Ben Gorham, the unlikely perfumer

The first thing Ben Gorham (Stockholm, 47 years old) says after greeting and shaking hands with everyone is “I’m tired”. “An hour ago I was fine, but suddenly the crisis fell on me.” jet lag“I’m not going to sleep anymore,” he says in a surprisingly soft voice as he places his tattooed, almost two-metre-tall body on a designer chair. Someone mentions the idea of ​​a coffee as an antidote to sleep. “They’re taking care of it,” he replies, although coffee never appeared during the interview.

Gorham has all the qualities of a creative: being, above all, an atypical person. He was born in Stockholm to an Indian mother and a half-Scottish, half-Canadian father. He finished high school in New York, studied at a university in Toronto, and later graduated from art school in Stockholm. In between, several things happened that changed his life. “From the age of 7 to 22 I was a basketball player,” says the person who was born in 2013. The New York Times baptized as “the prince of perfumes”While studying in Toronto, he played for his university team, Ryerson. An article from 2002 refers to him as “one of the most talented players in Ryerson basketball history.” A promising career as an athlete awaited him so, aware of his possibilities, he left university and returned to Sweden to play in the Swedish league without counting on his wings being cut by the gray rigidity of bureaucracy. “I was forced to stop playing because I needed a European passport to do so and I was a Canadian citizen. It was the only thing I had done in my entire life and suddenly I found myself in crisis.” From that crisis Byredo was born.

With her dream dashed and after finishing art school, Gorham met Swedish perfumer Pierre Wulff. “I was fascinated by the idea that you can transport people through smell and I asked him to help me translate very specific memories into a fragrance.” Those memories were the smell Gorham remembered from her biological father, a man who left home when his son was a child. With the help of French perfumer Jérôme Epinette, the green bean memory she associated with him was transformed into a perfume with notes of sage, jasmine, violet and musk. It was bottled under the name Green and became the first fragrance from Byredo, a brand Gorham registered in 2005.

Subsequently, Byredo launched Encens Chembur, a perfume inspired by Chembur, the Bombay suburb where Gorham’s mother is from and which he himself defined as one of his favorites from the brand. “Probably the smell I remember most from my childhood is that of India. Good and bad smells. Even when opening the plane door, the smell was already very specific,” he recalls. Then came collaborations with brands like Off-White, Ikea or Travis Scott, and his greatest success: Bal d’Afrique, inspired by the diaries that his father wrote about his days on the African continent.

Mumbai Noise smells of wood and sandalwood, and it’s also the smell that permeates the Byredo studio in a residential neighborhood of Stockholm. With open spaces and windows that look out onto the bright green of the trees surrounding the building that was once a factory
that made components for phones, the studio is the logistics center of the brand’s operations, although Gorham currently lives in Miami with his two daughters and his wife. In the offices there are creative boards where ideas for campaigns are born, wide tables with computers, thirty employees between 30 and 40 years old who wear casual but designer clothes, an industrial kitchen to make the fikathe Swedish coffee break, and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with art books. “Ben doesn’t read but he gets inspiration from art books,” explains Erica Persson, the brand’s communications director. “I’m dyslexic, I’m a terrible reader,” he adds. Poetry, however, is at the heart of his creations.

The name Byredo itself, which comes from the English of Shakespeare’s time, is an abbreviation of “by redolence”, which means reminiscence and sweet aroma. “This is a company but, more importantly, this is a vehicle for storytelling,” explains Gorham. Built on memories of Freudian overtones, packaging inspired by Nordic minimalism, evocative names (one of its best-selling fragrances is Rose of no Man’s Land, which smells of flowers and is a tribute to the nurses who saved the lives of thousands of soldiers during the two world wars) and an aura of sophistication that does not need celebrities to advertise its scents, Byredo has gone from being a niche brand to a consolidated company and Gorham has gone from athlete to businessman who takes advantage of his disciplined and competitive mentality earned on the court. “My idol as a child was Michael Jordan. My inspiration today continues to be Michael Jordan.”

If in 2019 Byredo recorded a turnover of 62 million euros, in 2021 it had a turnover of 119. And, just a year later, the family giant Puig bought the company for nearly 1,000 million euros, keeping Gorham at the helm as creative director. Today his company, which is about to turn 20 years old, is present in 1,056 points of sale and has 64 boutiques She has also created her own boutiques (30 of them in Asia-Pacific) and expanded into creams, candles, jewelry, Tuscan leather handbags and makeup by makeup artist Lucia Pica (her Earth Dust lipstick is Rosalía’s favorite). Still, perfumes remain her main source of income and continue to draw on Gorham’s personal ideas. “The creative process is often quite painful. It’s a real soul-searching process.”

Gorham says he feels a outsider even today in the industry (in his first press conference a French journalist asked him: “What gives you the right to make perfumes?”), and that differentiation plays in his favor. “I think the absence of background It is what gives us a unique perspective,” he says. That, and Michael Jordan.

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