Matt Berkson: Co-Founder & CEO of Maison Louis Marie

Episode 668

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Matt Berkson, Co-Founder and CEO of Maison Louis Marie, a luxury fragrance house blending botanical heritage with modern clean beauty. What started as a passion project alongside his partner, Marie, has grown into a thriving, non-toxic fragrance brand now available at Sephora, goop, Bergdorf Goodman, Credo, and more—all without outside investment.
In our conversation, Matt shares the inspiration behind Maison Louis Marie, how the brand has grown organically in an industry dominated by legacy players, and why they’ve remained independent while scaling efficiently. We also dive into the power of clean fragrance, what makes scent such an emotional experience, and how Maison Louis Marie is staying ahead in the competitive beauty space.
If you’re an entrepreneur, a clean beauty enthusiast, or simply someone who loves a great fragrance, this episode is full of insights on brand-building, sustainability, and the future of luxury fragrance. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show!

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the Kara Goldin show today. We’re talking all things, fragrance, clean, beauty and brand building with Matt Berkson, who is the co founder and CEO of Maison Louis Marie, did I get that right? That is perfect. Thank you. Perfect. Amazing. So Maison Louis Marie is a luxury fragrance house with a deep botanical heritage, blending nature and sustainability with timeless scents. I’m sure that you have seen many of the products. Definitely have smelled them, but now we’re going to get to hear the back story from the co founder. He, alongside his partner Marie, co founded this incredible, incredible brand. I can’t wait to hear more about Matt’s background and his unique perspective to starting and scaling maison. Louis, Marie, I love, love. Now I’m going to be saying the three, the three names, the three words, all day long of your brand. So it’s definitely Wonderful. So let’s dive in. Welcome Matt.

Matt Berkson 1:52
It’s wonderful to be here, and thank you for having me very,

Kara Goldin 1:55
very excited that you’re here. So let’s start at the beginning. So how would you describe Mazon, Louis, Marie to anyone who is not familiar with the brand? Yeah,

Matt Berkson 2:12
so back at the beginning, the origin story of the brand. So Marie is actually my wife, and at the time she had launched the brand, we were, we were dating. When I had met her, she was just an artist. She had an art studio in Echo Park on Sunset Boulevard, and she, she’s from Europe, kind of came from the fashion world. Had a really, just fascinating kind of upbringing into fashion. She worked for this woman called Isabella Blow, who was this fixture in the scene. She kind of helped discover Alexander McQueen and like Philip Tracy. So it kind of created this very kind of Marie was just around, like some of the most interesting figures of fashion. So she kind of ended up in Paris. Became the fashion editor of the London Sunday Time. London Sunday Times. But after kind of a long period of being in Paris, she just, she just needed a life change. It was just too crazy working in fashion. That’s an very intense industry. So she moved out to Los Angeles to become an artist. So that’s when I had met her. And at that time, I was actually in the fashion business, but kind of the manufacturing end. So I was making clothes for brands like Marc Jacobs, Alexander, Wang, Helmut Lang, doing a lot of their denim in Los Angeles. And she was kind of inspired by just like the entrepreneurial spirit and me having my own company. And as a hobbyist, she would always be making candles in our kitchen. And she loved luxury candles like Sierra to Don diptique, but these candles are very stressful to own. You know, they’re 60, $70 it’s a very stressful experience. You get them, you’re kind of scared to burn them, because you don’t want to waste them. Then they collect dust. It’s this whole thing. So kind of over time, she was just taking those containers and as a hobbyist, just kind of making her own sense, and they quickly kind of became favorites of her friends, and a light bulb went off where she was like, you know, I want to start my own collection of candles at, you know, a more accessible price point, but the same luxury quality, a beautiful, minimal esthetic, and she was off to the races. She, I mean, she was an artist, but the whole other aspect of her is she’s very detail oriented. She just kind of figures everything up by herself, kind of having no background, and starting. The company quickly found a factory, brought you know, and developed her sense. She started with a line of six candles, set up her own website through Shopify, kind of slowly transformed her art studio into a little warehouse and office. And kind of, I remember she she came back home one day, and she’s like, Oh my god, the minimums are 200 units percent. I’m never gonna sell these. This is gonna be so stressful. And then, you know, lo and behold, you know, within like two to three months, she just blew through the inventory, just kind of through word of mouth. I had a sister who owns stores, and she had like this, she still has this wonderful store in Venice that was, like our first retailer. And then kind of slowly but surely, we just kind of built a bunch of a collection of really cool luxury boutiques around the United States, so, and then it kind of just blossomed. It started with candles. Then Cust, you know, she folk. We focused a lot on kind of customer feedback. And they were like, oh my god, I love this scent. Can you please make a perfume out of it? And so we started, actually, with perfume oils. And at the time, we she didn’t even know what perfume oils were, so we had to do research on that. And then with perfume oils came odor perfumes. And then, you know, throughout the years now we have body care category, kind of home fragrance with candles and diffusers. And really, just in the beginning. I think it’s interesting because we didn’t really, you know, we weren’t, like beauty people kind of launching a company with some sort of plan of how it should work. So we really just wanted to create this beautiful brand without, you know, a huge need to kind of grow it quickly and get investors and exit. And because, you know, we just, we just wanted to create a beautiful brand. So, you know, I think for about the first four or five years, we really only focused on our website and kind of these luxury boutiques to just really find ourselves and grow the brand just organically. You know, for the first, I think, eight years of our business, we never really spent money on online ads, no PR. It was strictly kind of word of mouth and just kind of, you know, really just having beautiful products that you know, kind of, if you know you knew, and you know, we just, we had this wonderful organic growth in the beginning, so, and then, kind of moving forward, Sephora eventually came to us, I think, around 2016 and was interested in kind of vetting our brand to include within their assortment. And as they were vetting us, they kind of looked at our formulations, and this was right at the beginning of kind of this clean movement within in fragrance and beauty products in general. And they kind of came back and they were like, Wow, your formulations are extremely clean. We would love to kind of launch you at this new thing, you know, we’re starting this clean at Sephora, kind of assortment, and we want to kind of launch you with those with a group of kind of up and coming brands. So I just remember at the beginning we were kind of so nervous, you know, how is this going to affect our brand? You know, we’re we don’t want to alienate our current customers, really, just completely not understanding, you know, obviously the power of Sephora and how it really just kind of opened us up to, you know, a whole new market and and, you know, it’s been a wonderful relationship to this day. So and then kind of beyond that. Then, you know, we’ve expanded into just a great group of, you know, retailers like blue mercury, Kara, goop, essence, Bergdorf, Goodman, and then even, you know, globally, we’ve just launched in Sephora, Australia, and we’re in Sephora Hong Kong now with distributors in Taiwan and mainland China. So it’s just been an interesting journey for us. And, you know, we just kind of really go at our own pace, and it’s been working out so far.

