The Finer Notes

As Henry Jacques gets ready to open its second boutique within the UAE, in Abu Dhabi, CEO Anne-Lise Cremona reflects on the longstanding association of the brand with the region’s rulers and how she put the French perfumery on the global olfactory map

It started as a well-guarded secret. Those that knew did, and those that didn’t… that was by design. When world traveller and overall aesthete Henry Cremona struck a friendship with a fifth-generation “nose”, little did he know that it would birth Henry Jacques which would grow into a legendary French perfume brand that would secure favour among world leaders and tycoons.

“At the time there were no perfume schools, and the know-how was transmitted from one generation to the next,” Anne-Lise Cremona, Henry’s daughter and now CEO of the company, says of the “nose”. As Cremona explains, this man was an unhappy perfumer in the Seventies when he witnessed the transition of the perfume industry from an artisanal pursuit to something more mass market, where essences were being replaced with chemicals. Uncomfortable with being part of the establishment, the “nose” teamed up with Henry and they began building their own laboratory not far from Grasse in the south of France. “Building a laboratory like ours takes decades. We work with 100-1,000 mainly natural components, and you have to source each one, know the people behind them, their harvest cycles, etc.,” says AnneLise of the complex process involved in setting up the laboratory, a process to which her mother Yvette contributed immensely.

While the “nose” set about creating and experimenting with essences, Henry travelled across the globe to meet with discerning clients. Among them was Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder of the UAE and its first president. Henry would frequently travel to Abu Dhabi and was commissioned to work on several bespoke creations for the UAE ruler. Over the course of decades, Henry created 64 different fragrances for Sheikh Zayed. Some of these were used for the ruler’s personal collection, while others were used as gifts. One of his favourite essences was said to be White Safran, a perfume he ordered repeatedly. The perfume had notes of saffron, orange flower, jasmine and Rose Damascena, white musk and ambergris. The ruler’s other favourite perfumes from Henry Jacques included Dar Zayed, Princess of the Night, Abu Dhabi and An Evening in Taif, which was named according to Sheikh Zayed’s wishes.

The relationship with the Abu Dhabi family is one that Anne-Lise has cultivated to this day. “We still have a very close relationship with the family. This is what is even more beautiful because they know us… they know me, and we have this long-term relationship which is exactly what the Henry Jacques brand represents. When we have a chance to meet, it’s always on a very simple basis around perfume, discussing our favourite components and how it makes them feel,” says Anne-Lise.

Apart from Sheikh Zayed, another powerful regional ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, the former ruler of Oman and the longestreigning monarch in the Arab world at the time of his death last year, was also a prolific customer of Henry Jacques. “We created hundreds of perfumes for Sultan Qaboos. Every year, we would have a collection for him. And this is also what contributes to the strength of the brand here in the region, because it’s perhaps not well known by many consumers, but it is known among those at the very top,” says Anne-Lise. Joining her father in the perfume business was nearly a foregone conclu

sion for her, one of three daughters of Henry and Yvette. As she explains, since both her parents were involved in the business – they still are to this day – Anne-Lise spent her entire childhood surrounded by conversations around perfumes. “I finished my studies and began working with him when I was 20. He let me be very free in my ideas. I steered the brand in a new direction, positioning it as even more high-end, and I focused on the packaging which is why we started using Baccarat Crystal,” notes Anne-Lise.

But being involved in the family’s business for her entire childhood, and then into her early working years, became more than she wanted at the time. “He wanted his daughters to be in the business, but sometimes in a family, you just need a bit of freedom,” she says. Leaving the family business, she moved to Paris, got married and had children. She started working with a big perfume group within the communication department. “In 2010, unfortunately, my father decided to retire, and he left the company for three years. The company instead of growing, began undergoing difficult times. I came back to help, and I never left,” says Anne-Lise. Unable to see her parent’s life’s work diminish, a decade after she left the business she decided to leverage her expementor. rience of having worked in a big group, and bring those best practices and firm vision to her family business.

