This is actually a happy post although the title let ‘s you guess it might not be. The postman was busy yesterday, bringing me a lot of things: fragrant raw materials that I have been waiting for since….October 2011!  Finally, I have (almost) all ready to mix Loretta, the second fragrance from the Tableau de Parfums series. These fragrances in the Tableau de Parfums series are  inspired by movie portraits in Woman’s Picture, a film created by Brian Pera, but -contrary to what I read the other day in a comment- they are not celebrity scents or perfume made for a particular human being. I think that’s important to mention again.

Loretta will launch in autumn 2012 and it is getting time to produce it. One message from this post is: if you see a fragrance in the shelfs in autumn 2012, its logistics and production started eventually 12 months ago. Add another 12-24 months for its creation and you have timeline from start to launch of 2-3 years.  Frightening, isn’t it? Right now, I am waiting for one last molecule. In the mean time, I make all ready for the launch of Miriam, the first fragrance from Tableau de Parfums, in Italy, where we plan to present it early May at Campomarzio, in Rome. I am really, very much, looking forward to presenting Miriam in Italy. I feel that Miriam will find a lot of fans in the south.

Bringing Miriam to Italy translates into some translation work, too. With the 50 ml size Miriam comes a novelette, written by Brian Pera. This novelette, called “From the desk of Miram Masterson”, shows an other sides of the character Miriam and goes beyond the movie part. Both, the story and the movie, are part of the Miriam 50 ml packaging, by the way. And for those who missed it all: Here is the Miriam packaging explained in a little vimeo video, by Andy Tauer. Just click here to get to vimeo. Thus, we will translate the novelette for Italy, and print it specifically for Italy. I insisted on this because I think the novelette it is important to fully appreciate the fragrance and the character who inspired it.

I remembered all this when I was testing the digital foto frame yesterday. Yes, there we go: I am coming to the title of this post in a second. I wanted the movie part of Tableau de Parfums to be somehow visible to perfume lovers in perfumeries in Italy. Therefore, I figured out that I will -together with my Italian partner who takes care of my fragrant babies in Italy, ProfumImport in Milano- make a display that presents Tableau de Parfums and Miriam and that shows little sections of film clips, highlighting together with text what Tableau de Parfums and Woman’s Picture and Miriam is all about.

The display will be produced in Switzerland, it will be about 50×30 cm, super expensive, and integrate a digital foto frame, 10” size, and will be really cool. I visited the company producing it all by hand, using wood, iron, cardboard, printed fabric and the digital frame. From a commercial point of view it might not make sense. In a sense that I will not get it paid back in a year or two. But I think from an artistic and communication point of view it makes much sense. And not everything I do must make sense from a commercial point of view. That’s my privilege. And that’s – by the way- why you get 1,2 fragrances in my line that are ridiculously expensive to produce and do not entirely make sense from a commercial point of view.  At least not for the price tag that I mark them with. But that’s another story.

Here you see the first draft for the display that I made, asking the company to offer me 25 of these displays.

A simple sketch of the display from the side.

In the mean time, we started working seriously on it and for that I ordered the first digital frame to build the display around it. I also made a little test video to see whether it does play MPEG4 video. It arrived. It worked, but unfortunately, the screen has one line that is not ok. The frame is a simple out of the box failure and needs to be replaced. See the picture going with today’s post. There you see a little green line in the LCD display.

However, as time is short, I will ask Intenso, the company producing it, whether we can keep it for a month and then ask for a replacement, to build the prototype. I am curious to hear what they say.

Another parcel that I got: A new headphone. For my ipod and for traveling. I got it in pristine condition and can cut the world off my ears now. It feels like meditation, but without the intense work needed to find the inner calm.

There we are again: I got 5 fresh hyacinths on Saturday and enjoy their developing bloom and their fragrance. Thus, the picture of today is a quick scan of one of them, some dust removed with photoshop, but otherwise pretty “natural” and not photoshop enhanced.

I also sniffing a hyacinth sketch I made about  two weeks ago. I talked about this sketch, consisting of 20 or so ingredients here. I think I like it and will dilute now, that it has matured for two weeks. That’s about all I will do on experimental level today. I need to make more stock of a variety of samples, and box perfumes, and will do so later today, after I was successful in convincing myself to ride the bike. It is pretty chilly and the idea of getting onto the bike riding down the hill towards tauerville is not really inviting.

