∙ 1531 words ∙ 7 min read ∙
Inside Rose et Marius, House of Exceptional Fragrances, every sense is in action: the smell, the sight, the sound, the touch, and even the taste. When I stepped into this beautiful store, I felt inside a real provincial bastide with an atypical soul. It is in this peaceful place where time stops I met the creator of the brand Rose et Marius. Magali told me the story behind her new store created from her childhood memories.
The first luxury brand from Provence
Magali has been working for a long time in the Luxe’s world. Indeed, she followed her professional path by working for prestigious brands such as Cartier and Piaget. These experiences taught her all the full luxury codes that are so important for her own brand today. At a point of her life, Magali decided to create by herself. After her professional experience among the biggest, she yearned for a shorter decision circuit and to decide for herself.
The idea of the brand Rose et Marius came when Magali decided to travel around the world. At this time, she realized that in every country she visited, everybody knew Provence, her origins country. Therefore, it was the perfect insight that convinces Magali to create the first luxury brand from Provence and push a project close to her heart, her Madeleine de Proust*.
As a result, our creator launched the brand Rose et Marius for five years and a half ago. Up until now, twenty countries all around the world are distributing Magali’s exceptional and handmade fragrances. However, the concept store located in Aix-en-Provence is the last step in the development of the brand so far, since Magali opened the shop only a few months ago, in Mai 2018. Indeed, after five years of selling the brand via her online shop and thanks to her active BtoB circuit, Magali wanted to create her flagship store to share a fully sensorial experience of Rose et Marius‘s DNA.
The goal of the concept store is also to honor the French know-how because each collection is handmade by French craftsmen. A small team composed of talented people, dynamics and passionate about Rose et Marius‘s brand.
A country house in the middle of the city
To understand better the story behind the brand, you need first to focus on the name “Rose et Marius.” Marius stands for the Provencial dimension of the brand since it is a common provincial first name. Rose is the name of her grandmother, at whom Magali spent all her summers back in the days, in a Provencial bastide* she remembers all the details. From these precious memories, Magali was able the build up the whole universe of Rose et Marius‘s concept store.
“ I wanted to create a brand that creates sense, I wanted to welcome people, invite them at Rose et Marius’s bastide. The cement tiles you are seeing on the floor are memories from my childhood since it was the cement tiles I was playing on when I was a kid. Today they are the emblem of the brand Rose et Marius.
Aix-en-Provence is a wonderful city that corresponds entirely to the DNA of the brand: it is a bourgeois city, very aesthetic, with both local and tourist clientele and great heritage. Finally, this city is a real source of inspiration. I wanted to find a charming place, with a soul, that takes part of the walls of the town.”.
Magali also took care of the fact that Rose et Marius was located next to luxurious boutiques, such as Hermès and Montblanc. Moreover, a big city project will renovate the quarter within the three years. In consequence, Rose et Marius will be surrounded by a marketplace, a new Museum dedicated to Picasso and her street will be semi-pedestrian.
These are the kinds of information you need to find before selecting the right spot for your shop.
Attention to detail and a sense of storytelling
When Magali finally found a place, the local was not like it currently is. They renovated everything, so the store satisfied the precise and ambitious wishes of Magali utterly. To do so, Magali surrounded herself with the talented Sophie Ferjani and her team. Sophie Ferjani is a well-known interior designer who is working for a French TV channel. Sophie also has a nice concept store in Marseille.
Magali and Sophie’s team worked hard to build up a real provincial bastide. An atypical place with elements reminiscent of her grandmother’s country house: a conservatory, a boudoir, the cement tiles, an orangery. On top, a soundtrack diffused the sounds of a bastide (birds, water currents, refreshing wind).
Besides this, everything you see in this store was designed by and for Magali and Rose et Marius‘s brand. All the things you see are to sell: the fixtures, the cement tiles, the decorations. Even the wallpaper designed by Antoinette Poisson, a Parisian company which creates and publish hand-painted wallpapers.
