Sadie Chowen and I first met in 2018 when she was a finalist in the IMAGE Magazine Business Woman of the Year Awards and I was the editor. In my experience, there are largely two types of entrants, the serial entrant and those cajoled into putting their name forward. Chowen was the latter and appeared a little bewildered by the glitz of the ceremony and the excitement that was palpable in the Burlington ballroom that night. She went on to win her category and take home the title of Creative Business Woman of the Year, recognised for her vision and achievements in building her business, The Burren Perfumery, into a leading tourist destination and her growing product offering.

Three years on and, amidst a global pandemic, Chowen has another accomplishment under her belt, having launched her first 100 per cent natural, COSMOS certified perfume, Wild Rose. This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Most fragrance mixtures typically contain several hundred chemicals, most of them synthetic, some of which, can be harmful and cause a whole host of long-term health issues. Producing a natural fragrance is very expensive and involves a serious level of expertise, hence the rarity. Securing a 100% natural certification from COSMOS, the most revered regulator of natural products in Europe isn’t easy either. It’s guided by four core principles: promoting the use of products from organic agriculture and respecting biodiversity, using natural resources responsibly and respecting the environment, using processing and manufacturing that are clean and respectful of human health and the earth and integrating and developing the concept of green chemistry. Like I said, no mean feat.

“Wild Rose, for me, is the culmination of 20 years of working with natural ingredients,” Chowen says. “I finally have enough expertise, money and time to create something that I want for me, and others as well.”

Chowen was born in England, but grew up in the Dordogne region of France. She lived in London, New York and Paris working in film production and clothing design before falling in love with the Burren in Co Clare and the life it had to offer.

“The design back then was leprechauns and shamrocks, it wasn’t very contemporary. I couldn’t see why we couldn’t have products that could be on a shelf in London, Paris or New York.”

The Burren Perfumery, which was founded in 1972 was already making an imprint, but its second owner, Edward Briggs needed help and recruited Chowen in 1998 to help guide the business forward. In 2001 she bought it outright and spent the following years transforming it into a booming rural business which now employs 35 people, produces more than 120 products and (pre pandemic) welcomes up to 60,000 visitors a year.

“The design back then was leprechauns and shamrocks and it wasn’t very contemporary. I couldn’t see why we couldn’t have products that could be on a shelf in London, Paris or New York. And because I’m vegetarian, I buy organic food and use organic products so I wanted everything we sold to be something I could use. That defined a lot. I couldn’t find any organic creams easily in Ireland at the time. So I started experimenting and making organic creams and that grew.”

“It was a slow rise of costs versus income and they were pretty tight together for a long time.”

This interview takes place shortly after Garnier’s announcement of achieving cruelty free status and is widely lauded for their approach to sustainability and dramatically reducing the brand’s environmental impact. While this is indeed something to celebrate – Garnier is owned by L’Oréal, one of the biggest beauty brands in the world – these developments are, in no small part, thanks to independent companies like The Burren Perfumery, who have worked hard to find solutions and create demand amongst consumers over the last two decades.

“I think we’ve always been ahead of our time, but now it looks like we’re very established. There’s been a wonderful rise in natural and organic cosmetic companies in Ireland in the last five to ten years. It’s great to see the customer awareness, because that’s what will drive the publicity around it. The attention is very important, but the pressure on the bigger brands is to grow and also to get as big a profit margin as possible. So it’s harder to maintain that integrity. I think it would be nice to see more support, especially in Ireland for mid-range or small businesses as well as the bigger ones because they bring more energy, integrity and vision to their businesses.”

Bridging the financial gap from vision to execution to consumer awakening wasn’t seamless. “It was a slow rise of costs versus income and they were pretty tight together for a long time. After about four or five years, my husband Ralph [Doyle] came on to help me. He was an IT person and brought his skills.”

