Baptiste: Maman is an amazing person. She’s the most faithful person I know and has great emotional intelligence. It’s great to work with someone like that, with who trust cannot be broken; I know I can count on her at all times. She’s also truly a genius at what she does, and she’s very weird sometimes but I think every son finds his mother weird.
Marie-Lise: Baptiste was always brilliant at school, he was always very creative. He’s always positive and loves peace and seeing people happy, he hates hurting and criticising others. His dream has always been to create a maison, and so creating Ormaie was all his idea.

I have always loved creation, and in the process there’s a need to express emotions through different media. So, even though my career was going well, it was more important to me at the time to express this. I also have always loved artisans. I remember as a kid walking in front of shoe stores and just wanting to go inside and watch people work. I have always had a passion for people who work with their hands, and to be close to them you really need a maison.
I just love looking at the Heidelberg machines from the 19th century that hot stamps our paper, or go into flower fields to cultivate, or watch craftsmen polishing the wood of our caps. A family business also allows you to have a very focused vision and, for us, it was all about creativity and the product. The shift therefore came more as a necessity than a real decision.

Yes, the attention to detail is one. There are definitely some aesthetic codes which stay in your mind from childhood. I think also that it affected our link to smells and fragrances, and me and Maman both have a very similar olfactive culture – but that I think it’s quite different to everyone. I used to stay from a small age in temples in Thailand for example, my parents would keep me there during the day and I would spend the days in the incense and come back full of talk and powder. We lived on the beach and on a boat surrounded by flowers, so I think the link to nature was also quite special.

We work very well together. What is amazing about working with your family is that at the end of the day, you know you can count on the other person and there is nothing that will be able to destroy that, which makes you more confident. And when it comes to perfume, it is something very special. I lived with my grandparents for a while in the French countryside, and when we develop new scents, I can just say to Maman, ‘this smells so much like the soap in my grandma’s kitchen’, and she knows exactly that I am talking about Liz.

I just think there is something so beautiful and elegant about nature. There is definitely a poetry and such elegance to a flower growing and then cultivating it to making an essence. We simply do it because we find it very chic. I love the fact that it is directly linked to earth.  The main secret is time and the quality of the raw materials, we really wanted the scents to be exceptional and there was no way we would make concessions on that.
We worked for nearly two years to develop the scents, we had to learn how to work with natural ingredients but I feel like you can smell it, and there is something special about the smell. Natural also needs to rest longer than synthetics, and before putting the fragrances in the bottles, we let the essences unite for three months in order for the full composition to develop.

Yes. I think when you try to make something beautiful it also needs to be good. The words are very close in French, ‘beau’ and ‘bon’. I also truly believe that when people are very careful about the extreme quality of their products, they’re very careful about the way it is made and you can feel it in the objects. This is something that I think comes quite intuitively and that a lot of people now feel closer too.

It’s part of the creative process and it’s part of working with great artists. When it came to the typography, Jade Lombard, with whom I work very closely in all design aspects, quickly realised that we needed to work with a typography that brought life to the letters. We worked with Jean Baptiste Levée and we quickly realised that every letter would need an alteration so we could play with it. We almost have two alphabets.
We had many inspirations with the typography and we really wanted to play with it. In Yvonne, for example, we decided that the ‘n’ would be less classic than the ‘n’ in Papier Carbone because it was important to bring a modernity to that classic French name, like we brought modernity to the classic perfume.

It always begins with a desire to find a smell that comes from a memory or a moment. It can be the memory of a person or of a moment. I worked for a while in the jungle in South America. That is where l’Ivrée Bleue comes from, it is that animal narcotic feeling that you can feel in the jungle. We worked around a beautiful dark vanilla from Madagascar, added cacao Rhum and Iris in order to get the very addictive fragrance. It’s to me almost like a painting of ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau, you can see the darkness of the jungle with touches of vivid colours in some places. Toï toï toï means ‘good luck’ in German, it’s what is said to performers before they go on stage. It’s quite theatrical with a lot of different beautiful woods like the ones you can smell in an opera.

It’s very important, it’s very long nights of wine discussions and books. It can take me so long but sometimes, in a conversation you just find it and you know it’s the one. It’s a very hard process for me.

I like them all but I wear Le Passant, it’s about my father. Maman wears Yvonne, it’s about her mother.