Inside the factory

Every Ivana Sofia fragrance is made at 57 Cayman Road, Eikenhof, on the southern edge of Johannesburg. Not imported, not decanted from someone else's drums, not bought in and relabelled. Composed, blended, matured and bottled here in Gauteng by the people whose name is on the label.

How a fragrance is composed

A fragrance begins as a brief rather than a formula: the character we want, the family it belongs to, how it should behave on skin in Johannesburg heat as opposed to a Cape winter. From there it becomes a working formula, weighed to the gram from A-grade French fragrance oils.

The oils are blended into a perfumer's alcohol base at eau de parfum concentration, then left to macerate. Maceration is simply time: the blend rests in sealed, light-proof vessels so that the raw edges settle and the notes knit together. A fragrance smells sharper and thinner on day one than it does a few weeks later, which is why we do not rush this step and why nothing is bottled the day it is mixed.

Bottling and batches

We fill in small batches rather than long production runs. A batch is blended, rested, filtered, filled, capped, labelled and boxed, and each one is recorded so that any bottle can be traced back to the batch it came from. Small batches mean stock is fresh and a formula can be corrected quickly if it needs correcting.

Every filled bottle is checked by eye for fill level, seal and label before it is boxed. The bottles are deliberately plain: clear glass, a simple atomiser, a printed label. Heavy decorative glass would add several hundred rand to the price and nothing at all to the way a fragrance smells.

Quality, kept simple

Three things keep the range consistent: one grade of oil, recorded formulas and batch numbers, and short runs that turn over quickly. We do not test our fragrances on animals. We make no other claim about our materials beyond the one we can stand behind, which is that they are A-grade French fragrance oils.

A working factory, not a shop

Please note that 57 Cayman Road is a working production facility. It is not a retail outlet, it is not a showroom and it is not open to the public, and we do not offer collection of orders. Everything is ordered on this site and delivered to your door by courier anywhere in South Africa. You can read the detail on our delivery page.

If you would like to know more about how a fragrance is built, the journal goes into it. To see the range, start at the shop or the inspired-by directory.