On August 30, 2023, a shock wave runs through Japan’s perfume industry: Creed is returning. Bluebell Japan, which had imported and distributed the brand for 15 years from 2004, withdrew it from the market on May 31, 2019. Perhaps because of the rumored falling-out between Bluebell Japan and Creed at the time, this time the importer is Intermode Kawabe. Now that more people are willing to buy perfumes costing ¥30,000 or ¥40,000, can Creed regain its former glory? This page takes a deep dive into the brand, for readers who know Creed and those who do not.
Perfume is an art, an imaginative endeavor, like sculpture, a symphony, or cooking. […] But, of course, there is science too. If you do not know the correct temperature at which to store a particular natural fragrance ingredient (in Japanese), you cannot do even the most basic things. You also need scientific insight into how different essences combine. You need to understand how changes in soil and rainfall affect the quality of oranges or iris (in Japanese), for example.
Olivier Creed
Basic Information
Founded: 1760
Founder: James Henry Creed
Official website: English
Founding History
Every generation of the Creed family has had the skills to understand and practice the art and science of perfume-making. This is an innate ability, but it also has to be developed. Since childhood, I accompanied my father to fragrance workshops, where I learned about the structure of scents and other aspects of perfumery.
Olivier Creed
My son Erwin has likewise been following me and learning since he was eight. You need both talent and its development. Artistic excellence is also important: I painted at least 100 paintings before becoming Creed’s master perfumer in 1975.
The House of Creed, founded by James Henry Creed in Mayfair, London, in 1760, was originally a supplier of bespoke clothing and leather goods to the British royal family. He later became the first English tailor to open a shop at 25 rue de la Paix in Paris.
King George III, who wore scented gloves made by Creed, liked their fragrance so much that he commissioned a perfume with the same scent. Created in 1781, this was Creed’s first perfume, Royal English Leather, said to be the world’s first leather (in Japanese) fragrance.
The company continued as a bespoke clothing house, but in 1854, when Napoleon and Empress Eugénie formally appointed it a perfume supplier, its reputation is said to have spread rapidly, establishing it as a luxury perfume house.
In 1860, it appeared in the Army and Navy Gazette, gained acceptance from Queen Victoria and the leading courts of Europe, and began designing clothes for European royalty. The Count d’Orsay apparently also wore Creed’s made-to-measure gloves during this period, inspiring admiration and spreading the Creed name as a fashion house.
In 1885, Queen Victoria commissioned Creed to make a riding habit. At the same time, the house also created Fleurs de Bulgarie for her. That riding habit would later inspire the fragrance Aventus for Her. It was in this year that Creed’s tailoring formally received a royal warrant.
Charles Creed, born in 1909 as Henry Creed’s sixth child and third son, worked as a designer at Bergdorf Goodman before returning to Creed as a designer in 1933. In 1939, he achieved record sales for a womenswear collection in America, and the business apparently continued to operate despite the war. Creed is said to have pioneered the cachet of sewing a visible label into a jacket’s lining, and its winter coats were also admired.
After Henry died in 1949, Charles Creed took over the couture business. James Creed and his son Olivier apparently wanted to transform the family business into a perfume brand, and when Charles died in 1966, they closed the couture operation and focused exclusively on perfume.
Olivier attended the École des Beaux-Arts to study art and apparently taught himself perfumery afterward. In 1956, he created Fleurissimo, the fragrance for Grace Kelly’s wedding.
From a creative standpoint, a master perfumer must have the courage of his convictions. When I created Green Irish Tweed and it was released, some people said it would never sell because it smelled too strongly of grass. Today, the fragrance’s popularity speaks for itself.
Olivier Creed
After the initial success of Green Irish Tweed, created for Cary Grant in 1985, Creed continued to make bespoke fragrances for famous people: Spring Flower for Audrey Hepburn, Churchill’s favored Tabarome, Angélique Encens for Marlene Dietrich, and Love in White, presented to First Lady Laura Bush, among others. In 2010, Aventus brought explosive popularity worldwide. Its sales prompted the opening of brand shops in department stores around the world, making the Creed name internationally known.