Furthermore, I will need to continue playing PR and come up with some text, after I played travel agency over the weekend, booking flights and hotels and trains for March and April and May. To be frank: March is going to be a  touch too much, and you will see Andy hopping  from Munich early March to Rome to New York to Paris and to Milano and then in early April to Paris again. You can expect more and all details on my travel schedules and the why soon.

Today, I will continue there where I stopped yesterday: Packing some perfume. The picture to the left gives you an idea how this is done: Take the bottled fragrance, put an inlay into the metal box, put the silver cardboard paper with my signature on top before closing the box, seal it all with the large sticker,add a little lot label and put it all into the cellophane plastic bag. Do all this 24 times and then we have the storage unit of packed perfumes filled: Cardboard boxes, holding 24 units each. In theory I try to have some stock of packed fragrance. I practice I don’t have much stock.

Actually, looking at things: quite an effort, and on the side, quite an expensive effort.  Thus, in a sense, it was a welcome reminder of a couple of things when I got my order from Caldey.

I ordered their lavender eau de toilette and got it yesterday. It is lovely, straightforward, a high quality lavender, very much praised by Luca Turin, and I wanted to get it. Smelling it was quite a strong reminder of my love for lavender. And looking at their packaging reminded me very much that at the end, at the very end, ultimately, all that matters is the juice. At least my nose works like that.

A nice reminder.

On the other hand, an opulent and dramatic  fragrance like Rose chyprée needs some sort of a packaging celebration. Thus, the world is complex, both sides are relevant and true.

So I mixed Incense rosé and Miriam yesterday. Both juices are in a safe guarded place now and mature. After mixing, carrying the two aluminum bottles with me (you see how they look in today’s picture), I realized that I actually carry quite a bit of money with me; my bookkeeper tells me so, too. We got the invoice for the latest raw material order, and I will need to order more in the coming weeks. Although, on a side note, I am shifting slightly my priorities: From availability of perfumes to cash flow. This means that I rather don’t have a fragrance in stock than blowing up my stock and reducing my company cash. This is a lesson I learned last year: We had 100% availability all year of all fragrances. This meant that my stock was always very high and that I had a lot of money blocked in stock. This year, with a couple of investments in mind and a lot of uncertainty about the markets and how the financial crisis will be dripping down, I want to have a bit less stock.

Anyhow. I just wanted to mention this issue on the side, showing you the  multitude of questions that even a very little business brings up.

Thus, the last order consisted of Iso E, Okoumal, Ambroxan, irone alpha, linalool, rose absolute, cardamom oil, Clementine oil, rose oil, ylang oil, and cistus ladaniferus essential oil &extract.

The last natural is a thrilling raw material. I mentioned it yesterday, as it is an essential part of Incense rosé. I use it since years in some of my compositions, among other things you find it in the Air du désert marocain, too. It is rather expensive, around 3000-4000 $US per kilogram. I use a quality of cistus essential oil that is standardized. It is basically the steam distilled essential oil of twigs from Cistus ladaniferus plus a bit extra added for standardization. The standardization is made by adding some of the extract that results as by product /waste in the steam distillation process. Thus, the producer adjusts each batch by adding more or less extract to make sure it smells the same, and the extract adds extra fixation power.

The scent of this raw material: Warm and woody-spicy. Not sweet balsamic like you know it from Labdanum absolute. This essential oil is more on the wild-leathery-spicy side. Very dry and warm, if this makes sense. Actually, if all goes well I will use it later today again, together with cypriol, to test an idea I have since days in my mind but not mixed in a test bottle, yet. But first things first: The travel agency tauer continues booking flights and trains and more. So far I have booked Munich, Rome, Paris, Paris again, and Rome again.  It is going to be a busy spring, a touch too busy.

Today is mixing day. And today’s picture to the left shows you the aluminum bottles from the fridge that I took out yesterday, allowing the contents to come to room temperature over night. This is important to avoid condensing water inside the bottles. I store all citrus oils, all flower absolutes, and a few specialties such as rose oil, neroli in the fridge.

I store the rest of my raw materials  in a storage room that is cool, but not cold. Part of the other material that goes into the mix you see below. The orange labels with the X mark raw materials that are dangerous for the environment if spilled in larger amounts; like natural sweet fennel oil.

