Draeger: The French Printing House That Brought Great Perfumes to Paper

When we encounter a perfume, we are not looking only at the liquid. Gold lines across a box, lettering on a label, figures in an advertisement, bottles arranged in a catalogue: these communicate the world to which a perfume belongs before we smell it. The French printing company Draeger supported perfume culture from this paper side of the story.

The company’s work, which began in 1886, cannot be explained simply as reproducing designs on paper. Through boxes, labels, photographs, advertisements and booklets, it transformed the forms and names of perfumes into things people could hold. I want to trace that work through surviving sample books and museum collection records.

Key Information
From a Family Printing House to a Production Centre for Perfume Imagery
1. Founded in 1886, Expanding into Montrouge
2. Bringing an Advertising Agency and a Printing Workshop Together
Thinking about Perfume Boxes and Labels through Paper
Colour Reproduction and Catalogues Presenting Perfume
1. The 301 Process and Multiple Printing Passes
2. Gathering Lancôme into a Single Volume in 1945
Reading the Division of Work through Advertising Credits
1. Three Names in an Advertisement for Léonard’s Fashion
The Historical Printing Company and Today’s Draeger Paris
References

Key Information

Name: Draeger / Draeger Frères
Founded: 1886, Paris, by Charles Draeger
Principal activities: Printing, advertising and publishing, with Montrouge as a major production base
Present-day brand publishing the company history: Draeger Paris. The relationship between the present stationery and gift brand and the historical printing business is distinguished later in this article.

From a Family Printing House to a Production Centre for Perfume Imagery

Founded in 1886, Expanding into Montrouge

Charles learned printing beside his father Nicolas and gained experience at the Lahure printing house. His wife Amélie worked at the same firm, and their sons grew up familiar with the trade. In 1886, Charles founded Draeger & Lesieur. After his death, Amélie took over the business and continued it under the name Draeger Frères, placing their sons at the centre of its identity.

Montrouge, south of Paris, became important to the company’s expansion. With little room to enlarge workshops in Paris itself, printers moved to this town, close to the districts where publishers were concentrated. Draeger, too, developed its production facilities there. Its perfume-related work grew within this printing industry on the city’s outskirts.

Bringing an Advertising Agency and a Printing Workshop Together

In 1920, the company joined the American advertising professional Wallace to establish Wallace & Draeger. The work of planning advertisements became connected to the workshops that produced printed material.

In a later generation, Claude Draeger entered the family business at seventeen, learning layout, photography, typesetting, printing and binding. In 1965 he became president of the advertising agency, whose clients included Lancôme and Guerlain. Connecting the people who devised images with those who printed them required an understanding not only of the finished picture but also of the processes that made it possible on paper. Claude’s career shows the breadth of that work.

Thinking about Perfume Boxes and Labels through Paper

Stamping, Inks and Production Costs in the Sample Books

Two sample books, mainly from the 1930s, offer a concrete picture of Draeger’s work. This group of material, handled by Sotheby’s in 2023, contained around 400 printed proofs and advertising samples. Its provenance traces back to the sale of the printing house’s archives in 1990.

The roughly 130 items in the first volume carry production dates from 1928 to 1940, the names of designers and manufacturing costs, together with technical notes on stamping, embossing, inking and paper-surface treatments. The second volume brings together logos, labels, packaging, brochures and advertisements for Coty, Guerlain, Lancôme, Houbigant, Roger & Gallet and others.

What matters here is that design samples survive alongside the conditions of their manufacture. The same lettering or ornament can look and feel different according to the paper’s surface, its relief and the ink. Communicating the impression of a perfume involved choosing an image and deciding which materials and processes would bring it into being.

The Feuilles d’automne Box Decoration and Its Two Creators

Feuilles d’automne (Autumn Leaves), held by MUS, the Museum of Urban and Social History of Suresnes, is a decorative design for a box for Coty’s perfume Muse. The collection record attributes the 1934 design to Pierre Camin and Georges Delhomme. Both originally worked at Coty’s Cité des parfums and developed this decoration at Draeger after François Coty‘s death.

