JJUULY 2019LY 2019 l l ENTREPRENEURENTREPRENEUR l l 6363or not,” she says. “You’ve come this far. And you think, If I just com-
promise this tiny little bit, I won’t have to start all over.”
She agonized over the decision, and ultimately she walked away,
opting to start again and do this thing right. It’s what led to the sec-
ond lesson: “Somebody said to me, ‘Well, just consider that your
education fund. Every entrepreneur, every new startup, has an edu-
cation fund,’ ” she says. “So that made me feel a little bit better.”
But now more than a decade had passed, and she was still at square one.
FINALLY, A BREAKTHROUGH. In 2017, Pfeiffer called another fragrance
house called International Flavors & Fragrances (known as IFF). It
had just started working with an organization called Cradle to Cradle
(or C2C), which certifies ingredients and products for their environ-
mental sustainability. That meant IFF, which designs scents for many
of the world’s largest fragrance brands, was already primed to work
under very strict standards.
“We are pretty good at making the impossible possible,” says IFF’s VP
of fine-fragrance sales, Frederic Pignault, who took that first call with
Pfeiffer. A meeting was arranged, and Pfeiffer brought one of EWG’s
executives along with her. Pfeiffer wanted to make sure that, this time,
she wouldn’t waste a year with a
fragrance house that wasn’t fully on
board with her mission.
By the end of the meeting, she
was convinced IFF could make
what she wanted. Right there in
the office, in front of everyone,
Pfeiffer was so relieved that she
cried. “But I’m a little bit of a soppy
cow,” she says.
The laboratory inside IFF’s
Manhattan headquarters is enor-
mous—nearly the entire floor of
a large office building. It’s divided
up into little bays, where perfum-
ers carefully combine drops from
thousands of bottles of fragrant
liquids. Some ingredients are nat-
ural (say, the oil pressed from a
flower) and others are man-made,
and in various combinations they
can create anything from a fancy
perfume to the scent of chewing
gum. And these, at long last, were
what Pfeiffer wanted to control.
The two organizations, C2C and
EWG, began reviewing these thou-
sands of ingredients, nixing the
ones that didn’t meet their various
standards. By the end, IFF’s per-
fumers were left with about 300—
roughly 10 percent of the amount
of ingredients typically available
for a new job.
“Is it challenging? Yes,” says
Pascal Gaurin, one of the perfum-
ers who developed Pfeiffer’s scents.
“But I don’t see what I’m missing;
I see what I have. If you start com-
plaining, ‘I don’t have this’ or ‘I don’t
have that,’ you’re shooting yourself
in the foot at the beginning.”
Two years of testing and experimentation followed. Pfeiffer dived
deep into the ingredients that made the cut. Vetiver, for example,
is an oil derived from a tall grass grown in Haiti, and would go on
to be used in three of her company’s five fragrances. So Pfeiffer and
her husband, David Kelley, as well as the IFF team flew down to the
Caribbean nation to see how the crop is grown, harvested, treated,
and processed. (To comply with C2C standards, IFF works with its
suppliers to help support the local farmers—say, by providing them
with farm animals to raise and eat.)
All the while, she began staring down the next phase of this
adventure. She’d finally found a way to develop a product, but she
had no brand to wrap it in—no name, no design, no concept, and,
most important, nobody who knew how to grow a business. So once
again, she kept busy.
“I literally just would keep talking to people, and I think a part of
me—a big part of me—would go into every meeting hoping and feel-
ing like maybe this person will, after they meet with me, say, ‘I’ll run
this company for you! Let’s do this together!’ ” she says. “That didn’t
happen.” And when she started looking for a CEO in earnest, she
found a lot of people who said they’d want to own a large portion of→ PERFUME PARTNERS
Pfeiffer with her business
partner and CEO, Melina Polly.
FINALLY,ABREAKTHROUGH.