How racing driver Erwin Creed is transforming family fragrance empire
For Erwin Creed, ensuring his family’s legacy thrives is a matter of innovation.
There is a distinctive scent in the floral-wallpapered rooms and stone cloisters of Abbaye des Vaux-de-Cernay, an hour outside of Paris. It’s musky and leathery, the bright, lemony arrival (it’s actually bergamot, a citrussy cousin) and pink pepper of the fragrance having faded earlier on.
What’s left is the wood, the warmth. It’s the sillage – the wake left by a scent, like the last memory of a dream – of Aventus, the star fragrance from niche perfumer Creed.
It’s certainly not what the estate used to smell like, back in its time as a Cistercian abbey in the 12th century. But now, L’Abbaye is a destination for Parisian weekend defectors, the grand country hotel the chosen site for celebrating Creed’s heritage and its now-classic scents with a gathering of guests from around the world.
It’s in one of these cloisters (the hoteliers were under strict guidance to preserve historic features) – complete with pews and stained-glass windows – that WISH sits down with Erwin Creed. As a seventh-generation Creed family member (and the man being groomed for the top job), his surname is inscribed in gold on the bottles scattered throughout the room. And the house’s most celebrated scent is in the air all around us.
Erwin Creed, 44, is boyish and casual, at times disarming thanks to his typically French candour. He began to ride the wave of Creed in the early 2000s, when niche fragrance wasn’t yet a real proposition in the minds of consumers. But there was a growing hunger for smaller, more exclusive fragrances; scents that weren’t like the rest. Fragrance lovers communed on Reddit while websites such as Fragrantica surged in popularity, giving fans a place to share obsessions and air their distastes. Creed entered the scene with a compelling backstory – the brand was founded in 1760, and worked mostly in tailoring and clothing, only beginning to make perfumes commercially in the 1970s – and quickly amassed a cult following.
But what made it stand out from the pack? Erwin Creed reflects on the prolific nature of other fragrance houses. “They say, ‘Maybe one will be a success’. They launch a lot of perfume, waiting for one to be Aventus.” He grins wryly. “We are lucky, we already made Aventus.”
It was only a few decades earlier that smaller labels even began to stand a chance against fragrance behemoths Guerlain, Chanel, YSL and Dior. Then in 2010 came Aventus, whose creation the brand attributes to Erwin, his father Olivier and perfumer Jean-Christophe Hérault. It came at the perfect time to capture that momentum and propelled Creed into a new stratosphere. “It really changed the game,” says Creed.
By then, Erwin had already been working for the family business for almost a decade. (Now he lives with his wife and two young daughters in Geneva, Switzerland. “It’s nice,” he tells me. “You know, full of very rich people. Not us, of course.” Creed waves in mock humility.) He entered the fold of the family business at 21, after abandoning his childhood dream of becoming “a Formula One driver, or a fireman”. Creed still races cars, driving around the hills of the French and Swiss countryside. The speed, he says, clears his mind. But when it came to his career, reality sped in faster than he could drive.
“When I was young, I wanted to do something different,” Creed admits. “And then, as I grew up, I saw how [the fragrance industry] was growing. I wanted to be a part of it. I felt I needed to be there, to help improve the business.”
He describes his father, Olivier Creed, as a demigod of the enterprise, sitting on what Creed says is “his throne”. His own entry wasn’t cushioned. “It’s difficult to be the son, working under your father,” he says. “People say it’s lazy, it’s the easy way. But the family business is not easy at all.”
“He’s a strong guy,” Creed explains of Olivier. “He’s like the creator. He likes to do things alone.”
The younger Creed learned the fragrance trade in practical terms. First, under Olivier, and later in New York, where he worked with laborantines, or lab technicians, immersed in the chemistry of scent. He played a key role in expanding Creed’s footprint across the US, Europe, and Asia working mostly in distribution. Now, the brand is preparing to open a flagship store in Melbourne’s historic Royal Arcade in October this year. It marks Creed’s 10th stand-alone store in the Asia-Pacific region, outside of mainland China, and its first Melbourne location. It’s all part of Erwin Creed’s current focus: global reach, without losing touch with the ground.
Even as its footprint expands significantly, Creed continues to operate with a boutique mindset. In the brand’s early days, before it was fashionable or noteworthy, Erwin’s parents filled bottles by hand at their Paris home, sealing them with stoppers and delivering them store by store. Big-name French retailers such as Le Bon Marché turned them away. Growth came slowly, organically, often by word of mouth – and occasionally subterfuge.
“[My father] told me that he would ask a friend to go to a pharmacy and ask them to ask if they stocked Creed perfume,” knowing perfectly well that they didn’t, he laughs. Yet. Then, he would wait for the phone to ring. “The only budget [Olivier allowed] was the budget to make perfume.”
Olivier Creed is now aged in his eighties but still looms large in the business. He was the one who made the bold pivot from tailoring to fragrance, selling a few bottles at first to a Middle Eastern businessman, who came back some months later and asked for 50 more. It then became 1000. Thus, Creed, in some early version of its modern form, was born. Now business is strong. The brand reported sales of €800 million (approximately $1.4 billion) in 2024. The US is Creed’s biggest market, followed by the UK and the Middle East.
Despite that, the philosophy of staying small and focused still guides the house. “For me, the definition of ‘niche’ is seeing my grandmother picking white strawberries in the garden, making them into jam, filling them into jars,” Creed says. “They stick the labels on themselves. They sell them in the village. You taste it and you just say, ‘[Wow]’.” He leans back and closes his eyes, the anecdote a neat summation of how exceptional perfume should be (and from how close to the source it should come).
“I’m not sure I am a good businessman,” Creed admits. “If I was, I think we would reduce the quality of our perfume, we would expand too much. But we want to have our own staff, we want to have our own space.
“And yes, maybe we would increase our turnover, but then things would go down, the quality would go down.
“It’s like food. We just do what we can with the best ingredients we find.”
Creed may be erring on the side of humility when it comes to his nose for business. In 2023, the brand was acquired by French multinational luxury conglomerate Kering – also the owner of Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Saint Laurent – for US$3.8 billion. Despite the change, Creed maintains that the brand’s business remains artisanal, its processes meticulous. “We know where everything comes from, from top to bottom,” he says.
Take bergamot, a cornerstone of many Creed compositions. All the fruit for Creed’s scents is sourced exclusively from a single family-owned farm in Calabria, a place Erwin regularly visits. His focus at the house and his main passion is sourcing: travelling, discovering and selecting raw materials for each creation, to build each fragrance from the ingredients up.
Will Creed at some point become the iconoclast his father was, charting a new course for the brand’s future? Right now, it’s about holding steady. “I just want to maintain the quality. When it’s good, it’s good.” And even with its powerful new parent company, Creed won’t be chasing trends. “Our goal is to continue to make good perfume, to continue to improve our raw materials … the people will come.”
He could, however, be tempted back into the world of bespoke tailoring for which Creed was known for before his father’s ambitious focus shifted to fragrance. It would be a return to the path that Erwin’s grandfather walked. “Nothing flashy,” he qualifies. “I like classic things.”
Despite having an endless supply of world-class fragrance at his fingertips, Creed makes a surprising revelation: he doesn’t wear scent. “It’s so I don’t pollute my senses when I’m out in the world, smelling, looking for the best things,” he says. He may joke about being “a little boy” at heart, taken with fast cars and travel – but it seems Creed’s future is in safe (unscented) hands.
This story is from the July issue of WISH.
