t, flat, flat, flat, flat – summer – flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. I said, “Look, this is a cosmetic, this is a skin finishing, it makes you look good and feel good all year round,” and I changed that [sales] curve to be all year round.  When I looked at fragrance, it was the same. My head of marketing is ex-Coty, and she said, “We’ve got to go for it on Mother’s Day and at Christmas.” Sure, they are big times, but the whole premise of Floral Street is that it’s for every day, so I wanted to price it so people could afford a really good fragrance.  I’m really pleased that the industry has stepped up. The challenge is that a lot of the distribution channels are still treating fragrance like, “Let’s put it on a shelf and hope for the best.” I’m hoping the experience of fragrance, which is what I put into our store in Covent Garden and try to do via our Scent School, is going to inspire retailers around the world to start looking at the way they inspire the consumer around fragrance, because it’s still done in a very old-fashioned way.  Floral Street’s Covent Garden Store. Image: Supplied IR: I’d like to talk about your in-store experience at Covent Garden and also Scent School in a Box. Can you tell me what they’re like? MF: When I opened the store, which is a massive investment for a start-up, I wanted it to be this joyful, wonderful experience. I’d just been to a wine tasting and I thought, “This is what I want to do.” Modern consumers are connoisseurs of wine, chocolate, coffee, gin, cheese…why not be connoisseurs of fragrance?  Women particularly love gathering around tables and chatting, so we built this huge table and in the drawers are three essential oils from each of the fragrances. Then we can take you through a journey with those fragrances. You smell the fragrance, try to identify the oils and notes and it opens up conversations. If we are hosting a Scent School, we group people and we have fun questions. I did one recently in the store with students from the London College of Fashion and it was unbelievable. They were from all over the world and I was overjoyed to see them light up, have conversations and listen to what they were thinking about what they were smelling – it was amazing.   We launched Scent School in a Box during lockdown. For £24 ($40), you buy a box and it’s got a discovery set, blotters and scratch-and-sniff cards with three ingredients for each fragrance. Then I host an online school for an hour with a floraliste, which is a lot of fun. We were doing them every two weeks during lockdown. It was a way to connect with consumers to help them learn and have a fun experience. It wasn’t a selling mechanism, it was a learning mechanism. It enables people to come into our brand at a really low price point and experiment. I give people an eight-day challenge with the discovery set, where they use each one of those fragrances for the whole day, see how it makes them feel and how other people respond. Some of the best feedback is when people say to me, “I was in the line for groceries and somebody came up to me and said, ‘What are you wearing?’” Because I’m not from the fragrance industry, when I came into it, I had completely fresh eyes. I noticed people were saying things like: “I don’t like this, or I don’t like that” – me included. I would have said, “I don’t like vanilla.” And then our master perfumer Jérôme Epinette made this stunning vanilla-orchid fragrance and I love it. People get stuck in what they do and don’t like, but I wanted to ask them to try new things. That’s what the store does. It surprises, it delights, it brings joy. It’s sunny and happy.  I think the fragrance industry previously just took itself too, too seriously. It’s all very ephemeral, and you’re not supposed to know what’s in it. But I think modern consumers like to know where ingredients come from and they like to learn. So that’s what we’ve unlocked. IR: I know that this personal connection with your consumers and the learning experience is very important to you. How do you see that continuing as you grow the business? MF: That’s a really good point. Look, the world is going to experience two really tough years, let’s not pretend. So I think for a small independent brand to do an own-store roll-out would not be the right idea. Partners like Mecca, which embraced our brand very early on, love the Floral Street experience and the fact that I take so much time to engage all the Mecca staff around the country.  I think that’s what we want to keep doing: inspiring. We’ve taken that concept through into our home products, and they’re all sustainably packaged and sourced. We were very unique four years ago in telling this story. Now, thank goodness, lots of people in fragrance are doing things more sustainably; I’m glad that it’s a tick box.  