Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg on How Creativity Fuels Brand-building – WWD

A beauty brand can be launched from just a scribble of an idea on the back of a cocktail napkin or it can spring from a scientist’s decades of research. A new fragrance can be sketched from the most succinct five-word brief or from a Dropbox beast of a deck that expresses in detail the colors, the textures, the vibe of the soon-to-be scent. Only Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg, cofounders of Fresh and, more recently, The Maker, would seemingly build an entire luxury boutique hotel in Hudson, New York — with restaurant, bar, lounge and even a gym — to be used as the mood board for a new beauty line. So just what is The Maker? A fragrance line inspired by a hotel? A hotel that has a robust assortment of merch?

Launched by the duo in 2020, The Maker takes brand building to new heights: a fully immersive (and fully shopable) world that encourages everyone, whether in our own homes or tucked away in a room at The Maker, to treat ourselves, to live in the moment.

The Maker promotes mindfulness with a heavy dash of escapism. You can sleep on The Maker custom oh-so-soft bedding, spritz its fragrances, drink a The Maker cocktail inspired by one of the six scents. According to Glazman, to future-proof the health of a brand, you have to be a world-builder. “You have to continue to enrich your brand, not just with stories, but also with experiences,” he said. “That’s what Alina and I have always done with our curious minds and our desire to satisfy that curiosity. If there’s something we think should exist, we know it might resonate with other people, too. We will just jump into it.”

In the early days of Fresh, Glazman and Roytberg set up office in an old warehouse across the way from Boston’s Logan Airport. An enormous table in the conference room looked out on the active runways. “We could watch the airplanes coming in and out. It was very dynamic — our ideas seemed to always be moving,” said Glazman. “Alina and I would be debating, and everyone else jumping into the debate. It felt like we were seated at a big Italian dinner.”

At Fresh, these emotional connections, whether between employees or with customers, have been dubbed the brand’s “sixth sense” and one of the keys to its global success. Glazman and Roytberg have an uncanny ability to predict and then pioneer ideas that are now considered to be industry-standard, such as the value of naturally derived ingredients, the importance of sustainability, the power of premiumization.

Now, 23 years after LVMH purchased a majority share in the line, Fresh can be found in 25 countries and continues to be one of LVMH’s fastest growing brands globally. In just two years, The Maker has experienced a similar growth trajectory: the line launched exclusively with Goop, and is now available at Bluemercury, Sephora and Bergdorf Goodman. While the founders wouldn’t comment on sales, industry sources speculate sales will reach $12 million in sales in the next 12 months.

Thirty-two years ago, you opened the doors to Nuts about Beauty, a tiny beauty apothecary in Boston. What were you thinking about hospitality then that still informs your approach today?

Alina Roytberg: Before you build a brand, you build a world. Our first experience with presenting a world was that first store. It came from Lev’s fascination with the beauty industry and obsession with fragrances. And I was loving this idea of ancestry, the rituals, bringing history forward. We took personal care beyond product function by displaying the products in such a way that they tell a story. I remember when we hired our first part-time person. Lev was training her, telling her how you can’t have your hands down and stand three feet away from the person. You have to stand next to them, not across a counter from them. You have to take their hand, apply this lotion while you’re talking to them, tell them the story. Create an intimacy, because these products are truly very intimate — people use them while naked in the bathroom.

Lev Glazman: We also had quite an incredible assortment of products. We knew that we wanted to bring in products from around the world, ones that had natural ingredients. I used to go to beauty counters and obsessively buy, because I wanted to hear how people talked about their products. I couldn’t fully connect with the science — I understood the science, but I couldn’t emotionally connect to it. But if you’d walk into our store and there was a chamomile extract or a lavender extract, people already know what it is. They know how it smells. They’ve touched it before in their life. There’s an immediate curiosity. And then there’s the opportunity to have a conversation with them, but it becomes a conversation where they share their history, ‘Oh my grandmother loves chamomile tea, we used to drink it when we had colds and with honey, and it is great for the stomach.’ People immediately feel that there is something there, that they’ve connected to something. That’s the way our brain works. And that was what was so different with us. You literally walked into a world. And then there were also such a variety of things they haven’t seen before. And it was just an immediate draw.

It’s a combination you’ve mastered — using a touch of the familiar to make innovation feel accessible, using innovation to bring excitement to the familiar. How did this evolve at Fresh?

L.G.: When we started Fresh, we really felt that we wanted to be disruptors in the beauty industry without even understanding what that would mean at the time. We knew that we needed to introduce the world to natural ingredients, making sure that our customers would emotionally connect to the brand through the ingredients, stories and through rituals that had existed for so many centuries. Alina and I were always into design, into creating a background for what we do to enhance the experience. So we knew from the get-go, because we started with a shop, that we needed to continue with that to showcase the world of Fresh. You’ve got to be in that environment in order to embrace it, to understand it, to live it.

And today at The Maker?

L.G.: We wanted to create a brand that would become even more of a lifestyle, where you’re creating a theater of experience. People can eat in it, sleep in it, really feel it. And, of course, start creating memories. The Maker is something that’s so highly curated that it gives people an immediate emotional reaction, that sense of curiosity, which is how they get connected to the spaces and to the fragrances. The fragrance was always part of the story. I live fragrance. It’s in my blood. As we built the hotel and created each room, the fragrance was a very big part of it. As I was imaging what kind of memories and what kind of experiences people could have here, as the wallpaper was going up and the furniture was coming in, the fragrances were building in my head. We now have a platform to fully express everything we love — art, design and fragrance. And here, we can truly bring the fragrance to life.