“We want to create a really unique place where you can find the art of living in Provence. A place where you can bring back memories that are unique, beautiful and that make sense.”
The receipt of the success
Same as the design of the shop, Magali is doing very precise and detailed brief to create the perfumes she has in mind. With her perfumer located in the city of Grasse, they are developing together smells that are coming from Magali’s memories. Impressive, isn’t it?
And everything could not work if Magali would not have been surrounded by craftsmen to whom she is admirative and at the same time with whom she maintains interesting human relations.
This dynamic in her team allows her to offer products that embellish the everyday life of people, and that proposes a new relationship to the object. That’s powerful.
“You experience pleasure to touch and feel when you take soap from Rose et Marius. Because it smells good, because it looks beautiful and because the foam from the soap is smooth and unctuous.
It is about being able to reclaim the pleasure of simple things through the object, so I am very demanding in my choices.”
Indeed, the craftsmen she is working with appreciate the fact that Magali is always very precise in what she has in mind. Sometimes it can be very challenging, but in the end, they always succeed.
A taste for challenge
Creating a concept store is a path full of obstacles. For Magali, her most significant difficulty was to build up the notoriety in front of big luxury houses. They arm themselves with massive communication campaigns, whereas Magali is playing a lot with word of mouth.
“We want to create a real dynamic around the store to attract customers from around the world. We rely on media that allows, via word of mouth (e.g., Tripadvisor), to establish the notoriety of Rose et Marius.”
In addition to this, Magali has the magic receipt to face her big competitors.
- Stay yourself: you must know what you can bring to the market, how you are different from the other. Propose something unique, accordingly to your own personality.
- Master the distribution circuits: Rose et Marius’s Flagship opened in May 2018, before that, Rose et Marius was an online shop. The majority of the sales were mostly in B2B. Magali targets explosive distribution channels: 5-star hotels, decorations store, perfumeries, department stores. The brand is also present in a corner at Maison Montgrand in Marseille.
- Continually innovate: on the first floor of the store you can participate in a taste workshop. A world baking champion is creating squares to eat, that looks and smells like the Rose et Marius‘s soaps. The goal is to guess the four ingredients thanks to the taste and the olfaction.
- An eco-friendly approach: Rose et Marius focused on sustainable development by creating as little waste as possible. In fact, the soaps, the candles, and the diffusers are refillable in the shop. Therefore, at the same time, Magali improves the client’s loyalty.
- Personalized experience: in Rose et Marius, you can find a miniature greenhouse where you can select the soap bar you can engrave your personalized souvenir from Provence.
Rose et Marius’s memories
I fell for the flagship product of the brand: the precious rechargeable candle. Like a good wine lover, I choose the Rosé wine perfume (39€), the smell is just fantastic. Regarding the design of the candle, I selected the platinum blue oustau pattern (129€), this candle is made of Limoges porcelain enhanced by real platinum. And finally, I offered to my host in Marseille this beautifully engraved soap, based on poppy oil and Provence’s olive.
Discover all the rest of the products (perfumes, diffusers, soap, jewels) on the online shop https://www.roseetmarius.com/. Good to know: if your order reached the amount of 120€, Rose et Marius plant a tree in the creeks of Provence, in your name!
Information Rose et Marius
Rose et Marius
3, rue Thiers
13100, Aix-en-Provence
France
+33 (0) 98 25 93 535
contact@roseetmarius.com
https://www.roseetmarius.com/
Tue. – sat.: from 10:30 am to 1:00 pm & to 2:00 pm to 7:00 pm
* A bastide is a typical french country house where the Provencal towns and villages nestle in the summer to get some fresh air.
* Madeleine de Proust is a French expression used to describe an element of everyday life, an object or a gesture, that brings back a certain memory. This effect that provokes a madeleine to the narrator of “In As does a madeleine to the narrator of “In Search of Lost Time” in “Swann’s Way”, the first volume of Marcel Proust‘s novel.
