Interview with Claude Marchal (MDCI)

04/05/09 12:39:45

We are delighted to introduce to you MDCI Parfums and its founder Claude Marchal, a very talented and pleasant person. MDCI Parfumes is a selective and luxury French house that was built on the philosophy that fine fragrances are an art more than an industry, and should be a source of pleasure, pride and beauty more than a simple commodity.

How the idea of MDCI was born and who helped you to realize it?

Well, it goes back to the mid-nineties, I was working for a well-know group of fragrances and cosmetics and became disanchanted with the lack of creativity, the prevailing me-too attitude and the lack of vision: perfumery was bound only to go more and more mass, and crass, as the dream and romance, the passion at the heart of the love of the art of fragrance were replaced by the demands of accountants and finance types.

I thought, something can be done, why not try myself? (unaware of how difficult it would be!).

To do something radically diffferent, one had to start by....the bottle; everyone out there seemed to buy the same type of ugly bottle from the same suppliers; I could draw decently, had a couple of ideas, scribbled a few sketches on a bit of paper and decided to go ahead. The content would come after, I had some connections on which I knew I could rely.

Who is the designer of the bottles?

I am, and I also sculpted the little busts; the masculine figure was relatively easy, there existed an original model in the Louvre and at the Vatican Museum to draw inspiration from (I deliberately chose the intimidating emperor Caracalla, going against the easy path which would have consisted in chosing a pretty-looking young man... the present model is beautifully ugly, it does add a dimention in my opinion...).

The little lady was much much more difficult; I finally found the correct model and style after asking my wife's hair dresser to sit. She is pretty and not a real beauty, not a professional model, for sure.
But it took a lot of work to reach something nice and dignified, so as to avoid falling into kitch and cliché. She is sweet and kind, my type of woman!

Some niche houses use simple flacons, the point of which is not to attract attention on themselves more than on fragrance itself.

You see, for me, for a complete experience and pleasure, a perfume must be a completely satisfying object; the best scent in the world in an ugly flask means nothing; Coty, Lalique, have taught us precious lessons, we owe it to them, to our clients and to ourselves to try our utmost to do as well.

It means taking risks, and working hard... and paying the price; our bottles are ours, made with our own moulds, it means a real investment.

Most "niche" brands decide to use cheap off-the shelf, stock bottles which cost a few cents; this is not possible if one wants to do something really coherent and honestly claim a share of the upper segment of the market.

Obviously, bottle design is very important to you, but your customer chooses a flacon and a fragrance independently. Is there no connection between flacons and fragrances in your case?

We have different types of clients, and different solutions. Some are pure bottle collectors, who have snappped most of the crystal flacons we started with, and many of the "bisque" spray bottles thatb hey consoder as decorative objects.

Some are pure perfume players, attracted mainly by the content: packaging and bottle have little or no importance. Therefore the content must be up to the positionning of the brand, this is why we work with certain perfumers, leaving them all freedom to compose what they have in mind.

To these clients, we offer the possiblity to buy "refills", which are in fact the same bottles as the luxury presentations, without the fancy stoppers...

And to offer a lower entry point into the line, we sometimes sell "juice" in simple aluminium spray containers at a competitive price...

Some are attracted by the "whole" product, see it both as a pretty object and a convenient perfumery item, which can be changed when empty as the artsy stoppers can be kept to be fitted on a new "refill".
They have a choice to buy any particular fragrance, and any refill....

About the names of your perfumes. At the beginning each of them had a number as a name (FK1, FK2, FK3), now they have beautiful descriptive names, some of them originate from the great modern novels. Who chooses the names for your scents?

Well, I did, this is a very interesting and complex aspect of perfume creation. Without a good name, difficult to make a lasting impression. Names have been trademarked by the thousands since the dawn of the age of modern perfumery, finding a good one id really hard; finding several even more. But it is also a lot of fun, and very pleasurable as we sometimes reach here the borders of poetry; the guys at Serge Lutens have come up with beautiful names, why resonate wonderfuly (in french, at least); so they opened avenues, I only tread in their steps, relying on inspiration, luck, serendipity... FK1 , FK2 and FK3 were just temporary code names for the three juices composed by Francis Kukdjian.

Take Péché Cardinal, for example: the jest here, for there is one (or at least an attempt) is a bit more than a play of words between "Péché" (sin) and Pêcher (peachtree).

The effect in French comes from the contradiction between "péché", (sin), and "cardinal": in french, when we talk of a "vertu cardinale", it means one of the four fundamental (hence cardinal, from the latin cardo which means "hinge") christian virtues: la prudence (prudence), la tempérance (temperance), la force (strenght) et la justice (..justice!), which are completed by the three theologal virtues, la foi (faith), l'espérance (hope) et la charité (charity).

Here, "cardinal" instead of being associated to "very important, key, fundamental major" virtues, is associated with.....SIN! (péché, which in french sounds like pêcher, or peachtree...). So here we have a sin that one MUST commit! And the scent does contains some peach...

This may sound very sophisticated, but on the other hand, Invasion Barbare is the result of too many glasses of good Bordeaux wine with friends on the eve of a deadline to trademark a name before starting marketing the scent... Le Rivage des Syrtes (from the novel by French author Julien Gracq) fitted perfectly Patricia de Nicolaï's own description, the story of a lone sailor travelling from island to island and gathering, on the shores or inland, fragrant objects and things to bring back for his beloved one...

So, imagination, poetry and a touch of fantasy play a great role in the naming of fragrances, after which one has to face reality with the possiblity or not to trademark the names chosen.

Do you take part in the juice creating? Does a creator have any guidelines?

I usually leave it to the perfumer to do pretty much what he wants, with no limits, only simple indications like "I want something fresh and fruity with touches of white flowers, or something a bit retro, with a lot of depht" etc. When the first rough formulas arrive, we sit down, and decide to modify this or that, to abandon a direction and pick another one, until we are both happy with the result. For one scent which makes it to the end, I receive probably 30 to 40. but sometimes a scent is so perfect there is no need to tune it, like Invasion Barbare... We often turn down pretty amazing formulas which are sometimes submitted for evaluation: too extreme or even frankly horrible, to tell the truth...

Do you plan to extend the range of flacon and stopper designs?

For the present very busy with the current line; different stoppers mean a lot of work, $$$$$$, and time. We have requests for miniatures, for giant bottles, for more luxurious versions, for more affordable versions, for simpler versions, you name it!

The best perhaps is to give time to time and to take it one day at a time...