Atlas Pearls and Perfumes boss Stephen Birkbeck shares his inspiration

COSMETICS entrepreneur Stephen Birkbeck has found commercial inspiration in everything from emu fat to pearl perfume.

The Atlas Pearls and Perfumes boss went from running crocodile and emu farms in indigenous communities to advocating for ethical cosmetics.

IN a shed on a 300ha farm near Albany, Western Australia, Stephen Birkbeck and his wife Karen were experimenting with pearls to see if there was a cosmetic application. The self-described “bush engineer’’ had designed an extraction machine on the cheap for $25,000 (“we could never employ anyone to work on it because if the bolts flew off they would kill you’’) and he lifted the lid to see what was inside. No stranger to the world of cosmetics, the couple had successfully worked with emu oil and sandalwood and made millions of dollars in the process. But they were surprised at this result – it was not the texture, look or feel they noticed, but the smell.

“If you close your eyes and put yourself in a tropical environment and you just imagine the waft of white floral of the frangipanis and the white sand, a nice flick off the ocean, a little bit of salt in the air, that is the smell,’’ says Birkbeck of the pearl. “We went after the [the cosmetic application of the pearl] and by accident, as we were pulling off the lid, we got the extract, but it smelt. So through later trials we were able to extract the perfume of the pearl ... I knew I was on to something massive.’’

And so Birkbeck found his next endeavour, his next challenge: to manufacture and sell the world’s first pearl perfume. He had ventured into the pearl industry a couple of years earlier, when it was struggling in the midst of the global financial crisis. As someone who admits to “liking crisis’’ and thriving in stress, he bought into Atlas Pearls and Perfumes in 2009 at the almost rock-bottom price of 11c a share. He has managed to turn the company around (winning export awards along the way), increase its revenue dramatically and convince singer Tina Arena to become a creative director, perfume designer and ambassador. Now he wants to utilise the pearl and pearl shell in ways not done before: “Can you sell perfume in a jewellery shop?’’

There have been many words used to describe Birkbeck over his 50-odd years of life. They range from “colourful businessman’’ and “outback hero’’ to “legend in his own lunchbox’’ and other names that probably should not be published (WISH does not like words full of asterisks). Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer praises Birkbeck as the “Sultan of Sandalwood’’ (thanks to his success selling the oil to French perfume companies); former US president Bill Clinton has commended his work building an ethical cosmetics industry; and Arena says he is “just a hippie from the 70s’’. Birkbeck describes himself more simply, just as an Australian farmer (though one not shy of self-promotion). “I have very eccentric and odd ideas that seem to manifest themselves into the commercial world quite well,’’ he says. “But in terms of knowing where my limitations and weakness are, I always started with that, so I am quite happy to acknowledge that Tina is right and that is because of my 70s upbringing.’’

When WISH met Birkbeck, it was in a setting that hardly did justice to the extraordinary tale he told of a life that began in the English midlands and ended up in the remote outback. Sitting in a stiff, formal, old-fashioned dining room in Sydney, he spent 2 1/2 hours recalling the highs and lows that led to him to Atlas Pearls. With three sackings, a terminal cancer scare, love lost and found again, car accidents, multiple million-dollar businesses, skating the verge of bankruptcy numerous times, running a wild pub in the middle of the outback, lifelong friendships with indigenous Australians, the French aristocracy, emus, crocodiles -- there is a fair amount of material to get through. At times Birkbeck was in tears, recalling the impact his wife has had on his life (“You want the real story? It starts when I met Karen’’). Other times he would wander off topic, dropping names and detailed descriptions of countless individuals he met years ago. It is difficult to keep Birkbeck on track but one suspects this is also part of his charm, part of his success.

Birkbeck is the son of an English soccer player who migrated to Western Australia and worked as a teacher in various country towns. His dad had grand plans for Birkbeck to follow in his footsteps and sent his son home at age 14 to do an apprenticeship with his former side, Lincoln City. But Birkbeck wasn’t a fan of his birth country (or the sport) and came home soon after, back to high school with a new found sense of independence. “From that point on, I was Australian and fiercely proud of it but before that I had this English heritage because of Mum and Dad,’’ he says. “I think I had the highest level of truancy in the history of Balcatta High School [where he attended] but I was not expelled because I was getting excellent marks. Basically I was a 1970s wild child.’’

He met his future wife at a mate’s school carnival. She was a “prim and proper girl’’, he a long-haired boy who went too fast on his motorbike. “I was a bit wild and after a few years, Karen needed some space,’’ he recalls. “When she left me, I had a death wish, at that point, I went into self-destruction mode.’’ The couple were apart for five years before they reunited. In the intervening years, Birkbeck enrolled and dropped out of a number of university degrees (“I specialised in first-year courses because I liked the parties’’) before he smashed his friend’s father’s prized 1967 Holden into a ditch while he was drunk. He and his mate were lucky to walk away alive. He was arrested and spent the night in jail. “That night I decided I was leaving university, I needed to get a job, I needed to stop drinking and clean up my act,’’ he says. “I literally came out of the lockup, read the paper … and the first job I saw in The Sunday Times was for a barman at Wiluna Hotel [950km north-east of Perth]. I’d never heard of it before. It was in the Gibson Desert.’’

