Marc Chaya of Maison Francis Kurkdjian on how important skin is to fragrance

Maison Francis Kurkdjian CEO and Co-Founder, Marc Chaya, discusses scaling a global brand and how important skin is to fragrance.

What do the first 30 minutes of your day look like, your morning routine?

Well, I’m a happy dog owner. I have a Frenchie, and the first 30 minutes of my morning is taking my Frenchie, Cherry, out for a walk. The first 30 minutes is my ‘me time’, having my coffee, going through the news, scheduling my day, and finishing up by feeding my dog.

How did your previous roles support you being able to launch MFK and how did you know it was the right time?

So previously, I was a partner with Ernst & Young and I was dealing with multiple fields: business, finance, management, marketing, and leadership. I was managing several teams internationally in my role as EY’s global telecommunications markets leader. My experience at EY allowed me to learn a lot about the way you should structure the company financially. It also allowed me to acquire strategic thinking and taught me how to lead people towards a common goal. This was invaluable, but there was a life for me before EY, when I go back to the little boy I was, and my childhood. I have a very strong creative impulse, and I’m lucky that I have these two aspects that coexist: very strong creativity and obviously the now-proven business acumen. I felt that it was the right time for me to move to the next page – which has become the page of my life – Maison Francis Kurkdjian, when I met Francis Kurkdjian. When I met Francis, I discovered how unfair it was that a full category of amazingly creative people were deprived from their ability to exist on their own. When do you decide to get married? You meet someone, you date, and eventually, one day you decide. Life is not about sudden moves or sudden decisions. For me, life is a journey. At some stage, when you know, you know, as they say. I knew it was the right time and I decided to start the journey. At Maison Kurkdjian, I use my business skills – the ones that I acquired at EY – and I use my creativity alongside Francis’s creativity to drive the story.

How challenging was the process of refining the fragrances themselves, and did you follow your intuition with this?

It was easy for us, because when it comes to creating the scent, there is one person: Francis, and he is a perfumer. That’s also what makes our partnership unique. He gives me the entire freedom and ability to drive the business, and I give him the entire freedom and ability to come up with the ideas that will eventually become scents. And then we talk together. When I have a good business idea and I run it by him, it becomes an amazing business idea. And when he has a story about a scent or an impression or an intuition and we talk about it together, it helps him take it to the next level. But when it comes to creating our perfumes, we are not conceptually marketing driven. We are creativity driven. Francis has an idea, an encounter, a travel: something that inspires him or makes him smile, and suddenly, he feels the urge to start making it happen; creating the scent that would embody or make his impression come to life. It’s a journey where he needs a name to start the creation. For example, for Grand Soir, we were in New York, the two of us, and we were talking about ‘the grand evening’ in Paris. He said he loves the idea of Paris being a 24/7 city, imagining a beautiful party walking down the streets of Paris having a great evening – and here came the name Grand Soir. Waking up and going out in Paris in the morning is amazing because Paris is also waking up. The sun is amazing, caressing the streets and the buildings. You hear noises, people are starting to go to work, to go to the market. The boulangeries are open. You smell coffee at the cafes. He was inspiredby a story about Paris in the morning, and so came the name Petit Matin, the counterpart of Grand Soir. The names, Petit Matin, Grand Soir, helped him create the scents. In our Maison, the creative process is free. It all comes from Francis. Then, it becomes a dialogue between the two of us. But we do not fabricate stories. We have no concepts. It’s all genuinely generated by his creative genius.The bottles are stunning.

Did you envision the aesthetics of the brand from the outset?

