A decade ago, no one in the perfume industry knew about Christopher Chong. Chong, a lyric baritone with a master's degree in literature, didn't know much about perfume beyond the classic bottles either. But now, there is no aficionado of eau de parfum out there who doesn't know who Chong is.
Chong sits as the creative director of the Omani luxury fragrance brand Amouage, which was established in 1982. Despite having no background in perfumery, his larger-than-life character impressed David Crickmore, the CEO who had been brought in to reinvent the floundering brand in 2006, as he had been searching for a fresh pair of eyes outside the industry to take on the creative director role.
Chong's invitingly poetic way of perceiving perfumes got himself the full-time position after he had carried out a splendid job for his one-off task to create the brand's 25th anniversary fragrance collection. He marked his triumphant debut with "Jubilation 25" for women and "Jubilation XXV" for men, for which he marketed with a fascinating tale of a nymph to give his concoctions a fairy-tale quality apart from their potent scent.
With overwhelming feedback from press and customers for the new storytelling approach came the beautiful comeback of the brand and the direction it should take. The following fragrance collections were set on the same theme until the end of what he calls his "first cycle". Now at the second cycle, Chong is now poised to talk more about himself through his perfumes.
Chong was in Bangkok in the middle of October to promote his newest collection "Sunshine", just in time for the end of the rainy season following the launch of the brand earlier this year in the country. "Sunshine Women's" notes include Blackcurrant, Almond and Osmanthus while "Sunshine Men's" top keynote is lavender.
Life sat down with him to talk about his singular journey through the world of scent and sensibility.
When you started, why did you decide to take the brand away from what your competition was doing?
I thought there must be a way to engage with customers. How do you engage with your customers? Well, Mass Prestige would engage with customers through a story of sex: boy meets girl and they have sex. That's the way to sell perfumes. But this brand is different. It's classier. People ask me how come you don't have a supermodel in your campaign and I say: "Well, you pay a million pounds for supermodels so they will go to your press launch to have photographs with the press and the customers and then when they do interviews, supermodels say: 'It's nice, I love it. It's my favourite perfume'." Of course, you say that if you got paid a million dollars. So I said maybe I do things differently.
At one point, why did you think it was time to enter the second cycle where the focus is more about you than tales about the nymph?
From a marketing standpoint, I could not do it for the first six years. But I was having a little bit of myself behind each character I developed. For example, "Jubilation" was about hope. That was an aspect in me. I'm hiding myself, my wish, my desire behind the character. I expressed myself through a fictionalised character.
People say your 'artistic' perfumes are too complicated for regular use. What do you think?
There are some perfumes that are harder to understand. It's not because of the perfume itself, but our noses are not trained. We train our ears as we listen to music, we train our eyes as we watch films and arts every day. But how often do we train our noses? How often do we smell the food that we are eating? When we go to a new environment and we take a deep breath, how often do we say how we describe this smell? We don't know how to describe scent, do we? We don't. An average person doesn't. An average person can only detect, smell fresh clean scent, like fresh laundry. Anything that is different to an average nose, they don't know. They are not trained yet. But I have faith in some people, give them time and they will develop. I'm not too worried about it since the market is big enough for different types of perfumes.
With its degree of potency, do you think it fits with the tropical climate in Thailand?
It's not heavy. It's quality. I could make a lot more money by actually reducing the potency of the fragrance by reducing the concentration. But that doesn't give you that journey. Because smelling perfume is a journey. You need the kind of potency that we put in to the high concentration level of 20%. Not many people do 20% because it costs a lot of money. Perfume evolves, changes throughout the day so we won't have much experience if the perfume lasts only 40 minutes to one hour. It comes and goes. But for ours, it takes you to different sensory stages.
How do you think the perfume industry is going to change?
Well, who knows? When I started the brand I had high hope for the artistry. The artistry is going down, in my opinion. Lack of artistry and lack of originality. People take less risk. So, in many ways, I can't worry too much about where the industry is going, but on the other hand, customers are getting better. Customers are improving. They accept that perfume is subjective.