Today, Erwin Creed has taken over as the seventh generation.
In February 2020, the company was sold to the asset-management firm BlackRock and the chairman of Diageo. In June 2023, it was acquired for €3.5 billion by Kering, owner of Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. Perhaps it may develop a makeup division in the future, like Gucci or Balenciaga.
Incidentally, fragrances created for celebrities are covered by individual contracts, some of which apparently permit a release only after the person’s death. For example, Grace Kelly’s Fleurissimo was released immediately after she died.
We believe the manual methods used since Creed’s foundation in 1760 are the best way to make perfume, and we still use them today. All Creed fragrances are made in a workshop in France’s Fontainebleau forest by me, Erwin, and 30 production staff. There is no factory or laboratory, no market testing, and no animal testing. As master perfumer, I make every decision.
Olivier Creed
| First generation | James Henry Creed |
| ? | |
| ? | |
| Henry Creed | |
| James Creed | |
| Sixth generation | Olivier Creed |
| Seventh generation | Erwin Creed |
The Truth About Creed
The Ghost Perfumer is the true story of Olivier Creed, the seductive heir to a clothing empire, who brainwashed the world’s greatest perfumer into becoming his secret scent-maker for decades in exchange for just a few custom suits. The fragrant output that built a company sold in 2020 to the world’s largest asset manager for about a billion dollars may amount to the greatest con in the history of luxury retail.
Gabe Oppenheim
So far, this has been the Creed story everyone knows. There is historical documentation of Creed as a bespoke tailoring house, but in fact, almost everything about its perfume history comes only from the brand’s own official account. It is also said that Olivier had refused interviews for 15 years before agreeing to one with the perfume blog CaFleureBon in 2008.
Of particular interest is Gabe Oppenheim’s 2021 book The Ghost Perfumer: Creed, Lies, & the Scent of the Century. Written after interviews with many perfumers, it exposes truth and falsehood at Creed and in the perfume industry, as its title suggests. Its revelation of Creed’s major lies sent shock waves through the industry.
Rumors Circulating Online
Even before Gabe published his findings, discussions questioning Creed’s claims could be found online from around 2005.
The blog Feelingsexy.com quotes someone saying, “Despite the many claims about Creed’s history, I have never seen a single vintage bottle. In my research, all I could find was an image of a bottle of Olivier EdC, probably from the early 1970s.” A Basenotes thread also points out that “none of their royal warrants, advertisements, or press mentions says anything about Creed,” and states, “If they made perfume before Olivier’s time,” meaning sixth-generation Olivier Creed, “there is not a single piece of evidence beyond Creed’s own PR. Perhaps the perfumes were so bad that they were embarrassed to mention them.”
Before Olivier’s time in the twentieth century, only Creed’s history as a clothing house is historically substantiated; the stories about perfume survive solely in the company’s own narrative, such as its becoming famous as a perfume house in the 1850s and 1860s. Moreover, Charles Creed’s 1961 book Maid to Measure contains no mention of perfume.
In other words, there was not a single supporting testimony for the Creed history related in interviews and online by Olivier Creed, whom The Independent called the world’s most elegant perfumer. More than that, Olivier had not actually made all the perfumes himself.
The central figure in this story is Pierre Bourdon, creator of the celebrated Davidoff Cool Water and the only pupil of Edmond Roudnitska (in Japanese), the greatest perfumer of the twentieth century. Bourdon (in Japanese)‘s self-esteem, his frustrations with the perfume industry, and his peculiar relationship with Olivier Creed would give rise to the major brand that Creed became.
