Sud’s law: how the soap with the champagne price-tag won the pandemic
I first noticed Aesop’s little amber bottles popping up in smart restaurants and hotel rooms a few years ago: they were glass ambassadors from a faraway country of refined, futuristic beauty products. Then I spotted them on The Modern House website (and occasionally on Howdens furniture catalogue), positioned next to brick-tile showers and Belfast sinks. By spring 2020, the bottles were everywhere, the little vials of its Post-Poo Drops (designed to mask bad odours) in the loo shorthand for a certain kind of domestic sophistication.
The Aesop bathroom was in a house with Veja trainers in the hallway, Torres crisps in the cupboard and an Alison Roman pasta dish warming in an Our Place pan on the stove. Like Diptyque candles, Aesop products were a cultural signifier far beyond their practical applications. I have a friend who admitted to placing a bottle in the bathroom when they were trying to sell their flat.
Then came coronavirus. Whatever else might be said of the pandemic, it was boom time for handwashing, with Covid creating excellent trading conditions for Aesop, and specifically its handwashes. The NHS spent millions on videos about the correct handwashing technique, with Boris Johnson advising we do it for the length of time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice.
Aesop was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the new lather lust. With the world focused on hygiene, the brand became ubiquitous. Hand washing became a life-or-death issue, the first part of the “hands, face, space” liturgy, so paying £29 for a 500ml bottle of soap – more per millilitre than Moët & Chandon – began to seem, if not reasonable exactly, something of a treat, particularly as many of life’s pleasures had been removed. Inevitably, the brand launched a slightly pricier hand sanitiser – described by GQ as a “flex for an anxious time” – but it was sales of its established handwash that rocketed. Aesop declined to provide figures, but John Lewis listed it as one of its bestsellers of the pandemic.
“I love Aesop,” says fashion and beauty writer Lisa Niven-Phillips. “You see it in certain places or homes and you think, that’s something you want to be part of.”
Every brand dreams of combining small-scale allure with mass-market profits, and Aesop, which has been quietly on the march since it was founded in Melbourne in 1987, is a case in point.
But how exactly does a cult product go mainstream? Even if you couldn’t identify the Resurrection Aromatique handwash, you may recognise its scent (mandarin, rosemary and cedar), which come with a potent sense association; if your hands smell like Aesop, you’re probably having a fancy time.
The black and white lettering is also identifiable a mile off: the minimalist wording, the French translations, the fonts (Helvetica; Optima Medium), the macron diacritic (a straight bar) over the “e” on the label, so you know to say “Eeesop.”
This attention to detail has been present since the start. The company was founded by a hairdresser, Dennis Paphitis, who started by blending essential oils into his hair products. The firm was called Emeis (Greek for “us”) before being renamed Aesop in 1989. On day one, Paphitis hired an assistant, Suzanne Santos, who proved vital to the business’s development. He started with just four products – the signature Aromatique handwash launched in 2006 – but has expanded to nearly 100. Since 2016 it has been owned by a Brazilian company, Natura & Co, and has annual revenue of more than £250m. Paphitis is now an adviser but Santos remains chief operating officer.
Aesop’s internal processes are lore. Former fashion and shopping website Racked reported in 2017 that office staff had to use black Bic pens and aren’t allowed to eat lunch at their desks. Everything from toilet paper to colours on graphs on slideshows is prescribed. Aesop declined to comment.
“We labour over seemingly inane decisions,” Paphitis once told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We work to make things appear effortless and as though they just happen. But actually there’s a great deal of energy involved.”
For Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of branding agency Ogilvy, Paphitis’s heritage and Aesop’s branding are important components of the company’s success. “I first encountered it in Greece and assumed it was Greek,” he says. “The packaging is very clever. It’s a category you might call “chem-lux”, in that it carries hints of both the five-star hotel and the apothecary.”
At £29, the handwash is expensive enough that you can buy it as a gift without feeling stingy, while staying in the range of what a decent bottle of wine or bouquet of flowers might cost. A friend was given a bottle as a pre-baby gift to take to the maternity ward and maintains it “transformed” her birth experience.
Since 2004, when its first store opened in Melbourne, Aesop has used physical premises to create an experience that feels more like a spa than a shop. The stores are vital to the brand, sleek temples in which the products are displayed like museum exhibits (film director Luca Guadagnino even helped design the minimalist Rome branch). Today there are more than 240 branches in 25 countries, plus nearly 100 department-store counters. Staff are reportedly not allowed to talk to customers about the weather: it’s too banal.
Not everyone is convinced, though. “I wish bars and restaurants with good wine lists wouldn’t use their products,” says wine writer Nina Caplan. “Pick up a glass after washing your hands and you’ll be tasting Chateau Aesop whatever you ordered.”
Restaurants, of course, played an important role in popularising the handwash. There are not many other places where people repeatedly wash their hands in a refined atmosphere.
But for some restaurateurs, the packaging alone is enough to convey the desired effect. The refill economy (which encourages people to top up their bottles, thus saving on packaging waste) has exploded over the past few years, with companies like Fill and Ouai alongside Aesop leading the ecocharge.
The owner of a high-end bistro in the south of England went one step further: “I was given it as a Christmas present and it ran out just as I was opening,” she says, “and I’m absolutely not going to spend £29 on a bottle of soap.” Instead, she refilled the bottle with a cheaper alternative, before qualifying her mischief by writing “this is not” on the bottle above the word Aesop. “My favourite bit is when people come out of the loo smelling their hands, not realising that the bottle has supermarket hand soap in it.”
The brand has also inspired other businesses. The labels of Danish brand Meraki look remarkably similar. In October, discount retailer Aldi launched its own version, the Lacura Wellness Aromatic Hand Wash, in a dark amber bottle with minimalist lettering, which retails at an affordable £2.49.
In one characteristically punchy interview in 2015, Paphitis said Aesop’s attention to detail was why the “philistine plagiarists who attempt to copy what we do will always fail – always”. Yet there are signs that some of the imitators might be closing in. Wary of Aesop’s ubiquity, some hospitality businesses are turning to alternatives.
“We love Aesop but we reviewed our costs during the pandemic and discovered Gloved,” says James Hart of Harts, the London restaurant group that includes Barrafina, Quo Vadis and El Pastor. “We did a group test and all thought Gloved’s cedarwood smell is complementary to food – a good thing if you are going back to finish your meal. It comes in refillable glass bottles and it’s very good value.”
Aesop still ships everything from its factory in Melbourne, which can be expensive and carbon-costly. It has acknowledged these concerns, and announced plans to reduce its footprint (and historically, has been ahead of the game when it comes to things like minimising packaging). But as a profitable, successful firm, it’s the obvious target for ambitious upstarts.
Charlie Vickery is managing director of Haeckels, a natural skincare company focused on seasonality and locality, established 10 years ago in Margate, Kent. The company’s first product, and still its second-bestseller, is a bar soap made with seaweed picked 100 metres from its lab. A bar feels good in the hands, he says, and doesn’t involve the high carbon transportation costs.
“Aesop was the pioneer of soap as a design-led product, so we owe a bit of our heritage to it,” says Vickery. “But I think it’s easy for a lot of natural skincare brands to fall and trail in their wake.”
As lockdown regulations ease, Aesop bestrides the nation’s sinks like a saponaceous colossus. It even broke America, cropping up in Carrie and Big’s kitchen on the recent Sex and the City reboot. Aesop may have won the pandemic, but how long will it last? Call it sud’s law.
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The ‘refill economy’, which encourages people to top up products thus saving on packaging, has exploded recently