Hello, folks! I'm back again with another article. This is one that I am SUPER excited for you to read. I have had this for a while, but I am just now getting around to posting it due to how busy I have been.
Claude Gratianne is the owner of ZGO Perfumery, a small indie and niche store located at 600 Castro Street in sunny San Francisco. They carry a wide range of perfumes for your enjoyment. They even have tea, candles, and incense!
I have shopped at ZGO many times after discovering it last year due to a good friend suggesting it to me. I have been speaking to Claude through email for over a year now. He's such a kind and personal person. I just had to ask him for an interview. He exceeded my expectations with his answers. I am so pleased to bring this to you and I am excited about it.
Full disclosure: I am affiliated with ZGO. When this interview was done, I was not. So, I just want you to know that this was not done as a promotional tactic for my affiliation. I asked him to do it because I wanted to give his store more exposure because it's simply an amazing place to buy fragrances.
With that being said, MUSINGS10 will get you 10% off anything in the store except Diptyque, Comme des Garcons, and Byredo. Sadly, they are not allowed to discount those brands. They sell many fragrances that Lucky Scent does and they have spray samples instead of vials. On that note, when you buy a full bottle, you get money credit towards choosing your own samples with it. So, it's pretty awesome
Now for my affiliate link. I will be transparent once again and say I do earn a small commission from sales with this link. If you have any questions, you can message me on Facebook or IG and I will be happy to assist you. Even if you only need some advice on what I suggest from the store.
Link to ZGO's site
Okay, you are not here for what I have to say. Let's hear what Claude does!
1. Can you tell us a little bit about where you are from and what led up to you creating your own business?
I was born and raised in sunny California to a family of French immigrants. Having grown up in the town of Sonoma, the heart of the wine country, as a child I spent time in the French Pyrenees on our family's small farm, in Sonoma harvesting family friend's vineyards, washing planes at the local airport to earn my flight license and went to school to one day be an engineer. I did become a civil engineer and worked on quite a few projects before deciding to "retire" as it were, from an otherwise "normal" career job with my partner Tani. We had always been fascinated by the under-appreciated impact of our sense of smell. So we decided to embark on a personal olfactive adventure. With nothing but a vision of what could be a great fragrance shop, we resolved to put ideas to action and established ZGO Perfumery.
2. ZGO stands for "Zen Garden Oasis". Can you tell us why you chose that name?
From our travels throughout Asia, we had a deep appreciation for Buddhist practice (Tani grew up Buddhist, and I was Catholic). I've been a lifelong space enthusiast watching almost every space launch live if I can. Our notion in the name of our business was that the planet Earth is a garden in a vast desert, like an oasis. So this duality of desert and garden gave us the name Zen Garden Oasis).
3. Where did your perfume journey begin?
Olfactive journeys begin for all of us when our sense of smell is first awakened and we start to process the world through the olfactory colors of our nose. It's so underappreciated because smell is not as tangible as our other senses and far harder to describe in a precise way. Yet our world is telling a lot about itself through the sense of smell. Looking back to my childhood, the strongest impressions of various scents were formed on the small farm in France, where odors are very keen, not always pleasant but very distinct- especially hay, manure, mud, animals, mountain air and rain, and of course the cheese aging in the cheese room next to the barn. The small farm is an olfactory zoo.
4. At what point did you decide that you wanted to work with niche and indie perfumers over designers and why?
Our story at ZGO is only one of many stories. We always thought that what we are bringing forward to our customers isn't our story, but that of the brands in our store. Each brand has its own personal fascinating story and our goal is to tell those stories. Every person has an olfactive story and some lucky people make a career out of it by being a perfumer- a storyteller through scent. These people are artists in every way and so it's the art of olfaction and the perfume artist and their interpretation that is of interest. Thus when it becomes a mass market tool, it's just not as interesting.