In the early days, frustration arose when her husband was mistaken as the CEO. “That can happen and it’s really annoying. In a meeting, I’m careful to present first, and he’s always been careful to take a back seat. But in the older days getting money from banks as a woman was much much harder. The banking industry could be a little modernised. We, as a business, try not to go near the banks because they’re so old fashioned. We boot strapped our way up and we’re very self sufficient, financially and that’s how we chose to do it. But when I did have to do it, I felt quite patronised and found that really difficult. Because I wasn’t from Ireland I disregarded a lot of the [patriarchy] and it gave me an ability to just cut through it in the early days. I think women in entrepreneurship is incredibly powerful now, even in government bodies.”

“I think it would be nice to see more support, especially in Ireland for mid-range or small businesses”

Winning the IMAGE award prompted further developments. “It brought me into a world that I hadn’t been aware of before because I was so busy working and running the company in the West and occasionally going to Grasse, I wasn’t part of Dublin society, so winning that award opened my eyes and it was nice to be part of that. Right after that I applied for Going For Growth with Enterprise Ireland, that was a new era for me. It’s a great network of women, such a boost of energy. It’s a really good forum to get encouragement.”

Chowen withdrew from wholesale after 9/11 when she noticed a change in the market and it would prove a turning point for the business. “[Wholesale] was no longer small owner-run shops where they were looking after your product, it was much more cut-throat and I felt that we were going to have to compromise the quality of the product if we stayed in that market. Our core ethos was integrity, generosity, quality and so I made a big decision to stop supplying all the wholesale people, which was novel at the time, and grow our direct-to-consumer base on the internet, mail order sales.

“Our saving grace was withdrawing from the wholesale market. I was able to do that because of my husband’s skills and it meant that we were very self-sufficient. We had people coming directly to us so we weren’t reliant on outside forces or dictated to by those forces, and from there on in it was a gradual growth. We grew pretty much double digits every year, even through the recession. It’s a bit like during the war when people aren’t doing the bigger things, they’re doing the smaller things, which are for the Irish, buying high quality Irish cosmetics and luxuries.”

The pandemic has offered similar learnings. Despite being closed for most of 2020 and with little assurance as to when they’ll be able to welcome customers back, Chowen remains optimistic. Revenue is down 20 per cent, having been propped up in no small part by their mail order service and the powerful Buy Irish campaign. “Mail order has been growing 37 per cent year on year for the last five years, but last year it grew by 91 per cent. It was like a groundswell of support. We have customers from all around the world, but the Irish customers rose up.”

One wholesale exception was made for Avoca however. Following a rebrand in 2015, the company was inundated with exciting offers. “We had people dangling things in front of us, bigger and bigger and we realised success to us doesn’t necessarily mean size, it means richness in quality. For me, I just want to be proud of the business. But to be proud of it doesn’t mean it has to be distributed in every outlet across the world. I would like it to be in a few key places where it’s valued. We don’t have any investors, because that means you have shareholders, and the duty of the company is to remunerate the shareholders. So we’re not driven by profit, but we can do that because we’re self contained.”

Chowen agreed to partner with Avoca in 2017, and the relationship remains strong today. “We are delighted to be exclusively stocking such an iconic Irish beauty brand,” says Maoliosa Connell, Director of Marketing, Creative & Buying at Avoca Ireland. “It’s fantastic to be aligned with a like-minded brand who highlights the importance of sourcing organic and natural ingredients, with everything made by hand, on site in the Burren. Their business ethos aligns perfectly with [ours], with wellness and vitality at the heart of what they do.”

Until they can reopen, Chowen and her team are busy planning the evolution of Ireland’s oldest perfume house. “It’s given us the opportunity to think a lot about how the perfumery can move forward. What we see is that there’s going to be even more of a need for contact and customer experience. What’s interesting about the perfumery is the intersection, we’re a multi-faceted business. I want to focus on these new perfumes that I’m working on and want them to be world class. Ralph has a fantastic facility of bringing the Burren to the customers and telling the story so we’re looking into maturing the business in that sense and improving the customer experience. There’s an expectation that the experience needs to get better, so more talks, more understanding about the perfume and how it’s made. That’s going to be significantly better in the infrastructure we’re looking at at the moment, while holding on to the charm that it has right now. So not necessarily getting bigger, just improving what we have.”