absolutely open and receptive to wearing Australian fragrances.”