Kara Goldin 9:42
I love it. So you launched, what year 2013 2013 and how many SKUs did you initially launch with?

Matt Berkson 9:53
So it was six SKUs just and we kind of have a number system on a lot of our sense. So it was just number one. 12345, it’s six and beyond that. I mean, they have names, and I think one of the unique kind of things about our brand is we have this very deep DNA based on Marie’s family’s family history. She has a fascinating family on both sides, but the name Maison Louis Marie. Louis Marie is actually her great, great, great grandfather. He became a famous French botanist, and during the French because during the French Revolution, he was exiled. So he had to leave France, and ended up on the Meredith islands and also Madagascar. And while he was there, he discovered over 2000 different plant species. So when the revolution died down, he came back with with all these plant cuttings, he wrote kind of he had detailed drawings and botanical drawings, and was eventually elected in the academy days de science, which is this kind of important kind of scientific community in France. So that kind of just kind of led the generational family into kind of nurseries. And Marie kind of remembers as she was growing up, there was, they had a country home outside of Paris, and she would, her grandfather had this greenhouse, and she would kind of be playing around with all these guys in lab coats, and he was, you know, experimenting on stuff like heating orchids in the winter and and, you know, kind of through that experience, and then just, there’s just these beautiful nature around this, this, this country house. And so she was always just very comfortable with with plants and nature. And the family also owned nurseries, like the number two, which was part of the first collection, is named li long fond, which is actually named after a nursery in Belgium that the family still owns to this day. So a lot of the kind of scent notes are kind of based on childhood memories. So the packaging and everything is very minimal, yet, you know, we do, you know, on every box we have the original seed logo that Louis Marie drew in one of his books. And we kind of, you know, have subtle line drawings throughout our website. So it really, it’s just a really kind of beautiful thing, and it ties back to our family history.

Kara Goldin 12:38
I love it well, the heritage behind it, you can definitely see, and I think it’s, you know, anytime you have to educate the consumer, I guess you as long as you get somebody in to your stores, or Sephora, or any of the great retailers that you’re a part of, you can have other people experience those but how do you get people to really know the difference between your brand? I mean, it’s, it was a bold move right for you to go and launch something like this, you know, definitely it’s, it’s a founder story of saying, you know, maybe this is going to work. And obviously Marie had these ideas and rich history behind many of these scents and plant based I mean, it sounds like to some extent, you didn’t even know what you were creating, right? Like it was, it You Didn’t Know About Clean beauty. It was. People were barely talking about it at that point, but you were creating something that was super high quality. All of those aspects. How do you educate the consumer then to know that it’s really different, right? And without getting them to experience your stores? Because especially when you’re first starting out, you’re not going to open stores across the US. You’re one of you know, you were off doing this for a few years before even Sephora realized what you were doing too. So I think it’s, it’s, it’s hard, right? It’s super hard to get your brand out there and the brand story out there and, and I’d love to hear your perspective, yeah.