One of Anne-Lise’s priorities when she returned to the family business in 2010 was to open up the distribution system without compromising the brand’s exclusivity. At the time, Henry Jacques didn’t have a single boutique and was still mainly making bespoke perfumes. Anne-Lise spent two years studying the nectars and determining which ones would be available in the boutiques that they would eventually open. Those gave rise to the Classiques – the 50 of them that can be applied directly on the skin and which can be found in any of its boutiques. Once the basics were ready, it was time to go global.

Initially, Harrods approached Henry Jacques with the offer to open in a corner of their store, but Anne-Lise wasn’t impressed. “We refused to be in any [boutique] corner, refused to be in travel retail and refused to be in all those more mass retailers. At that time, for a perfume brand to have a boutique of its own was very rare,” says Anne-Lise. Harrods returned to Henry Jacques six months later and offered the brand a place in their prestigious Salons de Parfums instead, which led to the perfumer opening its first boutique on the sixth floor of Harrods in 2014.

Since then, Henry Jacques has scaled rapidly. “We will soon be at 10 boutiques. We have a new boutique opening in Abu Dhabi in September 2021, and we have a new 400-square-metre boutique opening in Paris too. We have plans for China, and also to open five boutiques in the US in 2022. We plan to increase the number of our boutiques to between 15-20 by 20222023,” reveals Anne-Lise.

Henry Jacques opened its boutique in Dubai in 2018, located at the Fashion Avenue of The Dubai Mall. Its interiors were designed by Christophe Tollemer, the brand’s creative director. Tollemer has also worked on the Abu Dhabi concept opening in September. Exclusive to the Dubai boutique, are essences like the Dar Abu Dhabi, an oud fragrance with cedarwood, vanilla and saffron that retails for $3,340 for 15ml, as well as Mandala and Deep Forest essences. These essences are also available as Brumes, sprays that are lighter than the Classique essences. Recently, it introduced Les Boites à Parfums, handcrafted chests to house the Classiques perfumes in combinations of 2, 6 or 10 flacons. Meanwhile, the Les Toupies perfume collection uses very rare ingredients and are among the brand’s more high-end boutique offerings, presented in hand-blown crystal bottles.

While Anne-Lise has shown steely business acumen to open up the brand to a global audience, she counts one famous uncle in particular as being her sounding board and Richard Mille, whose eponymous watch brand has become a roaring success, is her mother’s younger brother. “He’s always been a source of inspiration to me, and I think that my parents have also been a great source of inspiration for him. He was very impressed with what I had done with Harrods. He came to me and said, ‘If you wish, I would love to be on your side and decide the future of the company.’ And for me, that was fantastic because he is a businessman and has a really interesting network and distribution model. Having him on my side gives me confidence. He is a very respectful person, and he’s never really overly involved in Henry Jacques,” explains Anne-Lise.

Anne-Lise says that she also ran by Richard a product from Henry Jacques that was four years in the making, one that they will release this quarter, which she says is a lifestyle accessory without offering any other details. Apart from the upcoming lifestyle accessory, she also confirms that a cologne collection for men is also in the works.

While the brand expands its products and distribution network, Anne-Lise reiterates that bespoke will remain at its very core. The process of creating bespoke perfumes includes multiple consultations with a client which starts with a sample tray for the client to understand which smells they identify most with, in a method that Anne-Lise likens to a psychology session. “The idea is to push them out of their comfort zone and to try to understand what they feel when they smell certain components. Following that, we present three perfume test samples for the client to choose from, and they usually end up picking one of them. Once it is selected, we start processing that bespoke perfume.” The entire process to craft a bespoke perfume takes four-eight months and can cost around Eur85,000.

For the moment, Henry Jacques is still operating from its historical laboratory. However, Anne-Lise is in the process of setting up a new laboratory within a castle on a vineyard 15 minutes away from their current location in France. The new lab is expected to be completed by July 2022. Henry Jacques is a family business, and Anne-Lise prefers it stays that way. She has three children. Her eldest son is a musician but is also involved in the communications for the business, while her daughter is an architect who might join the business someday, while the youngest child will be attending a perfume school and working part-time at Henry Jacques while he completes his education. “This company is just like an old house that we built. My father had a role for a certain period, now I have one and I hope it will carry on like that. I strongly believe that the only way ahead is for it to remain as a family company.”

“We refused to be in any [boutique] corner, refused to be in travel retail and refused to be in all those more mass retailers.”