At an age when many of my friends were deciding to retire, I decided to start my own business. Actually, it wasn’t so much a decision as a gradual slide from copywriting into making perfume, until there was no time left for writing.

I started very very small, blending the 20 materials I’d bought because they were my favourite aromas, in many combinations.  Just with 20 materials there is a mathematical infinite number of blends you can make. After that I added materials, usually five or ten at a time, to get the effects I needed. I went to workshops to learn what other materials smelled like. I made my own fragrances, I wore them, I gave bottles away, and then I began to sell them.

This is not the way you do it if you go to perfume school or start an apprenticeship. There, you learn all the smells and all the skills first, then you’re allowed to have a go at constructing a fragrance. You learn in great detail to do it effectively and beautifully (and how to keep your clients’ costs down).

So mine was not a classical education, it was more like learning to play guitar by yourself in your room, chord by chord.

I learned from books as well as workshops. I learned from people who weren’t always there at the time. So when I’m reminded that this isn’t the way you’re supposed to make perfume, I’m very happy to agree; it’s just the way I make perfume.

Seven years later, here we are at 8 Issigonis House, in the Acton Vale Industrial Estate, Cowley Road. Someone once wrote to us, “The Vale, it sounds like Middle Earth.” It’s not, but then again, it’s not quite Mordor. I’ve been meaning to write a book about it, but instead I thought I’d start here.

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