While attending Oxford University, Owen Mears, the founder of Ffern, a natural-fragrance company, grew flowers and herbs in his dorm room, re-planting new ones every academic term to match the changing seasons. Mears, 29, missed Exmoor, the small Somerset town where he grew up. “It was like he was trying to re-create the countryside,” says Emily Cameron, 34, his older sister and Ffern’s creative director.
Mears didn’t understand how much he loved the olfactory experience of his home, which is near the first biodynamic herb farm in Europe, until he left for university, in 2012. “For Em and me, and for everyone in our village, it was overwhelmingly the case that we experienced nature through the sense of smell,” he says.
Mears became obsessed with fragrance, “almost seduced by” it. He “started to feel this growing disillusionment” when he discovered how detached the perfume industry is from nature, that most perfumes are composed of laboratory-made ingredients, rather than compounds directly derived from trees, plants, and flowers. With that, the idea for Ffern was born.
Launched in 2017, the Somerset-based, environmentally conscious company reconnects perfumery to its historical roots and artisanal past, prioritizing ingredients and creativity over glossy marketing and simplified synthetic formulas. “From the very beginning, we had this real vision that we wanted to become the most serious natural-perfume makers in the world,” says Mears.
The natural-perfume business was just starting in 2017, so the siblings have spent the last seven years establishing methods to make their fragrances. Synthetic scents are made of single-molecule chemicals produced in a lab, “so they’re very, very simple, and they’re very, very consistent,” Mears tells me. A natural oil might contain 500 different molecules, creating a complex mixture that continuously ages and evolves. “We’re always trying to predict what it’s going to look like after two or three months of barrel aging,” says Mears.
Owen Mears became obsessed with fragrance, “almost seduced by” it.
Cameron and Mears work collaboratively with two French perfumers, François Robert and Elodie Durande. They speak with Durande on the phone every day to discuss the fragrances in development. To address aging and embrace seasonality, they produce four new Ffern fragrances a year, released at every equinox and solstice.
Customers cannot just stop by their store, in London’s SoHo, to purchase a bottle. Rather, they must join the “ledger,” a membership system. By producing one bottle of perfume for every member, the company maintains a small-batch production process and minimizes waste. Ffern’s packaging is made without plastic and with 95 percent recycled materials. Their bottle is one of the first in the industry to be entirely recyclable.
Mears and Cameron hope their clients will form a personal connection with each of their scents. They emphasize the importance of intimacy, building each fragrance from a memory or nostalgic feeling.
Their latest fragrance, which is available now, focuses on rhubarb. As children, Mears and Cameron ate rhubarb desserts every spring because their grandfather grew multiple varieties. “He became sort of a mad-engineer figure,” says Mears. Rhubarb does not have a fragrant oil to extract, so Durande re-created the simultaneous sharpness and rounded sweetness of the fruit using buchu leaf, timut pepper, ginger root, and grapefruit. “We tried to capture this sweet-sour sparkling deliciousness of forced rhubarb specifically grown in Yorkshire,” Cameron tells me. “This,” Mears says, “is a testament to the art form of natural perfumery.”
Jeanne Malle is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL