‘It All Started in the Kitchen’
By Phoebe Neidl
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN — Close your eyes. Relax. Slip into a bath. Breathe in some Brooklyn.
Sound like strange advice? Well, it’s not anymore. Brooklyn, that icon of industry, labor and pollution, now has its own scent. Not a smell (we always had that), but a scent, a nice one, one that Coco Chanel herself may approve of — Eau De Brooklyn.
The borough certainly is changing. First we started having fashion shows in the old Tobacco Warehouse and now this — a luxuriant perfume to call our own. But this is not the marketing ploy of a clever corporation tapping into Brooklyn’s current cool. This lovely and improbable scent emanates from a doctor and his family living in Boerum Hill, who do, in fact, have the best smelling house I’ve ever been in.
“It all started in the kitchen …” explained Dr. Emilio Oribe, who began mixing essential oils purchased from health food stores with his wife and kids about a year and a half ago.
“It seemed whatever we liked, others didn’t like and whatever others liked, we couldn’t reproduce,” he recalled.
So after much consultation with friends and neighbors the Oribes got an idea of what they wanted and brought it to professionals, “to make sure it had a shelf life and all those chemistry details that are very important.” By last July, Eau de Brooklyn was on the shelves of area boutiques.
“From the beginning, it was an idea and the idea suddenly became reality,” said the soft-spoken doctor from Uruguay, who is still utterly amazed that the products, which were featured in W Magazine this month, have sparked so much interest.
“I was always interested in the sense of smell because, you know, it evokes emotions,” says Oribe. But what he seems most pleased with is that this homegrown enterprise really is a family affair, though this simple arrangement has left him a bit stumped about what to do next.
Oribe is likely to be seen with his kids, Kat, 10, and Nicholas, 8, on the weekends delivering their products to local outlets by bicycle — a scheme that will need some tweaking if they wish to expand into Bay Ridge, or if they act on the requests they’ve gotten from Europe and Japan.
The packaging was designed by his daughter from photographs they took at botanic gardens and all of the soaps are wrapped by Goodwill Industries, a group that organizes programs for people with mental disabilities to work for a day.
“You tell me, what should we do with it? Should we really go beyond Brooklyn?” he wonders. Right now, the product line, which consists of two different scented soaps and a perfume, is only retailed in boutiques in southern and western Brooklyn and on their Web site. “We never thought there would be interest anywhere else,” he says.
“I’m perfectly happy just having it in stores here, but maybe it would be good if it goes into the black a little. It would be ideal if it could pay for one of the kids’ education.”
However, in the great tradition of the beer-brewing monks of Belgium and those seasonally sensitive cookie-sellers, the Girl Scouts, Oribe is not sure if he wants to surrender fully to the pressures of supply and demand.
“This is meant to be a gift. It doesn’t have to be in a pharmacy. It should be for people that I like. I don’t want to sell to people I don’t like,” he says.
And he does like Brooklyn. “I think it’s the best place on earth to live,” he says.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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