‘Perfume doesn’t have to be French’: Why Australia is an untapped source for olfactory brands

Nothing in Australia is quite like anything anywhere else. The trees are different shapes, the flowers are different colours and the animals are just weird. It should not be astonishing, then, that Australia’s scents are no less idiosyncratic, but it’s perhaps surprising that so few perfumers have sought to capitalise on them. 

This thought occurred to Dimitri Weber, a Franco-Belgian perfumer, a decade ago. He had worked at several of the great European houses, such as Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci and Cartier, before launching Goldfield & Banks in 2016. The aim? To establish a distinctively Australian luxury perfume house with scents that boast inspiration and ingredients from across the Australian continent. Its perfume, Southern Bloom, for example, is drawn from Bruny Island – almost as far south as Australia goes: it boasts boronia, ylang-ylang and coconut, among other essences, and like many Goldfield & Banks scents it goes heavy on the Australian sandalwood.

As Goldfield & Banks marks its 10th anniversary, Dimitri Weber reflects on the journey so far with Monocle’s Andrew Mueller on The Entrepreneurs.

Is it strange that Australia isn’t more thought of as a perfume hotbed?
It has an untapped flora that has been explored in skincare but never in perfumery. We have amazing ingredients that have never been used in perfumery before. [And yet] Australia is one of the world’s biggest exporters of sandalwood. The sandalwood you find today in all the fragrances in all the department stores in the world: I would say, 90 per cent comes from Australia. We have some of the biggest lavender fields on the planet, too. It’s a really rich botanical culture in Australia, and my role with Goldfield & Banks is to share this beauty with the world.

How did you end up in Australia – and did it strike you instantly that it was under-utilised in this respect?
I worked in the fragrance industry [in Europe] for more than 30 years, and one of the brands that I was working with, which was a very high-end luxury jewellery brand, sent me to Australia to host a PR event. I was always intrigued by the ingredients coming from Australia. We have one ingredient, a beautiful, tiny, little flower called boronia that we find in Tasmania. It was used for the very first time in 1964 in a Dior fragrance.

Where do you even start launching a perfume house?
I had experience in retail, education, marketing, PR and even product development. So this allowed me to take a chance on creating my own fragrance brand. I didn’t really want [to] in the beginning. It was a risk. I just took €20,000 and opened this tiny little business, and today we still [haven’t gone to the] bank for anything. I’m very proud of having achieved that. With such a small amount of money, you can achieve beautiful things. It’s passion that drove me to create my own brand: my passion for Australia and [my passion] to show the world that perfume doesn’t necessarily have to be French. It can also be Australian. 

We apply the French expertise – we manufacture in France because you can’t have luxury without manufacturing in France, especially fragrances. But [we showcase] all these beautiful ingredients; that’s what I wanted.

How tough was it, especially early on? Did people understand what you were trying to do?
I did my market research for about a year before taking the step and creating this brand. The consumer was definitely ready for it. Australians were keen and happy that finally someone would create a beautiful, luxury fragrance house. Australian fashion houses were booming – Zimmermann, for example. Aesop is an Australian brand, too. And I knew there was a gap with fragrances. The international retailers such as] Harrods and Barneys believed in the brand straight away but the local retailers in Australia were a little bit sceptical.

Where did that scepticism come from?
They had this idea of luxury perfume being only French and a bit Italian, a bit London. But it takes education. It takes time. I remember people looking at me like I was an alien – like, ‘What’s this guy doing? What does he want with his perfume? What is he going to achieve with this?’ But I knew I was going to make it. I didn’t hesitate. 

How important was the name – it alludes to the 19th-century goldrushes and Joseph Banks, the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook?
The ‘Goldfield’ is for sandalwood. The tree grows only on fields of gold, because you need gold in the soil in order for the tree to grow. Australia is about the land and the earth, and so I wanted to have something very earthy in the name of my fragrance house. And then Joseph Banks. . . I just feel like a new version of Joseph Banks. He came back to Europe with more than 33,000 pieces of plants and pots and shrubs and showcased to Europeans all the beauty of the Pacific region. And now I’m doing the same with my little oils.

How much physical exploration of Australia is involved?
For the first five or six years, I travelled a lot in the country – I still do to look for new ingredients. But we have the privilege today that a lot of suppliers come to us and say, ‘We’ve got this incredible flower. Can you do something with it?’

Do you feel like you’re selling Australia, as well as the scents?
Even if you’re attracted by a campaign or by a bottle or by storytelling, if the fragrance doesn’t suit you, it doesn’t suit you. But as an Australian brand we work really hard on this beautiful story and expressing that in beautiful campaigns. Not many people travel to Australia because it’s so far away. So the least I can do is to work hard on the assets with photographers, with production houses, creating films to really give our audience a sample of what Australia is really like. That’s very important because with a French perfume house you can take the train and go to Paris – everybody knows the Eiffel Tower – but there is still a mystery around Australia. People come to me and say [that] they will probably never go to Australia because it’s so far away, but thanks to our fragrances they can imagine how beautiful the country is. That, to me, is the best compliment you can get.