Sneaker accords and a kilo of saffron

Inside the mind of Georges Maubert, founder of French perfume house MarieJeanne

Like any good Millennial, I first discovered French perfume house MarieJeanne on Instagram while scrolling idly through my suggested posts. In between the workout influencers and recipes I’ll never make, the sight of this brand’s sleek, minimalistic and angular green bottles stopped my thumb in its tracks. For a brand that traces its roots back to the traditional home of French perfumery in Grasse, the design of the brand and the straightforward nominature of its fragrances – generally an expression of its core notes or a person’s name – felt refreshing and intriguing. I immediately DMed the brand to enquire about samples, which duly arrived a few days later in a little cotton envelope.

Over the coming days, I tried them all. What impressed me was not only their crispness and clarity, but also the focus of their formulations on specific raw ingredients. I was especially impressed by Iris Pallida, which has become a new favourite of mine – sophisticated and mature without feeling old school. Lightly leathery and warm, its powdery central note of iris butter (for which the fragrance is named) is supported by a savoury, cool-creamy note of hazelnut – don’t think Nutella, but rather the smooth scent a raw hazelnut releases when smashed in two.

The fact the house also plays with fragrance concentration (you’ll find parfums, colognes and eau fraiches in the collection), as well as offering a fragrance for children and mists that purport to aid your body and mind in everyday activities, and I knew I needed to speak with the man behind the brand.

That man is Georges Maubert (pictured, top). Born in Grasse and now based in Paris, he is a fifth-generation member of Robertet Group, a company that has been creating fragrances and flavors from natural raw materials since 1850. What’s especially interesting is that, with such a storied selection of olfactive experts in his family tree, he’s the very first to start a fragrance brand of their own.

Launched in 2014 MarieJeanne has, as you might expect, a strong focus on raw materials and capturing notes in their purest, most realistic form. To source these, Georges also focuses on sustainable agricultural practices and traceability – and works with perfumers Sidonie Lancesseur, Alexis Dadier, Karine Vinchon, Serge de Oliveira and Michel Almairac to translate these raw ingredients into scents. Once the formulas have been decided, they are distilled into the green bottles that initially caught my eye – interestingly, a throwback to the original pharmaceutical bottles that were used to preserve ingredients from the sunlight during the distillation process.

In-between his globetrotting trips to locate unique new ingredients for his creations, I called Georges up in his Paris HQ to find out more about why he started the brand, fantasy accords, and his earliest memories of scent.

What’s your history in perfumery?

Georges Maubert: I launched MarieJeanne in 2014, but we have always been very, very exclusive – we control our own distribution, we’re not in department stores. We still want to stay very niche, but over the past four years, we have started to develop a little. Our biggest markets are now Japan, Germany and Italy.

I was born and grew up in Grasse, France (where my entire family is from), but these days I am more in Paris. As my parents owned Robertet, I started working in the industry at a young age, working in the lab. Each summer, I got to do something different or learn something new about note composition or the fragrance process, and I had the opportunity to travel around the world to see all different production sites. What is unique with Robertet is the access we get these very creative raw materials, and I was always passionate about these. However, the extracts we would create from them would always be for major perfume brands. I wanted to create a perfume house myself that utilised these.

What did you not find on the market that you wanted your brand to represent?

I didn't find any brands on the market that transcribed the real smell of the raw materials – and that's why my my goal from the start with MarieJeanne. Also, something important for me is that all our projects are not only formulated in Grasse, but manufactured in Grasse.

While scent for the body was always important, I also wanted to push the boundaries and offer other types of scents too. We have a series of candles for the home and we also have a range of room mists that are intended to have an effect on both body and mind. For example, we created a Matcha Mist specifically for meditation, as well as a Pillow Mist to aid sleep.

What’s the story behind the name MarieJeanne?

The brand is named after my grandmother. There are also a few fragrances in the collection that are inspired by my family members: Léon, a fragrance for children, which is named after my nephew; Marcel, a soapy cologne named after my grandfather; and Adèle, which is inspired by my other grandmother.

Are you the first in five generations of your family to launch a fragrance line?

Yes, exactly. My father, my grandfather and my great grandfather all had very, very different position in the company from chemists to farmers – my father was the CEO of Robertet. But my love is to develop projects and present them to the market. That was something very different, so I needed to do my own thing with MarieJeanne.

Can you remember a really early experience you had with scent?

Our family house in Grasse has a huge lawn and lots of flowers in the garden. I think my earliest memories are of those flowers while I was playing outside: lavender and jasmine and centifolia roses. There was also a bakery in our town that made fougasette, a bread infused with orange blossom. The streets around that bakery all smelled of orange blossom – I can still smell it now.

Also, I've been a huge fan of Iris since I was a child. When I was young and I was in the factory in Grasse, I remember seeing the manufacturers working with the Iris butter – these big, one kilo discs that were worth, like, €15,000 and were kept in a safe. Not only did I find that incredibly impressive, but the smell of that raw material was intoxicating – it’s powdery and floral, but also woody and metallic. I have been obsessed with it ever since. So much so that one of the first fragrances I launched, Iris Padilla, I designed to be an absolute overdose of Iris. The formula of this fragrance is something crazy – my father told me I was crazy to do that because it’s way too expensive. And just thought, well, nobody else can do that!

Is there a raw material that you love that you either haven't used in a scent yet?

I have something very special in front of me that I intend to use to create a scent very soon – a one kilo of box of saffron which costs about €20,000.

That's a lot of good risottos. When you talk about scents that are inspired by members of your family, as opposed to the ones that are designed to showcase specific raw ingredients, what is your process there?

There are two versions of this. For my grandfather’s cologne, Marcel, the formula was one we already had in my family (my father wears this). While I updated the recipe a little, it's very close to the original formula we have used for many generations. However, the fragrance dedicated to my grandmother, Adèle, was inspired by my memory of her and her love for Chanel No. 19.

And what about Léon, which was inspired by your nephew?

Yes, he’s six now, but I launched it when he was much younger. It’s really inspired by the smell of him as a baby – it’s a honeysuckle accord with orange blossom and sandalwood. But there's also an accord of dirty teddy bear in there.

I love a fantasy accord like that…

Me too. For our latest fragrance, Au Pied du Rosier [“at the foot of the rosebush”], I wanted to recreate the smell of new shoes, so we created a sneaker accord. We made another fragrance just for fun with a tennis ball accord. I love to try to transcribe a very abstract thing or object into a scent.

Now your brand is a decade old, what do you want to achieve in the future?

I want to keep the MarieJeann house small and propose very unique fragrances with an extremely high quality, but still at reasonable prices. And my ultimate goal is to open a boutique in Grasse. In the meantime, we are going to release some very, very cool projects this year – they’re going to be a big game changer for us.

Discover more at mariejeanne.fr