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5 Years to $4.5 Million in Profit With Perfume

Craig Ruckus

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Raquel and Adam Bouris are the founders of Who is Elijah, an Australian based fragrance company. 

Their journey started in 2017 at the Coachella Music Festival. Raquel noticed a friend smelled amazing. Raquel was intrigued and ordered 40 bottles of an India oil perfume. 

The scent was strong and unique. People started asking her about it. A business idea was born. 

Raquel found a perfumer in Sydyey (who ended up being a fraud, more on that later) and worked with him for their first perfume. He thought the scent was too unique and they landed on their him/her scent which would appeal to a wider base. 

The process took 12 months to create the fragrance, source bottles from an Italian retailer (100 order minimum) and to buy a crimping machine from China.

The first perfume order was 20 liters, or 200 bottles and it all arrived at Raquel and Adam’s apartment. They googled “how to fill perfume bottles” and got to work. The machine to crimp the sprayer onto the bottle didn’t work…

So they kept at it. They found a hand tool for $200 from South Africa and put some elbow grease into the operation. They used syringes or reusable sauce bottles to fill the bottles, hand crimped them, put a label on and boxed them up. All in it cost them $12,000 to start.

They launched in October 2018 online and… Crickets. Nothing. It took three months to sell 150 bottles. 

So Raquel walked into boutique stores in Sydney. Nine out of 10 said yes to a small order. 

By 2020 they were in 100 stores and were doing $40k per month in revenue. 

They were ready for the big leagues. Raquel sent a message on LinkedIn to a buyer at David Jones, a luxury department store chain. They requested a brand deck. But Raquel had no idea what that was. 

So she asked the marketing manager at the company she was working to help. In five days with the help of a graphic designer they had their first brand deck. The David Jones buyer said it was the best they had ever seen. They were in!

Adore Beauty, an online Australian beauty store, was the next big win. Then covid hit. They were 80% wholesale and no one was shopping in retail stores. 

But they didn’t stop. They started gifting perfume to influencers and quickly struck gold. They did $40k in the next two days and, as they said, it was a sliding door moment. They leaned into influencers in 2020/2021 and sales rose. 

They were giving away 1-2k samples a month. By 2022 they were on track to hit $3 million in sales. By 2023 they reported making a total $4.5 million in profit in the five years they operated. The company is now worth an estimated $20 million. 

Currently they’re working on expanding into new markets and optimizing their offering. 

They made it into Sephora Australia. But when they tried to get into Sephora in the U.S. the head office checked their sales in their Australia stores and said they were too low. So they pivoted and let all their boutiques know that they were no longer going to sell in smaller stores. They were spread too thin and needed customers focused on their largest retailers. 

The next optimization was around their sample offering. They tried offering a free sample for only $7 shipping, but that cost too much. So they raised it to $30 and that goes toward a $30 discount when you bought a 50 or 100ml bottle. Then they reviewed the customers to see if they actually bought a product. It’s currently $80 for the discovery set of 11 scents (still with a $30 discount on a future purchase). 

Adam also took over their ad account. They weren’t impressed with their agency so he learned how to do everything from the ground up. The results were impressive. The latest year with the agency their black friday weekend generated $150k in revenue. Their most recent was $2.5 million! Revenue is growing at 400% a year and they spent $1.2 million on ads in the previous year. 

Oh and their original perfumer? Turned out he was just a middle man. When they asked for the recipe so they could enter the UK and Europe he turned them down. He kept raising prices on each new scent and it all smelled a bit fishy. After two years they were able to track down the actual perfumer, Brad, and found out that they were paying three times the actual price.

And their name? It actually used to be named Raquel and Elijah, but people kept asking “who the f is Elijah” and it stuck. 

Sources:

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan (#521)

Retail Biz Article

Honey Nine Article

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