A.R.: One of the most exciting things about going to a new hotel is going into your room for the first time. In most hotels, it’s going to be the same room that you saw in the pictures. Your room and your next-door room and the room after that are all the same. The whole premise of The Maker is to create each room as an individual world to inspire that childish excitement that you feel when you see so many different things that you can look at and feel and touch.

The other important part is approachability. No matter how much history and artisanship and restoration have gone into the space, the aesthetic, this bohemian sensibility, is tied to being very comfortable when you are there. Imagine you have these incredible friends who are nomadic and travel everywhere and, obviously, are affluent, but you can visit their house when they’re not home. That’s The Maker. It’s the ultimate escape.

Why are details so important, and how do you know if you’ve gotten the details right?

A.R.: A new world starts in two people’s imagination and ideas, and then you start evolving it. To me, as a designer, all of those details count. With The Maker, we create fragrances tied to a new concept, to a different world and a new sensibility. It’s not about being minimal. It’s about putting all of our emotions, all of our emotional responses to feelings and people and textures, into one thing. And what could be better than expressing it through fragrance?

There are certain parts of the hotel we wanted people to be able to bring home. We have this amazing bedding, cushions and other decorative items. Glassware in the bar. But I think we knew from the beginning was going to center around fragrance. For both of us, fragrance is the core piece of everything. The olfactory is what’s going to take a little piece of a little world and make it the best memory. Or it could be a piece of fantasy, of something that you imagine yourself doing. 

L.G.: At The Maker, it’s about sensuality. it’s delivering an experience. Everything goes through a very sultry filter. It’s very sensual, from the textures to the environment to the fragrances. Sensuality is about being aware and seeing things around you. Sensuality is not just about sexual interaction. It’s about how aware you are of everything, of smells, of people, of what you touch — sensuality is your interaction with the world. And that’s what we really want to create and to celebrate.

As you expand a brand, how do you scale the world without falling into cliché or watering down the experience?

A.R.: Before we started The Maker, we worked on the mission and the core values. It’s different from how we started at Fresh, and it’s the only way to start a business now when you know you are going to have people working with you. You need to have a set of values that people can identify with.

The Maker world is so rich; there’s so many design codes. Coming into it at a very different point in my career, putting all of this together felt very easy. You’re pulling together the things that really identify with that world and using them in a bigger way to communicate. A product line allows you to do this, because you pull a few aspects that are very easy to identify from this very rich world.  One thing I’ve talked to Lev about, going back to 1991, is how to edit. It’s the first thing you learn as a designer; you have to have the knife and the scissors because you have to cut away the non-essential things in order to make your brand identifiable and visible and to emphasize what is important.

L.G.: And telling that story consistently — everything at The Maker is so interconnected. For example, our fragrance bottle has the same ridges as the texture of our glasses. We are very particular about how we express The Maker to the outside world. Even when we first interview someone, they immediately connect the dots. They from the start say ‘This is so The Maker’ or ‘This is so not the Maker.’ Because we activated the codes very quickly, and then we stuck with those codes.

A.R.: One of our first core values was being environmentally responsible. We do things at a cost to us, not at a cost to the environment. With the restoration, that meant making new things from vintage parts or rebuilding this world without using so many new parts. And having this same discipline with the product line, being clean and responsible and doing things with this different approach. The Maker glass bottle is half the weight of traditional perfume bottles. Thinking not just of what things are made from, but of their life cycle, where they go and if they are able to be recycled. It’s so much harder to retrofit, so we decided that this was something that we wanted to build into our world from the start. The hardest part is, as the clean lists become more and more detailed, the ingredients walk away. So it becomes such a challenge to create fragrance. But the bigger the creative challenge, the better the results, right?

What’s your leadership style?

L.G.: Our leadership style has never changed. We’ve always been open. There’s never been a hierarchy. Everybody is invited to the table. We encourage everyone to be disruptive in the way that they are thinking. The Maker is a perfect world — since we celebrate all the makers. Everyone is a maker, not just people who tinker with things. In the beginning, I was doing product development and Alina was doing the creative and design. But we would always meet. We always have that moment where we can interject. We had our spaces where we could do our development, but we’d constantly be talking about the vision together, feeding it to each other. We approach everyone in the company in this same way. We want people to feel empowered, to feel incentivized. To feel as passionate about what they are doing as we are.

A.R.: During that original indies period in the ’90s, developing a brand took a lot longer obviously than it does now. Before the Fresh table was a big table, it was a small table. It was like half a table. Just me and him. And slowly other chairs were being pulled in. The moment that somebody pulled in a chair and sat with us, they became the most essential person at the table. It becomes about them and their story. Someone feeling ownership of their job doesn’t come from being told that they own it, it comes from making sure you’ve created an environment where their voice can be heard. While it sounds very simple, it’s extremely complex as companies grow. With Fresh going on 30 years, being able to maintain the kind of environment where everyone feels free to speak, where everyone feels their own importance, that is a huge part of what we work on. That family hospitality can be very easily lost when you go to other markets where you speak other languages, when the core of the business has become so large, but, at Fresh, the family still exists.

How has The Maker evolved your leadership style?

A.R.: In hospitality, everyone steps in to do everything. You polish the silverware in the café; you take away the dishes. This is how you can understand how people feel at every level of a business. In order for them to be understood, you need to be able to do what they do.

L.G.: As a leader, you don’t have to come across that you know everything. You can learn from everybody around the table. A lot of times, someone will ask what I think about something. And I’m OK saying I don’t know. There’s that saying that no matter how much you know, there’s still always something for you to learn. Since you can never know everything, you just have to be open-minded. And then ideas come from everywhere.