Madeleines: ROJA DOVE

Interview with founder and perfumer, Roja Dove

If Roja Parfums was a song / poem, what song / poem would it be?

That's a really difficult question because Perfumery, like poetry and music is such a wide and varied art form, that can take the senses in many different directions, whilst meaning something different to each individual person. In fact, I'd have to say that's one of the harder questions I've been asked in my career. Each of my Roja Parfums creations have their own distinctive personality and stories behind them: You find evocative words like Scandal, Innuendo and Fetish whilst also finding the scented stories of my life (Haute Luxe Collection) and the scents of empires in my Imperial Collection. The magic of being a Perfumer that works completely without marketing briefs is that I am free to create a perfume completely as I want it to be – whether it be inspired by a person or a place or a piece of writing. So, when it comes down to summing the multi-faceted personality of Roja Parfums into a poem, I am rather at a loss.

One thing I will say is that when I was creating my scent A Midsummer Dream, I was heavily inspired by the words of Shakespeare and their relation to the raw materials of Perfumery. I had been asked to create a perfume for a Shakespearean-themed incentive and immediately knew I wanted it to be about A Midsummer Nights Dream because the text is so rich with olfactive imagery. I spent a lot of time reading the play, as well as many of his sonnets, to discover a rich tapestry of words you could practically smell. This is one excerpt that quite literally helped me decide some ingredients to include:

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;

And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in"

What /who is your greatest inspiration?

That is another difficult question to answer because there is so much that can be said and perhaps not one specific answer.

Because I have the freedom to create whatever I want for Roja Parfums, I have the luxury of a wide and varied creative process. I am able to gain inspiration from absolutely anywhere I feel like, which is wonderful because a perfume will then come very naturally to me, instead of it being a forced effort creating it in line with a marketing or advertising brief. I have made scents inspired by places: London, The Gulf Collection, Elysium ; Scents inspired by characters: Diaghilev, NuWa, and Parfums de la Nuit; and scents inspired by personality types: Enigma, Reckless, Risqué... I am very lucky that my job allows me to travel the world, meeting all sorts of people and seeing all sorts of places. I am exposed to many different things that inspire me and I am naturally very inspired by Opera, Ballet, Art and Literature, as I'm many of us are. But I would say that the combined effort of all these different sources of inspiration would be the raw materials. I am inspired by the immense beauty that the mother nature and science have been able to create, and I am inspired by the unrivalled sophistication of the world's finest ingredients, of which I use in every one of my creations. Like how a writer is inspired by writers before them, what inspires them most is words, I as a Perfumer am inspired by scent itself.

What is the most beautiful memory in connection with perfumes?

My earliest memory of scent is of L'Aimant from Coty. It's a scent my mother always wore and without this scent I wouldn't have lived the life that I've led. That's quite a powerful thing to say but it's true. I fell in love with this perfume when I smelt it on my mother one evening. I was a small boy of about six or seven years old and I was lying in bed. My mother was going out to a cocktail party dressed in a gold lamé dress and the light from the hallway illuminated her from behind, creating a corona around her. It is an image that will always stay with me. It was the way in which my ordinary mother had been transformed into this ethereal figure and the resonating smell of her face powder and perfume that lingered in the room once she had kissed me goodnight that marked the beginning of my love for perfume.

What smell / note triggers that memory?

That scent memory is made up of a variety of smells going on at the time, but when I think of a defining quality of it, it is a slightly soft, powdery smell that takes me back to that night. It was the feeling of the warmth of her powdered cheek pressing against mine that I will always remember. I had thought for years about bottling that moment and I really couldn't get the idea of making this scent out of my mind. One day I was in a cab going around Hyde Park corner and I said to my business partner, Dominic, that I couldn't get it out of my head and he told me that I just needed to make it. This is how my most personal scent to date came about and I named it A Goodnight Kiss. I decided to launch it on her birthday (6th January) in my perfumery on the 6th floor of Harrods and on the first day we sold 8 bottles. We quickly had to make more in my office and somebody had to carry it up to London – this went on and by the end of the month it was our biggest selling scent globally. The scent I had been so nervous of, it seems is a story that resonates with a lot of people: we all know somebody that has given us a kiss goodnight.

Are you planning to visit Slovenia in the future :)?

I do plan to visit Slovenia at some point, yes! The trouble I have faced the last year or so is that Roja Parfums has grown so exponentially since I started it in 2011 that I can barely keep up any longer. I have always liked to make myself available for our partners and one thing I've always made an effort to do is travel to our Roja Parfums accounts to train any staff working on the brand, so that the message of the brand is kept the same. A client should be able to travel to different locations around the world and receive the same service and be helped to find the same perfume that is perfect for them wherever they go. Because I physically cannot be in all these places at once, now, the way I tend to operate it is to send my Global Ambassador, Andrew Wright, to new accounts first. Andrew has worked with me for over a decade and was the manager of my Harrods account from the start. He grew the brand within Harrods amazingly and knows exactly what my vision for the brand is. So he helps me out by helping set up new accounts around the world and getting them started with merchandising and training and all the niggly bits– allowing time for the staff to get used to working with the brand. Then I will visit at a later date to meet with partners and staff, conduct training and press, and host customer events. So my visit to Slovenia will happen at some point and I look forward to seeing you then.

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