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The sweet smell of success

Kiran Ranga of the Cycle brand agarbathi has taken Indian fragrances to the world

FLOWER POWER Kiran Ranga

This guy is really in love with perfumes. He knows his jasmine from frangipani, and his rose from tuberose. He knows them anatomically, chemically and synthetically. He can perhaps beat the French at their own game — the coveted business of creating new fragrances.

Twenty-eight years old, Kiran Ranga is now at the helm of a 60-year-old family-owned business, famous for its Cycle Brand agarbathis that finds a sacred place in most Indian homes. They also export these incense sticks to 45 countries!

Kiran is typical of the second and third-generation brigade of Indian businessmen who stick to their core family business but innovate around it. "Yes, what I do is an extension of our family business but it's not a mundane job. My father was a creative perfumer. I was intrigued by what he did and the idea of creating a perfume was fascinating," says Kiran.

A partner in the Rs.160-crore revenue NR Group, Kiran now heads Ripple Fragrances that's just launched deos and perfumes under the brand name DNA. He graduated from the University of Plymouth, U.K., where he specialised in business and perfumery. The perfumery course he studied is one of its kind in the world; Kiran's expertise lies in fragrance creation.

Today, he does two to three hours of serious "smelling" every week. "Smelling is strongly linked to culture; and it has a lot to do with food. Most often perfumes contain food ingredients of that particular region," he says. And when he gets odour fatigue, the remedy is to smell coffee beans to neutralise it.

What really differentiates his company says Kiran, is that it has always created and blended its own fragrances. Otherwise, there are seven large perfumery houses across the globe that supply nearly 70 per cent of flavours and fragrances to all international brands of perfume makers and big designer names. About the intricacy of creating a perfume, Kiran explains that a perfume creator works with a palette of around 15,000 materials (called aroma chemicals) of which 90 per cent are synthetic. Any one fragrance will have about 250 of these ingredients, and blending it just right is the real game. And these days, gourmet cuisine orders are on the rise in the perfume industry. The newer fragrances in demand are cucumber, rice, and bamboo — a trend triggered by the French perfume Angel that used a combo of mango and vanilla flavours! Japan's Issey Miyake uses rice extracts to create a very subtle smell.

Kiran's company Nesso has been extracting flower fragrances and exporting it to perfumery houses that cater to labels like Boss, Chanel, and Calvin Kline. It exports to Grasse, the region in France where perfume making is concentrated. France, by the way is, considered the birthplace of perfumes. Tuberose, lotus, mysooru mallige and dundu mallige, frangipani, mimosa, and champa are their major products. "We use 650 kilos of mysooru mallige to get one kilo of concrete wax for the agarbathi. The same amount of flowers yields only 400 grams of the absolute essence."

Flowers come at a hefty price in the perfumery business — Rs. 48,000 for a kg of mallipoo and Rs. 1.2 lakh for a kg of tuberose! "We supply tuberose extracts for Christian Dior's Poison," says Kiran.

His company has a buyback agreement with farmers in Mysore, Coimbatore, T. Narasipur, Madurai, Ooty and Kodaikanal, where these flowers are grown. It also has extraction plants in two of these areas because the essence must be extracted from the flowers within six hours of plucking, and the flower must be in a state of bloom to be plucked.

It's a very delicate industry, as delicate as the flowers themselves. Clients can reject and return essences after this tedious process if they feel the smell is not right. One of the biggest crises the world's perfumery industry faces today is the non-availability of Indian sandalwood oil. In fact at a recent international meet of perfumers, this subject was debated at length. "No synthetic mimic produced has come close to the smell of sandalwood. And that's the beauty of it," says Kiran animatedly.

BHUMIKA K.

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