If the perfume world is full of secrets, perhaps the greatest is this:
Gabe Oppenheim
Creed’s original creations were not made by Olivier Creed or his ancestors, but by a brilliant perfumer named Pierre Bourdon. With his self-esteem wounded by his father, he gave Creed wonderful creations for very little money and concealed his role from his fellow perfumers.
This is a story of olfactory robbery.
The Ghost Perfumer
Before writing this book, the only information I had was what Michael Edwards and Luca Turin had discovered: that Pierre Bourdon had somehow been involved in making Green Irish Tweed.
Gabe Oppenheim
Olivier Creed, born in Nice in 1943, visited a small perfume shop called Soleil d’Or in 1963, when he was 20. This was the beginning of his life in perfume. Through Olivier’s sales efforts, it became the first perfumery to stock Creed’s fragrances and custom-made men’s suits. According to the shop’s owner, nobody knew Creed at the time.
Time passed, and until Pierre became not a ghostwriter but a ghost perfumer in the early 1980s, Creed’s perfume business was insignificant compared with its tailoring. It is said to have sold fewer than 1,000 bottles a year.
Olivier Creed felt that transforming the perfume business required a perfumer who could make extraordinary scents. He approached Pierre in 1983, while Pierre was composing a fragrance for submission to L’Oréal. Pierre’s former wife, Françoise Caron (in Japanese), played a role by directing Olivier to Pierre’s new workplace after he left Roure. Since Pierre’s workplace was directly opposite his shop, Olivier visited persistently, offering sweet temptations to a Pierre who was vulnerable from failing to win recognition from his formidable father, who had worked at Dior (in Japanese). In the end, he secured a perfume that had lost a L’Oréal fragrance competition and made it his own. He named it Fleurs de Bulgarie and spun a story that it had originally been created for Queen Victoria in 1845.
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect is that the payment for creating Creed fragrances consisted almost entirely, without much exaggeration, of made-to-measure suits.
When I lost the final competition for Lancôme (in Japanese)‘s Sagamore, Olivier Creed stole my formula and turned it into Green Irish Tweed.
Pierre Bourdon
Creed made adjustments and released Green Irish Tweed in 1985, and it succeeded in the market. The rest hardly needs telling. With this and fragrances including Spring Flower, Pierre led Creed’s business to success, ultimately paving the way for the historic 2010 blockbuster Aventus.
Next, Pierre Bourdon’s pupil Jean-Christophe Hérault became the target. He is the actual creator of Aventus. Rather than attending a traditional perfumery school, he had trained under Pierre. But without a perfume-school education, he had to prove his ability somehow. Creed exploited that opening and approached him. There is another detail behind the story: the pineapple in Aventus had been used in a fragrance Pierre and Hérault created together in 2005, and the accord was Pierre’s work. Combined with an incredibly beautiful musk, it became Aventus, which generated $5 million in its first year alone and continues to sell today.
What this truth about Creed demonstrates is the power of its marketing and branding, and that even a great perfumer’s unsuccessful submissions can sell. It also shows that Creed’s judgment in recognizing their commercial potential was sound.
I asked Creed to let me speak with Olivier and to clarify his position as a perfumer, but received no response at all.
Gabe Oppenheim
But knowing about this deception, the ghost perfumer, and the recycling of fragrances, would you still buy Creed? The issue is not limited to Creed. More and more brands lure us with transparently strategic marketing claims that make us wonder whether they were really selling perfume so long ago, or whether such techniques even existed then. Ultimately, it is left to the customer, and perhaps today’s purchasing habits suggest that these things do not matter. There will always be some people who do not care, even when crimes or ethical problems are involved.
Incidentally, it is said that Gabe’s book has not led to a lawsuit because it was approved by lawyers and confines itself to a record based on primary sources.