Today, I will mix another batch of Miriam for use in late spring, as we start with Tableau de Parfums in Italy in spring. It is quite a rich formula and the most expensive fragrance I have in my collection. It is 25 ingredients, 14 of which are natural, including rose oil, violet leaves absolute, sandalwood, cistus oil and extract. Actually, this natural Cistus ladaniferus essential oil might be worth another post. For those of you new here: Miriam is the first fragrance of a series, called Tableau de Parfums. It is an ongoing collaboration with filmmaker Brian Pera. These scents are portraits inspired by the shorts of Brian’s ongoing film series, Woman’s Picture. Actually, these days Brian has published a series of interesting posts on Evelyn Avenue, looking back into the past year, the collaboration and some details on the movie making part. You find all this and more here, on Evelyn Avenue.

more bottles with fragrant raw materials. The white powder: Ambroxan.

And I will mix another batch of Incense rosé, lot number 007. For this I had to check all the papers, certificates for each ingredient, for compliance with the (internally defined) standards on EU allergens, appearance etc. The mixing itself is not such a big effort. You just want to make sure that you do not mess it all up as some of those ingredients like rose absolute (3500$/kg) or rose oil (12’000$/kg) are costly. The mix goes into a 12 liter aluminum can, and goes into the fridge, waiting there for 30 days, until it is going to be diluted with Ethanol and needs to wait another month.

During mixing, I need to write down all the ingredient’s lot numbers, too. These lot numbers are important for traceability; in a worst case scenario I can always pinpoint which lot of which raw material was used in what lot of what fragrance. I write it all down into a large excel and store it for 10 years on a save server online.

The other day I was in New York and talked to a few perfume lovers there. And as I learned that a lot of perfume lovers actually do not know what Lonestar means and that many lovers of my scents do not know how they are produced: There we go with a little repetition course on tauer.  Back there in NY I mentioned Lonestar Memories and that I lived in Texas once, for a while, doing a post doc in College Station, and that Lonestar Memories means bascially Texas Memories. Right now I am filtering Lonestar Memories and get it ready for a bottling party later at tauerville.

For those who are new here or think we have a marketing, sales and bottling department: No, we don’t. And yes, we bottle all our flacons ourselves. And we= me and helping hands from the W.-factor who helps from time to time.

And yes, Lonestar Memories is the scent some call  “the cowboy” scent. Back then, a while ago, when I launched it, it came with a picture, a visual referencing, tagging the scent. You see the cowboy in the post’s picture.  Initially, some perfume lovers thought it is actually me on this picture, but unfortunately, I am a bit less handsome. It is a picture I bought from an agency. Since then I get their catalog, but that’s another story.

Anyhow, I have a hat like you see it in today’s post picture and I wear jeans, all the time. Thus, I guess, a part of me is there, too.  And yes, today is Lonestar bottling day, which means: Put the juice into a dispenser (10 liters), pump 50 ml each into blue pentagonal bottles, crimp them with the manual crimping tool, put the rings around the neck, camouflaging the crimping and providing support for the top cover, polish the flacons, put the lot number label on the bottom, put the Lonestar label onto the bottle shoulder, put the black colored beech wood top cover on and put the bottles into the shelves again for later boxing into pentagonal tin boxes.

simple enough.

Yesterday, I had a first meeting where we looked into tauerville, almost two years after changing flacons and packaging. This is not always easy, as I am emotionally  linked into my products and love them just too much. Thus, in order to successfully think about tauerville’s products, I need to add a black and white filter, allowing me to see a bit clearer.  Hence today’s picture. Black and white helps to see structures and forms better, sometimes.

Two years ago we were finalizing the new tauer design and started filling juice into the new bottles. Since then we learned a few things. And the world has moved on and changed. The EURO has turned into a currency that is swooning like baroque princess laced up from head to toe. Basically this translated into less money for Andy as we could not raise prices like we should in order to compensate the weak Euro to Franc exchange rate.  Europe is heading for a recession (again) and some countries in the Euro zone are shaken very hard already. Thus, hard times ahead. And it does not look like things are going to change that fast when it comes to Europe. At some point I will need to draw consequences on the changing economic environment here.

Those of you who follow this blog for a while know that I worry little about things, but just try to anticipate things and try to create the best environment for my creative venture: besides all the economic things, tauerville is about scents and perfumes, and the key goal will always be allowing me to create.

Thus, we moved on ; learned a few tricks and we learned a few things that don’t work they way we imagined. Like the inlay for the metal boxes; there we had to change from solution A to solution B to solution C.

