Bernard Alain Portelli, senior vice president of the Colber Group and developer of the perfume Les Fleurs de Claude Monet

"When we have a name like that, Claude Monet, the idea of going to a museum is fairly easy," he said. Price Is $65

For three years the perfume had been sold only at the Monet Museum in Giverny, France, where the Impressionist lived. It is now sold in 32 American museums, including the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Mr. Portelli said, and the company has no plans to alter the bottle size or sell the perfume in department stores.

"I still want to keep it kind of different and exclusive and connected to art," he said. "I don't want to have a product that's too commercial." About 10,000 bottles have been shipped to American museums so far.

Lingering impressions A Monet scent to wear
N.Y. Times News
THE BALTIMORE EVENING SUN
The flowers and gardens in Claude Monet's paintings, whose colors and sense of romance have touched art lovers for generations, inspired a perfume.

The fragrance, Les Fleurs de Claude Monet, is sold at The Baltimore Museum of Art, just the right sensual touch to the exhibit Claude Monet: Impressionist Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, which opens here Oct. 13.

The perfume is a blend of jasmine, iris, lily of the valley, white rose and daffodil, with a touch of lavender and an ambergris base.

The manufacturer and distributor of the French perfume, the Colber Group of Washington, sells it only in museum gift shops.

"I think it's very clever because you don't have to have a lot of investment" in advertising and store promotion, said Annette Green, executive director of the Fragrance Foundation, an industry group.

Bernard Alain Portelli, senior vice president of the Colber Group and developer of the perfume, acknowledged that cost was one reason to limit distribution to museums. But he also said part of the approach seemed obvious.

"When we have a name like that, Claude Monet, the idea of going to a museum is fairly easy," he said.

For three years the perfume had been sold only at the Monet Museum in Giverny, France, where the Impressionist lived. It is now sold in 32 American museums, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution and the Phillips Collection in Washington.

"I want to keep it kind of different and exclusive and connected to art," says Portelli. "I don't want to have a product that's too commercial."

Seven years ago, Portelli was working as a hairdresser and fashion designer in Paris when he met Jean Maizeret, a businessman who had just bought the marketing rights to the Monet name from the painter's estate.

"He thought it was a good investment, but he didn't know what to do with it," Portelli recalled. The two quickly came up with the idea of producing a fragrance.


The Phillips Collection is getting 24 new Monets next month but they'll be considerably less expensive than the two paintings ("On the Cliffs, Dieppe" and "The Road to Vetheuil") currently gracing the museum's walls. In fact, interested parties can walk out with a "Les Fleurs de Claude Monet" for an estimated $75.

Of course, Les Fleurs really didn't come from the brushstrokes of the French impressionist. Rather it is a perfume "inspired" by Monet, a fragrance fashioned out of memories of the luscious gardens at the artist's home in Giverny, France.

But to creator Bernard Portelli, Les Fleurs is still very much a work of art. "The idea of it is very simple," says Portelli, a Parisian hairstylist who opened the Washington salon Okyo in 1985. "Monet was blind for the last eight to 10 years of his life. If Claude Monet wanted to create something with his love of flowers, he could have done the perfume himself."


Portelli, who has collaborated on fashion projects with such designers as Yves Saint Laurent and Jean-Louis Scherrer, had the idea for creating a perfume back in 1983. A chance meeting with French businessman Jean Maizeret resulted in the perfect team: Maizeret had just purchased rights to use Monet's name, but had no products developed yet. "We were talking about different ideas because I just wanted to do a perfume," says Portelli. "The idea to get together with the {Monet} name just happened." He formed Colber Group Ltd., which now has worldwide distribution rights to the scent.

Before they could smell success, Portelli and Maizeret first had to deal with a little bureaucracy. "It took us a long time to get the final approval from the French government because in {the licensing of} art, everything is controlled by the government. That took us two years just for the approval to use Monet's name on a perfume."

The bureaucratic tango turned out to be the easy part. To re-create the gardens of Giverny, Portelli made up an exact list of flowers Monet cultivated at the turn of the century. "Among those flowers, we picked up ... the best flowers to mix together {including jasmine, iris, lily of the valley, white rose, daffodil and lavender}. From that choice, it took a long time to make because when we create a perfume, the nez can only smell three times a day." It has something to do with the expert smeller's olfactory nerves and other such biological quirks. Not exactly a scientific process, but it was important to Portelli that his perfume was made "not in an industrial way."


After three years of research, Portelli was satisfied with the blend. He picked a small, family-run business in Normandy to make the extracts and got Pierre Dinand, known for his perfume bottles for Paco Rabanne and Givenchy III, to design the packaging. The first lots of Les Fleurs were sold at the Giverny museum. The Phillips Collection's first order of 24 bottles is expected to arrive in mid-November.

"From the beginning to the end, we made the choice to market the product in a museum," says Portelli. "We could have gone directly to department stores, but we really did not want to do anything too commercial because of Claude Monet," as if the mere mention of the artist's name explains everything.

So far, Colber Group has received orders for "Les Fleurs" from 25 museums around the country, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. The Phillips will be the only local museum to carry the fragrance.


Of his unconventional distribution method, Portelli says: "We don't only want to make money. We want to have a classic scent and a classic image... . We won't sell millions of bottles, but we'll sell a lot. We'll make enough money to create more perfume products."

Ссылки: