Officine Universelle Buly 1803 Plots Product and Retail Expansion

MILAN — Desirability is alive and well chez Officine Universelle Buly 1803, the prestige perfume and cosmetics brand founded by Victoire de Taillac and Ramdane Touhami and acquired by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in 2021.

The label is continuing to build on its successful formula of innovative, design-driven products wrapped in retro packaging, customization services and charming stores evoking old-school apothecaries that draw queues of clients around the world.

In particular, the company has beefed up its lifestyle category with unexpected objects, such as a 120-euro sculptural metallic box with scented spheres to hang in closets or cars and 48-euro ceramic pencils to dip into concentrated perfume to make desks and corporate environments more enjoyable. 

“It’s a very poetic idea,” de Taillac told WWD about the latter. “You put it in your pencil case at your office and when you bend down to type on your computer or write something, you can smell it. It’s really about perfuming a very small space, like your table: It’s only for you, but maybe it reactivates your brand in a different way when you work.”

These new additions join popular items already in Buly’s lifestyle assortment, such as scented matches and perfumed vegetable stones coming in ceramic boxes, as well as higher-end design pieces like the 650-euro Fragrant Lantern, consisting in a lamp heating a scented candle. 

“Of course in Buly there is the pleasure of the object because we are driven by aesthetics,” said de Taillac. “We always have this idea that, when we create something, it should be about the function but also aesthetics. It’s not that because it is useful it needs to be awful. After all, everything you see every day, it stays in your eyes, so I’d rather see something nice.”

The cofounder dismissed the idea that the stronger push into home is related to the surge of the category after COVID-19. “We did home scents since Day One, because they are so important and can change the atmosphere in the room. And we’ve been adding products over the last 10 years with different functions and ideas…It’s always been a very strong feature for us, so nothing has changed in that.”

What might be newer is a deeper exploration into wellness, as de Taillac revealed she’s been eyeing that arena and the possibility of adding treatments in the Buly offering for a while.

“We’d love to experiment and create something more around the idea of well-being,” she said. “Now we have only one room where we do massages in our Paris store and we have a very strong vision of what a wellness space [done] in a Buly way could be. We had it in mind for a few years and it would be completely something else… because we have a point of view which is not about luxury like all the spas are. That’s why I wouldn’t even use the word ‘spa’,” said de Taillac, without disclosing further details except that the plan is to bring together “strong traditions with very modern ideas.”

While the cofounder had a target date in mind for such an implementation, she teased the process would be long and depend also on finding the right location.

In the meanwhile, the company will continue to expand assortment with “small things that make daily work funny,” said de Taillac, pointing for example to the widening of Buly’s rich catalog of more than 120 combs with those dedicated to groom horses, that will add to existing customizable brushes for dogs and cats. 

The brand will also soon launch a range of hair accessories including hair clips and pins, that can be engraved with initials, giving Buly’s popular lip balms and soaps a run for their money as go-to Christmas gifts.

If traffic at the brand’s stores in the lead-up to the holidays is predictable, de Taillac was more impressed by the regular lengthy queues outside Buly’s outpost in Paris’ Rue Bonaparte. 

“The success in Paris is overwhelming because now it’s been two years that we have queues,” she said, underscoring that on Saturdays people wait up to three hours to get into the store. “It’s amazing that they are doing so, but it’s not the experience we wish for everybody.”

That’s why she’s looking to introduce a registration service online to enable customers to avoid waiting and planning to open other two stores in Paris next year. These will follow recent openings in its top market, Japan, such as those in Hiroshima and in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills complex. 

Without disclosing exact figures, chief executive officer Nathalie Elbaz said, “The company is enjoying sustained growth throughout the world: in Japan, the growth is over 20 percent; in France, our second market, our shops are growing by more than 50 percent.”

“We have about 50 shops around the world. That’s still [a] very small [count],” continued the executive, confirming Buly will continue to expand its footprint in France and Europe and add four units to its distribution network in 2025. 

“We’ve noticed that, as we don’t have a presence in the U.S., a large proportion of the transactions on our website [come from there.] Many of our tourist customers in Paris are also Americans,” said Elbaz, hinting to the possibility of opening a unit in the market in the short term.

Since joining the company and succeeding Anne-Véronique Bruel in the role last year, Elbaz has spent plenty of time at the brand’s stores around the world. “I like to say that my mission, after 10 years of the [brand’s] existence, is to spread its wings while remaining faithful to the extraordinary creative vision of Victoire and Ramdane,” said Elbaz.

The cofounders also just opened Buly’s new headquarters in Paris, which de Taillac described like “a wooden glass house with a tiny Japanese garden in front.” A five-minute walk from the Rue Bonaparte store, the three-story location was designed by Touhami, who simultaneously was busy returning to his first love with retail as he unveiled a new store in the Marais area last month. 

Called Words, Sounds, Colors and Shapes, the 4,300-square-foot space is just steps away from where Touhami housed his first boutique L’Épicerie in the late ’90s and showcases under one roof brands he currently runs, including the Permanent Gallery art space and the Radical Media Archive featuring more than 2,000 rare and historical books, magazines and posters, among others. 

The location is also home to the first outpost of Café Utopia Drei Berge, the culinary offshoot of the luxurious Swiss mountain retreat Drei Berge Hotel that Touhami bought and revamped last year out of his passion for mountains and hiking.

Sharing a love for traveling and exploration, de Taillac and Touhami met in the early 2000s, with the former previously serving as head of public relations for Colette and the latter being an entrepreneur, designer and art collector.

Before Buly, in 2002 the couple launched Parfumerie Générale, their first concept store dedicated to niche cosmetics and perfumery, while in 2006 they masterminded the relaunch of French heritage candlemaker Cire Trudon. Seven years later, they designed and published Corpus, a biannual and bilingual glossy magazine dedicated to the beauty of the body and spirit before establishing Buly in 2014.

LVMH supported and assisted Buly for almost four years through its Luxury Ventures minority investment fund, before taking over the firm in 2021. As reported, de Taillac and Touhami decided to sell Buly with the goal to continue growing the company through the support of a larger partner. 

What de Taillac founded most rewarding ever since was the team’s expansion with the hiring of people who share her same passion and understanding of the brand.

“For me, the integrity and the singularity of the brand is the success,” she said. “The problem is that sometimes singularity is complicated, and sometimes when you have big corporations, they don’t like complications.” She compared some conversations to a dance. “Sometimes they go my way, sometimes I go their way but this also teaches me what it is fundamental about Buly, as there are things that I can’t compromise.”

The most important? “Quality. The customer is buying a product, not the story,” she said. “So if a product is a bit cheap, it’s not working.”