Cult fragrance brand Byredo just opened a whopping great big store in Soho—take a look inside

Cult Swedish fragrance brand Byredo is a unique success story. Founded by Ben Gorham — a former basketball star and art school graduate with no formal training as a perfumer — in 2006, the brand rose to acclaim through its alternative take on fragrance.

At a time when many luxury houses found commercial success through glossy celebrity advertising and floral scents, Byredo was part of a wave of niche, high-end fragrance brands, including Frédéric Malle, Diptyque and Le Labo that offered more unique scents to the saturated £39 billion global fragrance market.

Byredo fragrances have names like Blanche, a clean scent with notes of white rose, and Palermo, a citrusy perfume, and come packaged in a simple, cylinder-shaped glass bottle with a white label with a black dome-shaped cap. All very chic.

Fast-forward 12 years and the company has an annual revenue of £33m, a flagship in New York (which opened in 2015) and, as of this week, a vast flagship in London’s Soho. The London shop has taken over a five-storey townhouse (three floors for the store and the top two floors for office space) where fragrances, beauty and leather goods are displayed against a minimal backdrop of pine, marble and glass.

“London had been on the top of my list for a few years in terms of opening a store, but I was waiting for the right space and location,” Gorham tells the Standard. “I initially looked at the more traditional luxury streets in London but I didn’t feel it really had the same relevance that I’d been hoping for in terms of our following and our clients in London. It wasn’t unique being one amongst many, that wasn’t really part of our ethos, so we broadened the search. I liked Soho because I really remembered it buzzing 10 or 12 years ago.”

The ground and first floors are traditional retail space, the second is a gallery space which Byredo will use to host events, talks and artist residences. “We do a lot of collaborations and launches and creative projects and I love the idea of having a kind of neutral backdrop to express those projects,” says Gorham. “It’s not about yoga classes, if you know what I mean.”

Over the past five years, Byredo has added beauty to its offering and in September 2017, it debuted a line of luxury leather goods, including handbags, wallets and cardholders, which are also on display in the London store. Furniture and ceramics are, says Gorham, in the pipeline

The bag collection on display is the brand’s fourth, and the first Gorham has been truly happy with. “I had a very high position on how these bags were to be constructed,” he said. “It’s taken 1000 prototypes and 100 trips back and forth but this season is the first time where I feel I’m truly capturing the initial idea of how I imagined the bags in both class and quality.”

While Gorham has no intention of ever starting a fashion line, the move into accessories felt like a natural one. “I think the intimacy of a bag, and the intimacy that women have with handbags especially, is quite similar to the intimacy they have with fragrance,” he explains. “A lot of women will carry one bag yet change their outfit every day – so fashion is this revolving part of their identity and expression and a bag is kind of this constant. Our idea with Byredo has always been to take a really long time to make near-perfect objects and goods that people can wear for a very long time – it’s the reason we’re not fit for fashion.”

He's equally particular when it comes to formulating a scent and carries a journal for noting inspiration with him at all times. “I don’t like common smells, I like unusual smells. For me smelling things that I haven’t smelt before is the big fascination.”

“When an idea is strong enough in my mind, I create a brief where I describe not only the smell but the emotion. I use anything from pictures of poetry to cinema to music, to science, which I always present to the perfumer in person.” Often, a Byredo fragrance starts with a very specific memory. Encens Chembur, for example, is based on recollections of visiting his mother’s hometown outside Mumbai and the permeating scent of incense from the town’s Hindu temples: “I based a fragrance on that incense, and added certain elements.”

Gorham, who doesn’t wear a fragrance himself (partly due to the constant olfactory demands of the job, partly because, somewhat ironically, it’s not really his thing. “Honestly I have never really been that guy who wore fragrance,”) is intensely focussed on creating a product he personally deems perfect, and insists he’s not motivated by creating something with broad appeal.