Now, for me, it’s about the experiential side and helping consumers see things differently. We’ve got a long way to go. We’re successful, but we’re doing a lot with digital, which has pluses and minuses. I really want to work with our retailers around the world to secure this experiential piece of what we’re doing.  IR: Speaking of digital, can you tell me how you go about selling a fragrance online? MF: When I was creating the products, I was thinking,  “How are we going to do this?” From the very beginning, we decided to do the discovery set, which is really inexpensive. You can spend $24 for a wardrobe of our fragrances, which you can try at your leisure, then hopefully, you fall in love with it. Then you can come back in, or you buy the products online.  A lot of brands are doing it now, but four years ago, not that many were. It’s helped us build online tremendously, then we’ve organically grown it in general.  We have created a candle discovery set, too. We’ve got four mini tins, [and] they burn for four hours each. We’re also taking the Scent School to the next level, so if I want to buy you a Christmas present, but I don’t know what you would like because fragrance is so personal, [I can buy] a voucher for the Scent School, so that you can experience it and then choose your own fragrance online.  We are learning how to maximise that discovery part of the brand. A category like home gives customers this beautiful, easy, inexpensive step into our brand. I’m hoping that with most people around the world tightening their belts, those kinds of things are going to become really nice, inexpensive treats to bring joy.  IR:  I think it’s really interesting that you went out of your way to find a more accessible price point. Tell me about how you arrived at that decision.  MF: When I was first creating Floral Street, most of the people I knew in the industry said, “Make it niche, make it expensive. That’s the growth market.” But that’s not what I wanted to do. Call me crazy, because I have to sell four times as much as [luxury brand] Francis Maison Kurkdijian.  When I was given a major role at Mac Cosmetics, when Estée Lauder first acquired the brand, the joy of Mac was that it created “masstige”. It was all about phenomenal quality products at a mass price point. I looked around at fragrance and noticed that nobody was doing it. It’s either “mass”, or what we used to call “class” – things were either really, really expensive or cheap. There was nothing in between.  Normally, I would say don’t go in the middle, because it’s really hard. But when I looked at the modern consumer, I knew price was going to be key, and my whole idea was to deliver a fine fragrance at an affordable price and make it accessible.  That makes things really hard. I’ve been in business for just over four years, and we need quite a lot of volume if we’re going to be profitable, but I still think it’s the right thing to do because I would rather a consumer buy two or three of my fragrances than one. The difference is not the “juice” necessarily, it’s the marketing, it’s the design of the bottle, it’s selling costs…there’s a lot of packaging.  IR: How do you create a sustainable fragrance brand?  MF: It’s really interesting. I worked with Robertet, the world leader in natural ingredients in fragrances. Like how you’ve got farm-to-table with food, we can now trace a lot of our ingredients via Robertet, which is what we’ve been storytelling since the beginning. We know that Mr He collects the Szechuan pepper from small groups of people who grow it in the Himalayas. I’ve tried to educate myself and the team on where we get our ingredients from. Ingredients are number one.  Second, yes, there is processing, there are chemicals, but Robertet has also built this billion-euro facility which has no impact on the surroundings, so I know the more scientific side of the fragrance is taken care of.  Glass is the most easily recycled material, and because fragrance has got alcohol in it, it needs to be in glass. I designed and developed [packaging] with a paper manufacturer in the UK and their facility is fuelled by solar. They are able to upcycle coffee cups from Starbucks and extrude the plastic out of them, so the pulp gets reused, and that becomes our beautiful pulp box.  We’ve led the way and now other fragrance brands and beauty brands are using that [technology], but we were the first to do that. I feel quite proud of that. We’re FSC-certified and we’re vegan-certified. The next stage for us will be to measure our carbon footprint.  The bit I can’t solve is the pump. It has a tiny bit of plastic in it. I can’t solve that unless somebody out there can redesign that so we don’t need it. That’s a challenge, but we work with another charity to offset that tiny bit of plastic, and we have an association with a group of women in India who collect a lot of waste from the ocean, which gets repurposed and recycled.  We’re just trying our best on every level to do the right thing, but without compromising.