Birkbeck was given the job. But it was 1980 and the WA outback “still effectively had apartheid’’. The pub had separate bars for whites and Aborigines. The job came with stern warnings from the owners of the pub (which still divides the community over the effects of alcohol on the indigenous population). “ ‘If you ever go near the Aboriginal women, we will get you out on the first plane because we have had two of our men speared’,’’ Birkbeck was told. “This pub was just the wildest pub in Western Australia — like Fitzroy Crossing, just wilder.’’

On his first night, the Wiluna Hotel lived up to its reputation. “It was a Tuesday night and it was quiet so Ken [one of the co-owners] went to bed. He showed me how to pour a beer, I had never poured a beer before that, and two [indigenous] people walked in. They were large and unbeknownst to me, they were drunk … they were rolling drunk,’’ says Birkbeck. “I cut [one of them] off and I wouldn’t serve him. He hit me pretty hard … but I didn’t dob him in. He sort of respected me … and he became my mentor.’’ The man’s name was Bobby Cameron (known as “Cowboy’’ in Wiluna) and he was also an expert emu egg shell carver. Birkbeck was fascinated by this unique Australian art form and he asked Cameron to show him how to do it. They then decided to go into business together. “[In those days] an emu egg shell basically sold for $500 … at five-star hotels,’’ he says. “I found a dentist drill and thought we could commercialise this and make a fortune. We scaled our little business up and I bought my first house with that.’’

Birkbeck tried to go back to university to study Aboriginal anthropology but could not forget the violence he had seen in Wiluna. “I was an idealist and I still felt a strong drive that I could actually do something,’’ he told Fischer for his book Outback Heroes (co-written with Peter Rees). “I certainly wasn’t going to do it sitting in a classroom in the city.’’ In the next few years, Birkbeck reunited with Karen, got married, had three daughters and ran emu and crocodile farms in remote indigenous communities.

He was sacked three times, mostly from disagreements with federal bureaucrats (perhaps a polite way of putting it but again WISH does not like to include words with asterisks). “You have mercenaries, missionaries, and misfits that go to indigenous communities. The three Ms. I was a misfit,’’ Birkbeck admits. He may have clashed with the powers that be but he also made lifelong friends, says Aboriginal artist Richard Walley. He describes the 54-year-old as a self-made man who was “not afraid to show off a product nationally and internationally’’ but also wanted to help indigenous communities. “He related to a lot of them,’’ Walley says of Birkbeck’s indigenous mates in Wiluna. “He makes friends easily. He is larger than life and it becomes infectious in the communities and so he did really well.’’

The three sackings did, however, take their toll. Birkbeck had nervous breakdown at 27 (he describes this as handy because it “stripped back’’ his ego) and he retreated from the world, buying a cattle farm in Albany. But he did not truly hit rock bottom until his wife suffered the humiliation of a cheque bouncing during the weekly grocery shop. The local branch manager berated an embarrassed and angry Birkbeck: “Steve, you have to get a life, you have to realise you are going backwards’’. So he went back to what he knew best: emus. He and Karen started experimenting with emu oil (after seeing indigenous friends use it) as body care products and was soon making half a million dollars a year and travelling to France to do more research on its cosmetic application. “I got my mojo back,’’ he says of this time of his life. “I decided I was going to sell emu fat.’’

The next step was upscaling operations from the kitchen table (where Karen was doing it with a saucepan and a jug) so Birkbeck bought an essential oils factory that was in financial strife. In the fire sale, he also got stockpiles of sandalwood. “That stood out to me,’’ he says. “What I saw was an industry that had been going since the mid-19th century, it was the first export out of Western Australia.’’ And so Mount Romance skincare was born in 1990 and Birkbeck began selling sandalwood oil to luxury French perfume houses (it was an ingredient in Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium). It also spurred a connection with France, as Birkbeck formed friendships and later business partnerships with the Rocher family (of the Yves Rocher cosmetics company) and became a key player in the push for ethics and sustainability in cosmetics.

By 2005, he sold his company for $19.5 million (he later bought it back off its new owners when it was on the verge of collapse, and sold it again for $28m in 2008). But when Birkbeck finally got his first “big cheque’’, he also found out he was sick: he was diagnosed with leukaemia and given 90 days to live. He spent four months in intensive care, but doesn’t look back at that time negatively, instead seeing “opportunity out of adversity’’. And Birkbeck is still here, albeit with less hair (his words, not ours). “He gets up off the floor and he tries and tries again until he succeeds,’’ says Fischer. “Steve is a determined, dynamic colourful Australian who has had his bumps along the way but he has bounced back.’’

Birkbeck says he will give another two years to “the commercial world’’ before withdrawing to his farm (he has already stepped down as CEO of Atlas Pearls but remains executive chairman). When pressed on what this actually means, he says he plans to write a book, spend time with his daughters and do some “nutty creative things’’. Sounds like ordinary retirement fare. But in the last seconds of the conversation, Birkbeck drops that he met French President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently at trade functions and one suspects Birkbeck will not be slowing down any time soon: “I had a fascinating couple of days and now I am really keen to look at some much higher level [trade] issues that will help my company and Australia.’’