Most perfumes fade in less than an hour; you spray it in the morning, and by afternoon you can’t even smell it.
It is frustrating, especially when you have invested a lot of money in a perfume that you just don’t see performance from.
One of the reasons is the concentration. Many mass-market perfumes have a lower amount of fragrance oil, hence the lack of perfume smell at midday.
The traditional Gulf way of perfumery is the opposite, with more concentrated oils that are designed to be worn for hours, and not minutes or minutes per day.
Rasasi perfumes capitalized on that distinction.
Its humble beginnings were as a one-shop in a crowded Dubai market in 1979. It’s in over 165 stores today in 90 countries, and it’s easy to see why people never seem to want to walk away: the fragrances hold up longer.
The story of how a small shop in Dubai turned into a global fragrance house.
Starting in the traditional Murshid Bazar, a market in Deira, Dubai, Rasasi began.
At the time, Deira was one of the oldest trading port areas in the region, where traders from all over the Gulf, South Asia, and East Africa traded and sold spices, fabrics, and other goods.
It was not uncommon for a perfume store to open there. The element that made this one special was the intention behind it.
The business was established by a businessman named Abdul Razzak Kalsekar, who intended to run a general attar shop, but not the usual kind.
In the markets, such as Murshid Bazar, the shops that sold oil-based perfume were popular with the residents and with those who came in to sell their goods.
Kalsekar did not want people to think of his name when they thought of a stall among dozens of others that had similar oils.
The one store developed into a business that expanded to almost all the main markets in the Middle East. Growth like this is seldom random.
It always involves ploughing early profits back into the business rather than extracting funds, and it involved the product having to stand up once it moved away from the home market and to compete with the European fragrance houses who had much longer established reputations.
The business itself has never left the family; Kalsekar’s sons have divided the business between them, each one taking charge of a different aspect of it.
But that’s a division often found within Gulf family businesses, where everybody really wants the company to go past the founder and not simply go on to cash out.
What makes Rasasi different from other perfume brands?
Rasasi catalogs its work in two distinctly different styles.
Oriental fragrances bring warm, rich notes inspired by Arabian tradition, oud, amber, musk, and spices, all with a long duration.
Western fragrances are designed for customers everywhere and are formulated in a light, multi-layered style.
Most brands will choose a lane and remain in it. It takes years to master true expertise in the art of Oriental perfumery, to understand how to work with raw natural ingredients that are not as malleable as the Western notes, such as oud and amber.
The same for Western formulas is to grasp a different set of expectations when it comes to sillage and day-long development. Both were created by Rasasi, and they both had depth – that is unusual in this business.
This is best displayed in Blue Lady.
It is the hallmark of the western collection and has contributed to Rasasi’s reputation beyond the Gulf as an innovator in fragrance for humans, instead of just perfumes that smell nice in a lab.
The reason why the Manufacturing Behind Rasasi is a big deal for you.
The majority of perfume manufacturers will have their perfumes made at whatever factory can supply it for the lowest price for that season.
That can be effective for a time, but it also means the brand is less in control of sourcing, batch consistency, and the speed at which quality issues are identified.
Rasasi chose a different path and set up its own manufacturing plant in Dubai’s Jafza (International Financial Centre), covering over 12,500 sq m, and has maintained the production process from beginning to end, with everything in-house.
The factory owner oversees quality control from raw materials to testing each batch prior to shipping.
No one is under pressure to get anything out at the last minute to meet a sales deadline just because we have no external supplier’s timeline.
The company opened its own warehousing and distribution facility in 2005 and thus gained better control over the movement of the products from the factory to the doorsteps.
That was important since the number of stores expanded to hundreds in dozens of countries. If a brand doesn’t have its own distribution network, it’s going to be dependent on third parties for the last mile, and that’s typically the first place where quality control begins to fail.
The bottle you purchase is backed and manufactured by the same company all the way through.
The family behind the brand continues to run the show.
Today, Rasasi is still run by the sons of the founder, each one of them running a different business arm.
Decisions on new aromas, quality assurance, and new stores are made by people who have lived with this same company and not by investors looking for quarterly returns.
That’s a distinction that’s important, not just on its own.
A perfume company that trades on the public markets is answerable to investors who are looking for growth this quarter. A family-owned hotel is one that’s accountable to its own name.
Family businesses that have maintained the same standard for 40 years or more will keep their name in check, as it’s still on the door, and any corners cut on quality would be for the family to deal with.
When you are looking for your next perfume, this is what it means.
History is a better indicator of a brand’s commitment to what’s in the bottle than its marketing is likely to claim.
Rasasi began on a small scale, remained under family ownership, developed its own factory and manufacturing, and is still holding its own, decades later, against the world’s giants.
It took more than good advertising to achieve its status of nearly 50 years in business and a presence in 90 countries.
It was only after the second purchase that people who had purchased the same bottle remarked that the fragrance actually lasted for a second time.