Guest Lecture: Régime des Fleurs' Alia Raza

+ a Glossier OG joins Substack, Deloitte layoffs.

Good morning everyone. Thrilled to publish the first Guest Lecture on Feed Me, where Alia Raza discusses packaging choices, doubling the Régime des Fleurs business organically over the past year, and the implications of fragrance dupes.

In today’s letter:

• I speak to Glossier OG

  Annie Kreighbaum
  about her new Substack

• Bad news for Frog Club

• Bad news for people who make over $151k a year

But first…

GUEST LECTURE: Alia Raza, Founder, CEO & Creative Director of Régime des Fleurs

This week I’m introducing a new Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. 

In this series, I’ll introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to submit questions to them.

I wanted to capture the spirit of that (sometimes unhinged) guest lecturer who would come into your class on a Friday, drop more knowledge than you learned all year, maybe hit on a student, and then leave forever.  Our guest lecture next week will be with a GP at Andreessen Horowitz, so if you want to be a part of that make sure you’re a paid reader!

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Alia, I’m interested in what you’re seeing trending in fragrance and how you’re adding new fragrances to the line accordingly:

The biggest shift in the fragrance industry has been the move towards gourmands, which really started with Mugler’s Angel in the 90’s. People kept saying it was a trend, but decades later it’s here to stay. Right now the most requested perfumes at Luckyscent are photorealistic gourmands—perfumes that smell like sticking your nose in whipped cream or caramel or an oven of cookies. The market has exploded—there are $400 perfumes based on marshmallows, and I've even spotted vanilla scented garbage bags at the grocery store. 

I’d resisted making gourmands since the beginning, because I’ve always preferred flowers, plants, resins, woods. But I had a recent bite of a chocolate jasmine cake in Paris and a honey saffron pudding in Los Angeles that inspired me. Yesterday, I was reflecting on capturing the notes of a silver spoon or a porcelain bowl in a sundae. If we’re going to do it, I’d like to do something truly innovative that changes the category. 

regimedesfleurs

A post shared by @regimedesfleurs

Can you talk about the proliferation of luxury perfume “dupe” brands like Dossier and Alt Fragrance, which seem to be gaining in popularity for “replicating” popular scents at a fraction of the price? Is this a concern for brands like yours?

Dupes are like fast fashion. Consumers can choose to be part of something real that they believe in and are inspired by, something that happens when an artist puts a lifetime’s worth of ideas into their work—or they can settle for copies. 

I started making perfumes by hand and fell in love with rare floral absolutes, and to this day we use a high percentage of rare and exquisite ingredients,  which is not the case even for many luxury brands. It’s really apparent in the first handmade extract from back in 2014 which we still make, Nymphaea Caerulea ($990). We are the only brand in the world that has access to this rare vintage extraction of sacred Egyptian blue water lily—two acre sized ponds collected before sunrise in India, distilled into a few bottles. That can’t be duped! 

I am curious about Alia's thoughts on how you manage/grow something with such a clear and specific and unique vision - in other words how do you balance the "art" and "commerce" of it?