Today’s picture shows you a clear bottle with a cliplock, sketched this morning during a coffee break. I saw the bottle when opening the cupboard in order to get explorer sets ready, in one of the upper shelves, a vestige from a past that is not so far away. There we go: Today’s post deals with cliplock bottles, at least on the side. …

When I started my venture, together with Pascal from Medieval art & vie, the bookstore in Zurich, I first made the Le Maroc pour elle, and later, in 2005, composed the L’air du désert marocain. The first batch of both was mixed in a 1 liter cliplock bottle, about 1 kg of concentrate, enough for a the “launch”, which wasn’t really a launch, if I remember properly. The diluted fragrance was sitting later in aluminum containers, but I still have some diluted fragrance of earlier batches sitting in the cellar in these cliplock bottles. I mentioned it before, in earlier posts, I am not super super organized, and hence it happens from time to time that I have some perfume left and it sits somewhere and I forget about it.

Until it is too old and continues sitting there as long term stability experiment.

These days, of course, I use no glass for storage anymore. And the batches are a bit larger. While sitting on the computer and sketching the cliplock bottle, I was remembering how many did not believe in what I was doing together with Pascal, and -worse!- how many came, mostly men, close or after their retirement, telling me what to do now and what not. Believe me: Had I listened to them, about how to address the market and how to expand, and the women telling me how to pack my fragrances and how to expand, I would have failed a long time ago.

In the mean time, I learned that advice is often nourished by enviousness of self-declared mentors who never achieved what they talk about. I mentioned it here earlier: I do not give any advice anymore, even when asked for. One reason is time, my resources,  and some experiences made. The other reason is: I feel that it is important to learn walking by walking forward, stumbling and falling and getting up again, by choosing the right track for yourself and , if you are lucky, having somebody next to you who walks with you, but does not talk.

But now I lost track a bit. Actually, what came to my mind, too: Back then, I had a stock of maybe 2 kg concentrate, two fragrances. Imagine. Two bottles were sufficient to keep all my stock. With every step forward (seemingly forward) I added more storage bottles and cans and drums and labels and you name it. When talking to our insurance guy the other day about Tauer GmbH, the company, and all that belongs to the company, I was amazed again, how much money sits there. And, to be honest, how much money went down the drain, when stumbling and getting up again.

Finally, when looking at the bottle, sketching, I realized that 2015 will bring the 10 years anniversary of air du désert marocain. Wow.

2015 will be a air du désert party year! Lucky me, there is still some time.