We started the brand from scratch. It was very important for us to host our perfumes, Francis’ creations, in a beautiful flacon. Francis had a few ideas, I was listening to him, but we really wanted an object that would be elegant, beautiful, and timeless, but would not come across as the star. A lot of marketing driven concepts need a wow factor in the bottle, in the design of the shop, in the marketing. For us, the brand had to be beautiful but timeless, and the real star was the perfume that sits in the bottle. The bottle was designed by a friend of ours who is a really talented creative director – his name is Fred Rawlyer. Fred came to us with this little bottle, and then he improved on it – he added our little logo, the monogram, and added a Japanese style stand. He helped us get the angles of the bottle sharper so that the light goes through the bottle in a very beautiful fashion. It was actually Francis who came up with the stopper. The stopper was supposed to be round. And then Francis said to me, “I want to put a square on top of the round”. I was like, “What are you talking about?” It’s beautiful. He was right. Everything, it came together. And as you see, all of our flacons are boasting the same type of bottles. We have three sizes. But for us, the most important thing was, again, to have an object that was elegant, that captured light, that was expressive, but that did not overtake the story. The story is what goes inside the bottle. And that’s what we celebrate. The identity is inspired from Paris. We live in a city that gives us goosebumps. We travel a lot. And whenever you go to Paris and you’re by the Seine river, you realize it’s a stunning city. Our flacons are in zinc, the same as the rooftops of Paris. The zinc is a tribute to the rooftops of Paris. Zinc is a living material. We have stoppers in zinc and stoppers in gold – as in the gold domes of the Monument. During the creative process, we started naturally going to Paris. Eventually, Paris became our only, or our biggest, source of inspiration. Some brands are Italian and they find inspiration in Rome. Some find inspiration in fashion. We find our inspiration in two things, Paris, and the freedom to be who you want to be through our fragrance water.

 

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How important is skin compatibility in how long a fragrance lasts on the skin?

Your skin interacts with the scent and some people will have different interactions, based on their skin and the scent. However, you’ll find that 80% of us will carry the scent in a very similar fashion. There’s a lot of effort that is put behind creating a scent. The story is about first coming up with the inspiration, creating the scent that reflects the inspiration, but then working the chemistry so that the scent is stabilized, that it diffuses, that it has a sillage. And Francis is the king of sillage. When you wear Grand Soir or Baccarat Rouge or Oud Satin and you enter the room, your aura is in the room, and that’s technique. This is not given to everyone. It is like a couturier – why is this gown so amazing? Why do we consider that this gown is perfect? It’s technique that combines, that adds to the genius of creativity to create a masterpiece. It is a big part of our work to make a masterpiece on your skin and to give it longevity.

Have you had to get comfortable in your own skin as a business owner and how has how you view of yourself changed?

A lot. To be an entrepreneur and to go on a journey of building something while embarking other people alongside you, requires deeper knowledge of yourself, because it’s not linear, it’s hard. I’ve learned a great deal about myself, about others, and I think I’ve worked very hard to learn and improve. I don’t think you can be successful; I don’t think you can lead and inspire unless you have a great level of respect for yourself and some kind of knowledge and self-love so that you can then give it all to others. I’ve done a lot of that.

How many people are in your team now and did you start out alone?

A lot. It’s about 150 people in France. Another 40 people in the US, excluding our retail team — that would be in the hundreds. We’ve just created a subsidiary in the UK where we have about 50 people. We have people in China, about 15. We have about six to seven people in Hong Kong. This makes me really proud; it makes me really proud to see that there is no ‘I’ in a team. There’s ‘we’; we are a people-first company. We say that Maison Francis Kurkdjian is a human adventure. The hero in this adventure is perfume, but it’s a human adventure. And I’m a very proud CEO and cofounder to have the chance to have so many skilled and talented teams around us. It’s interesting — it’s a testament to the brand that it’s global. It’s not just per region. Yes, we’re in 52 countries.

How do you approach scaling without compromising on quality?

You should never compromise on quality, and you should never consider scale as the end game. Scale is the result of time. Mmhmm. It took us 15 years to open 800 doors. 800 doors can seem a lot, but in our industry, you can distribute perfume in over 60,000 doors. So we picked up hand in hand. And it took us 15 years to open those 800 doors. Quality. You can’t compromise on quality. Our luxury, you know, we, our dream is to be the most luxurious fragrance house, but luxury doesn’t mean anything anymore. So I had to give it a definition. Luxury for me stands in three things. The genius of creativity. And I’ve been talking about that. The genius of Francis Kurkdjian the perfumer. Number two, craftsmanship and quality. You can do beautiful things with ugly materials. The love of excellence is what characterises it. You can’t become a star ballerina or a lead champion in a sport without exercising hours every day. With Francis, we go the extra mile and we worship quality. And three is playfulness, joy, and an uplifting journey through fragrance. For me, when I combine these three geniuses of creativity, craftsmanship, and quality, and an extraordinary journey through fragrance, this is true luxury. So quality is everything to us. And how we did it is you scale up with time, you take time because only when you respect time, things that are done with time are respectable and they last forever. So we live by those values.