Fragrance Creations
| 1783 | Royal English Leather |
| 1845 | Fleurs de Bulgarie |
| 1850 | Santal Imperial |
| 1856 | Royal Scottish Lavender |
| 1862 | Fantasia de Fleurs |
| 1870 | Jasmin Impératrice Eugénie |
| 1875 | Tabarôme Privé |
| 1875 | Bois de Cédrat |
| 1890 | Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare |
| 1901 | Citrus Bigarrade |
| 1933 | Angélique Encens |
| 1948 | Vétiver |
| 1948 | Cyprès-Musc |
| 1949 | Ambre Cannelle |
| 1950 | Orange Spice |
| 1953 | Cuir de Russie |
| 1959 | Jasmal |
| 1965 | Aubépine-Acacia |
| 1968 | Irisia |
| 1970 | Sélection Verte |
| 1972 | Fleurissimo |
| 1973 | Acier Aluminium |
| 1975 | Zeste Mandarine Pamplemousse |
| 1975 | Épicéa |
| 1980 | Tubereuse Indiana |
| 1982 | Chèvrefeuille |
| 1982 | Baie de Genièvre |
| 1985 | Green Irish Tweed |
| 1987 | Bois du Portugal |
| 1987 | Vanisia |
| 1992 | Erolfa |
| 1993 | Royal Delight |
| 1994 | Néroli Sauvage |
| 1994 | Millésime Impérial |
| 1995 | Silver Mountain Water |
| 1996 | Spring Flower |
| 1997 | Royal Water |
| 1999 | Green Valley |
| 2000 | Tabarome Millésime |
| 2000 | 2000 Fleurs |
| 2001 | Herbe Marine |
| 2002 | Himalaya |
| 2004 | Original Vetiver |
| 2005 | Love In White |
| 2005 | Original Santal |
| 2006 | Royal Ceylan |
| 2006 | Feuilles Vertes |
| 2006 | Fleurs de Gardenia |
| 2007 | Amalfi Flowers |
| 2007 | Virgin Island Water |
| 2008 | Love in Black |
| 2008 | Les Floralies |
| 2009 | Acqua Fiorentina |
| 2009 | Les Royales Exclusives – Sublime Vanille |
| 2009 | Royal Mayfair |
| 2010 | Aventus |
| 2010 | Les Royales Exclusives Spice and Wood |
| 2011 | Les Royales Exclusives Jardin d’Amalfi |
| 2011 | Royal Oud |
| 2011 | Royal Service |
| 2011 | Les Royales Exclusives Original Cologne |
| 2011 | Les Royales Exclusives White Flowers |
| 2012 | Acqua Fiorentina (2012) |
| 2012 | Fleurs de Gardenia (2012) |
| 2012 | Les Royales Exclusives Pure white Cologne |
| 2013 | Millésime 1849 |
| 2014 | Acqua Originale Iris Tubereuse |
| 2014 | Acqua Originale Vetiver Geranium |
| 2014 | Acqua Originale Asian Green Tea |
| 2014 | Acqua Originale Cèdre Blanc |
| 2014 | Acqua Originale Aberdeen Lavander |
| 2015 | Creed pour Enfants |
| 2015 | Royal Princess Oud |
| 2016 | Aventus for Her |
| 2016 | Rose Impériale |
| 2017 | Les Royales Exclusives White Amber |
| 2017 | Viking |
| 2018 | Love in White for Summer |
| 2018 | Floralie |
| 2019 | Aventus Cologne |
| 2019 | Angélique Encens |
| 2019 | Acqua Originale Zeste Mandarine |
| 2019 | Acqua Originale Green Neroli |
| 2019 | Acqua Originale Citrus Bigarade |
| 2020 | Aventus 10th Anniversary |
| 2021 | Viking Cologne |
| 2022 | Wind Flowers |
| 2023 | Carmina |
| 2023 | Millésime 1849 |
| 2023 | Absolu Aventus |
| 2023 | Spring Flower |
| 2024 | Queen of Silk |
| Verveine Narcisse | |
| Bois de Santal | |
| Bayrhum Vetiver | |
| Scent of Oger |
