Dimitri Weber on Australia’s first luxury perfume house and the Kylie Minogue effect

0:01Dimitri Weber: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 slash conference for more.

0:38Dimitri Weber: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 programme 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.

1:01Kylie Minogue: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.

1:11Dimitri Weber:And later, we'll head to Paris to hear from a former luxury executive about her pivot into the world of chocolate.

1:19Nicole Kidman:Simplicity is where the true mastery begins. And for me, it's luxury.

1:23Dimitri Weber:This is The Entrepreneurs, with me, Tom Edwards.

1:36Dimitri Weber: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 & Banks, intended as Australia's first luxury perfume house and as a showcase for the country's distinctive palette of scents.

2:17Dimitri Weber:As Goldfield & Banks launches its 10th anniversary fragrance, Rose Magnitude, Dmitri Weber spoke to Monocle's own aromatic Australian, it says here, Andrew Muller at Midori House. Andrew began by asking Dmitri how strange it is that more perfumes not produced in Australia from Australian ingredients.

2:36Kylie Minogue: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 and 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.

3:09Kylie Minogue:We have our own lavender fields. We have the biggest lavender fields on the planet in Australia. Okay, I did not know that. Well, there you go. So it's a really, really rich botanical culture in Australia. And my role in this with Goldfield and Banks is really to share this beauty with the world.

3:26Dimitri Weber: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?

3:37Kylie Minogue: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. Then I worked in the fragrance industry for 30, more than 30 years. and one of the brands that I was working with, which was 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.

3:59Dimitri Weber:And did it strike you instantly, though, that here was somewhere that had been underexploited, underutilized as somewhere that people could make high-end scent?

4:10Kylie Minogue: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 a 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. And so there's lots of stories and lots of things that come from Australia.

4:45Kylie Minogue: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 therapeutical or pharmaceutical. But we've got some incredible ingredients.

4:59Dimitri Weber:So where did you even start, though?

5:01Kylie Minogue:What were the first steps you took? Oh, God. Good question. 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 and 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

5:48Dimitri Weber:privileged life that I had before to settle a question I was going to ask in Australia because

5:53Kylie Minogue:you know it's a risk and and I just took 20 000 euros 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 French expertise is what we apply even today, even for our own brand.

6:31Kylie Minogue: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. And I didn't know anyone in this country. I met my partner back then, and that was basically, and I had one friend and a few friends that I met in my first trip.

7:10Kylie Minogue:But that was it. I didn't know anybody in the industry, and it was a tough time, I can tell you that.

7:14Dimitri Weber: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 pitched this to people, how did they generally respond? Were they enthusiastic, slightly baffled? Where were the spectrum of reactions?

7:38Kylie Minogue: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 we have the Australian dream. So people dream of Australia. And I knew that, you know, I mean, fashion was booming in Australia.

8:18Kylie Minogue:Australian fashion houses were booming, like Zyberman, 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 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, 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.

8:53Kylie Minogue:And that to me...

8:54Dimitri Weber:Why were the local retailers skeptical? Did they have this idea that people just think scent is inherently European. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. That's interesting because I would have thought slash hoped by now that Australians would have got over that idea of instinctive deference.

9:10Kylie Minogue: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, before that, 20 years, and I knew I was going to make it.

9:47Kylie Minogue:You know, I didn't hesitate. Like, I didn't have, I wasn't reluctant. 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. Kylie Minogue has been the same. They had to make a name and fame overseas before being accepted in Australia. And now everybody thinks of them 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.

10:27Kylie Minogue:And now everybody is like super proud of Goldfield and Banks. So that's interesting.

10:32Dimitri Weber: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 sailed with Captain Cook. Exactly. How much thought went into the name, though? How many other ideas did you write down and then scribble out?

11:00Kylie Minogue:No, that was the one and only idea I had. Really? 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. And, 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.

11:32Kylie Minogue: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. And 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.

11:56Dimitri Weber:But, 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, et cetera?

12:06Kylie Minogue: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.

12:39Kylie Minogue: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.

13:15Dimitri Weber:Well, at which point we should talk about your 10th anniversary because you have a scent, I guess, celebrating that. This is Rose Magnitude.

13:24Kylie Minogue: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.

13:58Kylie Minogue: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 know, Australia can be, especially in Victoria, it can snow in the same day, There you have the heat, you have the cold and the wind.

14:12Dimitri Weber: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 fields in which there's always something else you can add or subtract. You can always tinker a little bit more with it.

14:43Kylie Minogue: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, Roberté in Paris, in Grasse, really. He was very understanding because I'm very demanding. And when I have something in my mind, I know 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, a certain feeling of the fragrance.