5. What is your most prized fragrance in your collection and why?
I went through a period, a sort of rabbit hole I guess, of a fascination for oud. It's an onion that has so many layers- Like studying the various scent profiles of oud from different regions, the history, the cultural and religious significance of oud, the harvesting and exploitation of this wondrous resource, and the sustainable practices of farming agarwood trees (the tree that oud is harvested from). After all this, I had a chance meeting with an Agarwood farmer in Thailand and thought about importing his oud to the U.S. There are some oud oils already for sale in the U.S., but their sourcing and legal importing were too clear, so we set out to import this farmed oud through proper channels, get it permitted in Thailand and in the U.S., which we did, and actually sold it in our store under our own label. So, all that effort for about a liter of oud, but sold out in a few months. I don't know if we'll import that again since the logistics were daunting, but I'm glad we did it. So that was my prize- an oud journey. I still have an Agarwood chip from this journey, so that's my prize I guess.
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| Claude's prized piece of oud |
6. What do fragrances personally mean to you?
The fragrances we smell are our universe telling us about itself. It took how many billion years of evolution for a rose to smell like a rose? The universe created that rose scent- Amazing when you really think about that. It's offered up to us to experience through our God-given sense of smell- Do you accept that gift? Can we appreciate it? What does it say about the universe and ourselves? If we weren't here at all, a rose would still smell like a rose, but our being here makes it significant. So, let's appreciate that, and each other on this little raft called Earth.
The inside of ZGO Perfumery
7. Can you name some of your favorite perfumers and/or fragrance houses and tell us why you enjoy them so much?
(John's note: Sorry for the white box. I have tried and tried to edit it out and it just won't go away. Pesky little bugger.)
8. If you could make your own perfume, what would it be and why?
If I could be a perfumer I would be living a personal dream. I did make a perfume- only for me, and it wasn't very good- so I'm not yet ready to make a living as a perfumer.
9. Can you tell us about a memorable sale you made in your store and why it was memorable?
We get quite a few customers that don't know where to start and so helping them figure it out is always rewarding. However, one particular day, a mother came in with her young daughter for her first perfume. The little girl was so curious and enthusiastic- She was trying quite a few she liked and didn't like- we found one she loved. Kids trying perfumes is always fun because they don't hold back their opinions about it.
10. Do you have any future projects that you can tall us about? What is your goal for ZGO going forward?
Well, we always have some plans on the burners and back-burners. Some turn out well and others not so well, but that's what keeps it interesting for us. Our latest project is to develop an online Fragrance Fitting that has enough intelligence to be able to actually provide a good fragrance recommendation over our website. We've been working on that for months and it is still a work in progress. Our first version of this was made available through the Match It app created by Michael Edwards- the world-renowned fragrance expert. We're continuously updating this app and are going to roll out version 1.3 soon. We've kept it low-key because it is still buggy, but it is available to try on our website by clicking Fragrance Fitting in our website footer at the bottom of the page. After that, well, I probably shouldn't talk about it...TBD.
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| The gateway into a magical world |
Conclusion
Thank you very much, Claude! I appreciate the effort that you put into the interview and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so I am sure others will as well. It's always interesting to me to get a look inside someone's brain and what they think. I also love hearing about their memories. It really gives you a sense of connecting with someone. This is one reason why I like to connect my reviews to stories. I think it helps people like myself be able to feel the fragrance and not only smell it.
Now, I would like to say something about paying it forward. We all have probably received kindness in the fragrance community. I am not only speaking about physical things. I am speaking of emotional aspects, advice, and many other intangible things. Pay forward your kindness. Pay forward your love. Pay forward your passion. It helps all of us stay positive and grounded in these tumultuous times we live in. The person who introduced me to ZGO is the same person who taught me the importance of paying it forward, so I am mentioning it here.
As always, don't forget to say something kind to someone today. You never know what they are going through. One kind word can keep someone grounded when everything is crashing around them. We all share this planet together. It will be what we make it. Let's make it a better place.
Thank you for all of the support. Much love to all of you and until next time, keep smelling great and being great!
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