This example reveals the relationship between the perfume company commissioning the work, the two designers devising the decoration, and the company developing the box. Replacing the designers’ authorship with Draeger’s name alone would erase that collaboration. MUS also holds another decorative design for Muse, with coloured scrolling foliage on a shagreen ground. These paper records show that multiple appearances were considered and produced for a single perfume.

Scented Face-Powder Boxes and Adaptation for Mass Production

The world of perfume extended beyond the bottle. A Coty powder box in the Musée du Cartonnage et de l’Imprimerie in Valréas carries white and gold powder-puff motifs against an orange-gold ground. The lettering inside the lid indicates that the natural-coloured powder was scented with L’Or de Coty.

The museum’s record associates this powder-puff decoration with Léon Bakst and explains that Georges Draeger adapted it for a less expensive cardboard box. The distinction between Bakst’s design and Draeger’s development of the specification is important. Decoration conveying luxury was translated into packaging that could be manufactured industrially. Here, paper and printing connected ornament with production.

Colour Reproduction and Catalogues Presenting Perfume

The 301 Process and Multiple Printing Passes

Central to Draeger’s technical history is the 301 process, distinguished by its colour reproduction. The Bibliothèque Forney in Paris holds an advertising sheet for the process dating from around 1950. Two balls of yarn and two spools of thread were chosen to demonstrate its colour fidelity. Beyond perfume, conveying the colours of materials was itself something the printer could sell.

The City of Montrouge’s history records that some of the company’s luxury printed works used gold and silver inks and required five, sometimes seven, printing passes. Layering colour helped create the character of the printed surface. This should not be treated as a specification shared by every perfume box or advertisement, however. The techniques used for each work need to be read from its individual records.

Gathering Lancôme into a Single Volume in 1945

A Lancôme catalogue printed at Draeger Frères in Montrouge in July 1945 offers a concrete example of presenting perfumes and packaging together. The copy held by Cooper Hewitt is one of a numbered deluxe edition of 100. Its 88 pages are held together with a transparent plastic spiral binding and contain forty mounted plates, four of them in colour.

The cover has a rose motif against a gold ground, while the text paper carries a floral watermark. Its pages present not only the bottles but also their packaging. Photographs show the contours of glass, colour plates arrange several bottles together, and the text describes the perfumes and their containers.

The scent itself cannot be transferred to paper. But by presenting bottles and boxes in the same volume, a catalogue gives readers a tangible understanding of the objects containing it. Here, the paper, illustrations and even the binding become part of the medium through which perfume is introduced.

Reading the Division of Work through Advertising Credits

Three Names in an Advertisement for Léonard’s Fashion

A 1970–1971 magazine advertisement for Léonard’s perfume Fashion, held by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, provides clues to the division of creative roles. Léonard was the client, Akila Marais the advertising agency, Jean-François Arrigoni Neri the illustrator, and Draeger the printer.

The image bears the artist’s name, “ARRIGONI NERI,” the agency credit “AKILA – MARAIS,” and the printer’s name, “DRAEGER.” The technique is recorded as colour offset printing on paper. Drawing, planning and printing come together within a single advertisement.

The “DRAEGER” credit identifies the printer who gave the advertisement its visible form. On its own, it does not establish that the company also devised the figures or composition. Looking at the small credits at the edge of a perfume advertisement reveals the chain of production hidden behind the brand name.

The Historical Printing Company and Today’s Draeger Paris

Today, Draeger Paris is a brand selling stationery, cards, gifts and other products. According to its history, Éditions Yvon, acquired by Draeger in 1956, remained with the Draeger family when the printing company Draeger Frères was sold to the Gaillard Motel group in 1971. This Yvon business became Draeger La Carterie in 2018.

The City of Montrouge, meanwhile, records that the historical Draeger factories closed in 1980 and that the printing house’s archives were dispersed at auction in 1990. The present brand carries the lineage of the family and its stationery business, but this should not be read as meaning that the factory which printed perfume boxes has continued operating unchanged to the present day.

Draeger’s contribution to perfume history was not the creation of fragrance formulas. It was the translation of designs into the textures of paper, of bottles into catalogues, and of brand names into the colours and lettering of advertisements. Learning about the painters, photographers, planners and printers involved in that process lets us see perfume boxes and old advertisements as more than decoration surrounding a scent.