making of

a glimpse of the creative space

Good morning from Zurich, where I just realized that the first month of 2015 is almost over. Wow. Time is running so fast.

After a couple of intense, out of the ordinary days, we are back to our good old routine this week, with a lot of packaging tasks and paper work that needs to be done. Today’s picture shows you my creative space that maybe looks different to what you might expect. However, this is not the office space where I spend a good time of the day working on the PC and where I try to keep trial vials under control. And where I write most of my mails, answering questions like “I know you do not ship here or there, but can you make an exception for me?” (answer: No we can’t) or “we have this new platform xyz, please send full bottles to review your scents” (no we don’t).

In brackets: The number of new perfume and fashion blogs is still growing and contrary to the bigger brands I can’t really send full bottles and I am also reluctant to send samples, the longer the more. I haven’t really developed a policy for free samples for blogs, though. I guess I need to do that one fine day…

Anyhow, this is the creative space, a room that does not really come with a nice perfume organ (with neatly arranged bottles of perfume raw materials), but a room where you find most perfume raw materials arranged in a chaotic order. The closer they are to the bench, the more often are they used. The raw material bottles are pretty large, but most of them are pretty empty and I just use up what is left for trials. Production material is stored in a different space, and so are expensive, delicate materials that are  stored securely in fridge. Like the tuberose absolute that I got the other day and that sits tightly closed at 3°C now.

So here you find material like Sandalore for instance, a molecule that smells like sandalwood, mostly, and that I use in my scents as it is a great fixation molecule and adds a nice deep woody sandalwood note to the base of scents. Or you find ambrein there, a natural extract from Cistus ladaniferus; woody, ambery, leathery, dream stuff.  This one I actually used yesterday to try a couple of ideas that I have in my mind for a nice amber scent.

But you find more… pictures, sketches, watercolor brushes, oil colors that linger around the corner, a digital screen to work with adobe’s photoshop in order to optimize pictures of bottles and render normal glass flacons into dream stuff. And, not visible here, more trial vials. Basically , the house of tauer is a trial vial swamp.