There is a lot of rapacious cynicism around, and a heat map of it would likely have Paris glowing orange-red. However, there is also a widespread passion for sensual quality at a decent price, as anyone can attest who has enjoyed a good meal with local wine in provincial France. As proof of the latter, Les Indémodables is a French niche brand headed by Valérie Pulvérail and her husband Rémi, founder of L’Atelier Français des Matières (AFM).
AFM is a remarkable outfit that works with small, high-formula-cost niche brands, helping them with materials, hands-on perfume creation, and compounding. Because the world of French luxury goods is a mass-market business, no longer strictly dependent on what was once legendary quality, bigger oil houses often treat the business brought in by small niche firms as a mere rounding error and fob them off with rejects. By contrast, AFM can focus on these clients exclusively.
Furthermore, though a firm like AFM must be small because both their supplies and their customers are limited, small firms are where a lot of the experimentation with extraction methods and discovery of new materials has happened in the last two decades. Never underestimate the French and their simultaneous, almost Japan-grade fondness for both tradition and high-tech. They will fight like hell not to change things and will strenuously disparage newcomers and new ideas. But when they finally accept that something needs doing, expect it to be done in stainless steel, to stringent international standards, designed and run by engineer graduates of the Grandes Ecoles, the sort who reply “affirmatif” to a yes-no question.
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