The Quality Makers: Frances Shoemack of Abel

Frances Shoemack is the founder of Abel: a leader in the conscious fragrance movement in its unwavering transparency, incorporation of biotechnology, and trust in master perfumers and 100% natural ingredients. Contrary to all expectations, Shoemack – a former winemaker – successfully launched her first 100% natural fragrance in Amsterdam in 2013.

Today, Abel is based in Wellington, New Zealand, with global distribution and worldwide acclaim. Dive into the new world of fragrance below as Frances shares her secrets. 

What led you to the creation of Abel?

Abel turned 11 about a month ago, so we're relatively established as a brand. When I started out, I was looking for a natural perfume, and I couldn't find one. My background is actually in wine making. I grew up on a farm in New Zealand. My mom was a yoga teacher, and I'm one of six children, so I had quite a quirky, earthy kind of upbringing. I’ve always been into natural products, from cooking in the kitchen, right through to what I use on myself. About 15 years ago, I moved to Amsterdam, and I started learning about this emerging world of niche and artisan perfumes. It really took my fancy. You discover these fragrances that feel like they were made by real people. I had my natural lens on, and was thinking, why are none of these people talking about the supply chain, or where the ingredients come from, and why is no one working with naturals? At a time when clean beauty was already booming, it felt like a real oversight. 

I didn't have experience in the perfume world, so I really tried to find people to come on this journey with me. My first ally was our master perfumer, Isaac Sinclair. He's Kiwi as well, but he's been living away from New Zealand for over 25 years now. He is the only perfumer from Australasia ever. Master perfumers are quite a small group of people. They say there are around 50 in the world, less than astronauts. That wasn't necessarily a prerequisite for me, but I needed to find people who really believe in what I’m doing. 

I saw this video of Isaac, he was standing in the New Zealand native bush, and he was talking about how perfume is like wine. And I thought, this is our perfumer. Abel was never going to be a founder made product, because I recognize that I'm not a perfumer, and I really respect that craft and science. It's always been about finding the very best people around the world and working with them. Isaac and I are a total creative duo. I trust his expertise, but the creative process is very much a collaboration. It usually starts with an idea of mine and they build on that 100%.

Tell me about your collection: Pause and Nurture.

We work with a second perfumer who did Pause ($130) and Nurture ($245), which come from a place of a woman's journey. We created Nurture all around new and expecting mothers, so it’s safe to spray during pregnancy and breastfeeding, but we also used ingredients that support you during that time. Pause was specifically created around perimenopause and my own experiences. I wanted to ground that in something beautiful, something that helps you celebrate aging, as opposed to shame and stigma. I wasn't going to work with a man on those two perfumes, so I found myself a really wonderful female perfumer. She's also a doctor in biochemistry, a super smart French woman. Her name's Fanny Grau and she did the room sprays as well. 

Although these scents come from a very feminine place, and they’re inspired by my hormonal journey, it's not only for women. It's for all kinds of people. I think that feeling of needing nurture is pretty universal. We try to be inclusive, also in the way that we communicate those fragrances, while still being true to the fact that being pregnant and going on that journey is super special and unique.

How did your background as a winemaker inform the philosophy of this brand?

The winemaking gave me that false confidence that I needed. There are a lot of similarities in terms of that ‘art meets science’ approach – you can't have the technical without the creative. In wine, they say you can't make a good wine with bad grapes, so it's all about the ingredients. That's been a thread for Abel throughout, that we really start with the ingredients. 

These days, the inspiration might be a little bit more abstract, but in the early days, we would start with a hero ingredient and find a way to build around that. You’ll find that sense of respect for the ingredients and respect for nature, common in both forms of artistry. If you think about wine, you're turning grapes into wine, and that's kind of what we do with the fragrances as well. Often it's flowers or trees or plants, and more and more so these days, it's biotechnology. But even then – the biotechnology itself is typically a plant sugar starting culture, and then through a bio-fermentation process, you get the scent molecule. Super exciting new frontiers in terms of the perfume industry. I think it provides a legit opportunity to shift the fragrance world away from petrochemicals, which are about 99% of the ingredients in the fragrance industry. 

Where does your inspiration come from?

My inspiration comes from all over. Our more recent launch, Cyan Nori ($180), which is our best seller, was really inspired by the wild ocean off the coast of where I live. It's salty and briny and powerful. Since we use only natural ingredients, they are an even more integral part of the formulation process. We literally use Nori, so seaweed. It's an algae absolute – a beautiful, kind of strange, hypnotic ingredient. Cyan Nori is probably the fragrance I'm most proud of, and it was inspired by my back door. 

We're currently launching a new fragrance called The Apartment ($130), and that was inspired by the room Isaac and I stayed in in Paris. We started daydreaming about what kind of person would live in the apartment we were in, really just riffing on that, and all of a sudden we found this muse. The apartment was gorgeous and Parisian, overlooking the Arc de Triomphe, and that was the source of inspiration for a new fragrance.

What role does fragrance play in your everyday life?

I'm not a huge perfume geek, rather I’d call myself a smell geek. I don't like being over-scented, because I love to smell the world around me, from cooking to nature and more. I think smell is such an underused sense, and it has the ability to bring about all these beautiful and powerful emotions. It’s the only one of our senses that has a direct neural pathway to our subconscious. Your subconscious brain is processing smells all day long, and triggering memories and emotions. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that we just don’t use enough.

Tell me about your creation process.

We have quite strict rules around releasing new fragrances, so we really try to take a stance against the amount of stuff in the world. When we launch a new perfume, we take a different one out of the collection. When we first got to seven fragrances, that’s when I put this philosophy in place. Seven just felt like a really beautiful number. It has so many spiritual references in both Eastern and Western cultures. It’s a bit of that ‘kill your darlings’ sort of thinking, but it really forces us to think: do we think this brings something unique to the world? The truth is, there's no end to creativity in fragrance. There's so many ideas, and there's definitely not a shortage for us either. 

What’s so important about being 100% natural?

I don't want anything to do with the fossil fuel industry. If you look at what the options are:  it's either natural or it's fossil fuel derived. These petrochemicals are being pumped out of our earth’s core, and  a lot of the synthetics are non-biodegradable, so they show up in our food chain and our aquatic life. There's all of the links to endocrine disruption as well. People forget that this is what perfumes are made of because fragrances are ephemeral and emotional. 

Transparency is so important to me, and that includes putting your money where your mouth is. Apart from a few small boutique producers around the world, I think we're the only brand selling in retail that is 100% natural. That’s been a big part of why we exist. If you call yourself clean, but you're not willing to share your ingredients list, then we don't know what's in your products. We share everything and we're proving you really can do it with all these renewable, biodegradable ingredients. 

When I first started out, the palette of natural ingredients was much smaller because biotech wasn't a thing and natural science was much more limited. These days, when I'm in the lab with Isaac and Fanny, every time there's more ingredients that we have at our disposal. That's also the nice thing about the one in, one out approach – it feels like we have this living organism, and it’s just getting bigger and better over time.

What are your dreams for the future and growth of Abel?

Our mission is to shift the fragrance industry. I always say: if we get to a point where being 100% natural and using biotech is not interesting, then that's a good situation, because it shows that we've brought the industry along with us. In the coming 12 months, we've got an incredible collection overhaul, which is really pushing the boundaries in terms of packaging. Everything's made and produced within 200 kilometers of our production house in Holland. It's a project I've been working on intensely for the last three years, and it’s a reflection of how far we’ve come since we started. We’ve had many iterations over time, and the final one will be in the market in February. It's that constant evolution that I want to keep doing - pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Dive into the new world of fragrance through Abel.