Sweet smell of success
UK perfume house Miller Harris makes scents like no one else
INTERVIEW | ROBINA DAM
SAYING THAT AN ENGLISHWOMAN WHO LEARNT HER TRADE IN FRAGRANCE WHILE LIVING IN FRANCE has now decided to launch a range of scents in the Middle East feels like the beginning of an elaborate joke – or the first chapter of a Joanne Harris novel. Chocolat, anyone? Well, if the Juliette Binoche character had decided to work with essential oils rather than cocoa, the result may not have been a million miles away from the fabulous concoctions that are made by the equally beguiling Lyn Harris. “I think it certainly helped that I was seen as la petite anglaise while I was in France,” Harris tells me in the new tearoom at the back of her Mayfair boutique, just off Berkeley Square.
Unlike the Chocolat storyline, this Harris left Grasse, in the south of France, to launch her Miller Harris fragrance brand in west London almost a decade ago and has turned it into an international success. Since creating her first fragrance workshop beneath the Notting Hill boutique, Harris has gone on to open another two boutiques in prime central London sites (aside from the one in Mayfair, she launched another in Covent Garden’s Monmouth Street last December) plus one in Nottingham this year.
“The work we’ve done over the past year redesigning the website saw the business take off in a way that we simply couldn’t have foreseen,” says Harris. “We created specific sites for the American and French markets, in addition to the British and international sector, as well as allowing customers to place actual orders. It was much bigger than opening another store because it reached out to people who knew our brand from department stores or just reading magazine articles.”
Her surprise is palpable; understandable given the context. Her flagship Bruton Street store had a perfectly respectable 20 percent year-on-year growth. Plus the department store businesses were showing extremely buoyant trajectories: Selfridges, for example, had been demonstrating 120 percent year-on-year growth. Yet, despite positive predictions from her team, Harris was “astonished” that the online business saw a 200 percent increase from the previous year.
All this without having to compromise on the product – partly because the company is still mainly family owned. Harris, her partner, Christophe Michel, and her sister, Julie Harris, retain the majority holding, with only a couple of external investors, the most recent of whom came on board 18 months ago.
“The Prince’s Trust was hugely instrumental in helping us to launch the company in 2000: they put up 50 percent if we were able to raise 50 percent, helpful when I was so young,” recalls Harris, who turned 40 this year. Keeping control of the brand has been integral to the company’s success. “It’s the ultimate in quality control. We’ve made 21 fragrances but each of them have been incredibly special so I’m under no pressure to do a launch for the sake of it, unlike certain companies. There have been certain years when I’ve launched nothing.”
But what separated her from being a rather small cottage industry, even if dealing in extremely exclusive material? “We are the only independent British perfume house which actually develops as well as sells our own scents and can tell you exactly who our suppliers are. Going forward, ensuring the sustainability of our ingredients, and having a greater say in the ethical sourcing will be a big component of running the business.”
This month, in the run up to next year’s 10th anniversary, sees probably the biggest push of the brand. “The Middle Eastern market has been one that I’ve been looking at for a long time but we needed to enter with the right business partner.
This is a culture that has a long tradition of scent, but it’s also one where the sort of fragrances that are successful are quite different to European ones.”
Harris is launching an exclusive line specifically for the Middle Eastern sector and will also be offering her bespoke scent service there, which allows customers to concoct their own perfumes – prices start from £8,000. (You can now also buy the fragrance she originally made for the actress Jane Birkin.) Then comes her brand extensions – for the first time she is branching out into accessories such as mini travel candles (which are now exclusively available to buy onboard bmi flights) and notebooks.
In addition to the Middle East, plans to expand her international presence have grown steadily. “Looking back, I would say that our launch in the US with Bergdorf Goodmans, Barneys and Neiman Marcus was probably too soon,” she says with the confidence of an entrepreneur who has learnt from her own mistakes. “Having local partners who understand you is essential – it’s like a marriage.” Next year sees the company opening a store in Kuala Lumpur, followed by a foray into Japan with washbags in the signature Miller Harris print.
The company chose caution over a rapid expansion – a decision that Harris feels was vindicated by the credit crunch. “I’m so against a quick roll-out. My board would kill me for saying this but that sort of approach is so in the past now – as we’ve seen in the light of what’s happened when people borrowed up to the hilt to do a roll out that they then can’t sustain.”
So how has she been hit by the recession? After all, the luxury sector has had to change its strategies and Miller Harris is unashamedly a luxury brand with her eau de toilette starting at £39 for 50ml. Harris sees her positioning as “alongside brands such as Diptych and Annick Goutal rather than Jo Malone. Jo was the first to admit that she was a facialist who then went into fragrance whereas we are a fragrance brand in the true sense,” and hence has been buffeted so far from the vicissitudes of the market.
“Of course we thought we were going to be affected by the recession,” she admits disarmingly. “But we realised that the houses that had heritage and retail experience were not only going to survive, but grow stronger, such as Hermès, for instance,” says Harris, who combines developing new product lines and running the business with being a mother to four-year-old Henri. “To succeed, you have to think about what your customer wants. And, like my customer, this Christmas I may not be able to have the designer handbag, but I can still have an exclusive scent.”
Harris has touched on what many other women are thinking. And she knows it makes business scents.