 

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Have you had any mentors along the way and if so, what knowledge did they impart?

I did have many of them. It started at Ernst & Young where I had very smart partners and business leaders that were older than me and were able to share their experience so that I can go faster or not replicate their mistakes, or at least have the opportunity not to replicate their mistake. It’s my choice, at the end of the day. I believe in mentorship. I try to be a good mentor for others. And I think that life is all about giving and taking. With Francis, we give a lot. I give a lot and life gives back. I believe that mentorship is part of growth and is part of the give back. I was lucky to receive, and I will give back twice over.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

A lot of advice. It’s easy to give advice to a younger person, but it’s also important that I wouldn’t be who I am without everything, my entire journey. If I went back, I would not influence myself to be different. However, since I was young, I believed in hard work. I believed in return on investment. I didn’t believe in instant reward, and that’s my generation. We were raised the hard way. Maybe I would advise myself to be nicer to myself, not to be as hard as I was on myself. To take time to respect my body and find a good balance between body and mind. This is the advice that I would give to myself. The notion of instant reward, which we are witnessing today with the younger generation is a source of worry to me, including in the way we hire, nurture, and try to grow our teams. We hire a lot of young people, very talented, and they believe that everything should be given to them. You give something to someone once, it surprises them, and you make that person happy. You give it twice; you start creating expectation. You give it three times; you start creating entitlement. You give it four times; you start creating dependence. And I believe that the younger generation are at the dependence level of instant gratification, but instant gratification doesn’t exist. You’ve worked so hard to be where you are. People come to our company and after two weeks, say, ‘Oh, I’m not doing enough creative stuff’. Two weeks! I think that life is made of passion, self-respect, hard work. Play hard, work hard – but work hard comes before play hard. Believe in your potential and be on your axis. Don’t do things that you don’t like. Find the things that you like because you’ll excel in them – and every one of us can excel in something. If you are a fish and I ask you to climb the tree, it’s not going to work. Yeah. But if I ask you to swim fast, you can swim.

What have been the biggest challenges to date and how did you overcome them?

We have no marketing. In the fragrance industry, when you go to buy perfume, you’re buying into a marketing concept. When you come to us, you’re buying fragrance that is created by one of the greatest perfumers of our time. It is like you, like Alexander McQueen who is no longer here, but we love the brand. What he brought to life is a creative vision. Francis also brings a creative vision. Francis Kurkdjian is a creator. He’s a visionary. He’s someone that creates, so, we have no marketing. At Maison Francis Kurkdjian, we are not telling you a story about a brand that was inspired from travel, where the bottle was made by this crazy designer, and this celebrity wears it – this is all marketing. The key point was to start to explain to people that we were a luxury fragrance house that celebrates creativity above all. That marketing is at the service of creativity and not the other way around.

 

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This is The Skin Issue – what does it mean to be comfortable in your own skin?

It means to accept yourself and to accept your limits. To accept that you’re not perfect. And that imperfection is beauty. Tome, ecstasy is this fine line between pain and pleasure. You can’t be all pleasure or all pain – it’s this fine balance. Being good in your skin is accepting your imperfections and being happy with them, as well as accepting your good aspects and being happy with them. Accepting the balance, respecting yourself, and respecting your taste. A lot of people want to follow a trend. Well, I’m turning 50. I don’t have the body that I used to have. If I wear a skinnyt-shirt, I’m not going to look nice in it. If I am not going to accept the fact that I will not look nice in it just because I want to look like a celebrity, it’s not ‘me’, but if I listen to myself and I wear things that make me comfortable, it means that I’m at ease with my body and my mind is no longer at alert. I’m happy, I’m comfortable, I accept myself, I love myself. And so, others will follow. If you love yourself, why would someone not love you?