Thus, we looked into numbers, ideas, visions and worries for the next 3 years to come. It will be my job in the coming weeks to lay out the plan of what will remain and what needs a polishing and what needs to be changed completely. Let’s call it evidence based adjustment. Excel , I am coming…

I think it is already a good guess expecting 2012 to be a year of conceptual work and 2013 to be the year where we introduce the changes.  Exciting!

Equally exciting is the latest addition I got for my raw materials collection: Labdanum absolute decolorized. I love this so much.

Welcome to a new week! Let’s see where we will be at the end of the coming days. I got another bunch of hyacinths, all pink, and smelling rather differently compared to the blue ones I got two weeks ago. They are much less metallic but rather powdery sweet, with a spicy undertone and only little green tonalities. Actually, very little green here. And their scent changes. I got them on Saturday, all buds still closed. They did not smell at all. Almost. Now they are in full bloom and the scent has changed from yesterday’s gourmand like sweetness to a more stingy, a bit more belligerent variant.

No wonder, I fooled around a bit yesterday, circling the flowers so to say, squeezing in a moment with these flowers and a few fragrant raw materials, such as phenylpropanol, lilial, phenylpropanal and roses et al. Phenylpropanal is interesting as you find it naturally in hyacinth, lilac, and cinnamon bark. It smells fresh, green, metallic, aggressive and is super potent. I think I will use about 0.1% in the diluted fragrance. Much more you do not want to put in there, I think. Well, I guess it is a question of how much of metallic green you like.

And somewhere in between, I circled the flowers with my i-pad, sketching one little flower using the drawing app, observing its symmetry, and how it is broken, the colors, the shapes.

Thus, yesterday was very busy, in all possible ways, and it saw us getting more air du désert marocain ready for bottling today. But I managed to do the weekly jogging including some hard core brand and numbers thinking, in preparation for this week’s meetings. There, at the meetings, we will try to come up with a master plan for the next 1-2 years. I need to come up with some core decisions like how many scents more do I want. And when. And in what kind of bottles. And for what price. For whom. All very good questions. Right now, I worry about the number of scents that I have not published. I have a couple of colognes ready, two three other fragrances sit in Excel, and I simply have not decided what to do with them. If I was a painter it would be simple: Just hang the paintings up, in a gallery, or another public place and share them. Scents are different. A whole factory has to be turned on in order to share a new creation. And once it is out, there is an expectation that it will always smell the same, look the same, cost the same and be available all the time.

And while everyone seems to be interested in new fragrances, asking for more, and more new scents, everybody seems to complain about too many fragrances appearing and too little time to follow what’s new. Not easy, right?

These, and other questions such as profitability, and volumes and work load will be on the table tomorrow.

Ultimately, the goal is to continue building an environment that allows  being creative without having to compromise too much.

Today’s picture: Another shot taken yesterday, of the hyacinth flowers. Their waxy flowers are almost translucent in bright sunlight.

Maybe, if all goes well, I will have some time to draw another hyacinth on the pad. Let’s hope for best.

I wish you a lovely weekend.

today’s picture: Hyacinth, seen this morning in the living room.

I am back from New York since Wednesday where the shopping related credit card damage got not into substantial area. I guess I was just too busy meeting people and talking. Imagine: I did not even buy jeans… A few books on illustrations and packaging are on the shopping list and decorate the coffee table now. I am looking forward to getting inspired and learning how other illustrators work.

One of the reasons to get to NY: I visited MIN, the niche perfumery in the middle of New York and loved it so much! Thus, you will soon see me there again, presenting Tauer flacons and juices.

Since I am back  I am rather busy getting things done. I just finished an interview this instance and will soon head down to the factory, bottling Orange Star, the last 100 bottles of the last batch. I am still in a waiting position for the new batch. Besides Orange Star that should go into production in this month, I have other sourcing issues. Zeta is on the waiting list and I am down to 50 bottles. And no stock. Getting raw materials has become an issue again these days.

Thus, all back to normal. Perfumery business is also very much a logistics business. A rather tough logistics business. I have to work on that over the weekend. It will be rather long and busy.

Optimistic as I am , I am looking forward to actually mixing and getting some production done  in January and February, in order to get ready for spring 2012. NY will hopefully soon see me again. I plan to go there again in March. I guess I will buy jeans then. On another happy travel note: I just booked my Paris train ticket. But Paris is worth another post.

Today’s picture shows you some perspective: Metro in New York.