Matt Berkson 14:20
I mean, this is obviously with fragrance. Just a super difficult part of the business is, you know, even with the exposure of being in a major retailer like Sephora or blue mercury, you know, you’re you only get a little shelf and a little shelf space to kind of show off your wares. And it can be, you know, so it’s hard to, you know, properly represent your brand. And I feel kind of the way, I think why we’ve resonated over time with customers and are able to kind of grow to. New customers. It’s just kind of us staying true to ourselves, like we spend a lot of time kind of on our photography and kind of the content that we put out to the world to kind of make sure that, you know, it’s it’s really personal, and kind of reflects us as a brand, and kind of draws people in and, you know, throughout the years, I think it’s getting more and more difficult to reach consumers, especially in beauty and fragrance, because there’s been so much kind of investment activity with brands. And, you know, nowadays it seems like kind of coming out of COVID fragrance had, you know, kind of a huge, kind of resurgence in the United States, and it caused kind of a lot of beauty investors actually look at fragrance. So, you know, nowadays, you know, most brands, you know, really early on, are taking capital, and they’re able to really kind of amplify their message, you know, spending tons of money on influencer marketing, paid ads. And, you know, while we kind of do the same thing, we’re just not able to do it on the scale of a lot of these bigger players. So it’s, it’s always been kind of difficult in how to kind of reach new customers, but I think, you know, there’s that kind of idea of, like, quiet luxury and and kind of just like over time. It’s just, you know, we’ve been around so long, and we’ve kind of had this steady drum beat, and we’ve kind of slowly grown more and more, and we’ve kind of always been around. And I think people kind of will, you know, will kind of show up on people’s radars here and then, but then, like throughout the years, you know, they can kind of see that like, you know, our messaging has been very consistent from the beginning. You know, it’s only gotten kind of nicer, and we’re kind of better able to, you know, shoot even better content and kind of put it out there. So I think, you know, people appreciate kind of how we’ve stayed true to, you know, like, really, our our brand, because, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s such a desire to kind of follow trends, you know, in any industry, so, you know, and you know, obviously we’re cognizant of, you know, scent trends, like, you know, if vanilla gourmands are hot, you know, or fruity florals, you know, you see kind of a lot of brands just like running to kind of launch, you know, products that are in the, in the, you know, current Zeitgeist. And we, you know, we don’t really operate that way. You know, Marie carefully crafts fragrances according to kind of what she feels is right for our brand. And I just think, you know, it’s a slow and steady approach that, you know can be tedious and scary at times, but pays off in the long run. I think,

Kara Goldin 18:11
yeah, definitely. So, how many SKUs do you have today? Well,

Matt Berkson 18:16
we probably have roughly, you know, we’re kind of in the 70s, because, you know, within each category, now I think we’re up to 12 candle cents. Then you have those 12 skews, plus you have, you know, all the perfume oils. And then, you know, within the perfume oils, you have different sizes of perfume oils. We have many, you know, many oils, you know, EDPs, travel spray. So it really starts kind of adding up. And then in our kind of newest focus has been really into body care. And, yeah, so it’s, it’s, it’s starting to add up. And that’s kind of another thing. Is really always examining your collection, and, you know, making sure that it, it makes sense, even kind of from a business standpoint, you know, like you, you sometimes will need to cut certain things. Yeah, definitely, May of, you know, there’ll be, you know, there’ll be kind of a very niche scent in our collection. And, you know, sadly, we’ll have to discontinue it after a certain amount of time. And you definitely hear it from, you know, that customer who’s been buying that scent, you know, for years. But you know, just to be kind of sustainable as a business, you really need to kind of watch, you know, and make sure the skew, skew count doesn’t get too overwhelming.

Kara Goldin 19:43
So in terms of your sense, is there one runaway bestseller that you have a very difficult time keeping in stock?

Matt Berkson 19:53
Yeah, the number four, blah to ballon court, which is ballin court is the. The name of the family house outside of Paris, which was actually in the initial collection of sixth sense, really just kind of from the beginning, just did extremely well and resonated with our customer. So it’s always, you know, we kind of have it in, you know, every possible formulation, from wash to lotion, because the customer just kind of wants to experience this scent in multiple ways, kind of for their lifestyle. And you know, that’s always been a very tricky skew to keep in stock. And you know, we have a lot of other scents in our collection that are, you know, are sell really well and have a huge following, but the number four just, and you know, in our over 10 years has just continued to still be the, you know, the big scent in our collection

Kara Goldin 20:57
Is there one scent that was very difficult to create. I remember the in the product that I developed, hint lemon was very difficult, and people were like, why? There’s a million lemons out there. But actually using real lemon, without it actually turning into turpentine is, is a real thing, right? So, and we don’t use preservatives or anything. So there were all that took us years to make. Is there one that you worked so hard to develop that and finally you got it? Yeah? I

Matt Berkson 21:40
mean, there that, you know, continually happens behind the scenes with Marie. I mean, she generally, you know, will work on ascent for, you know, a year, or sometimes over a year, to kind of get it right. And, you know, sadly, some never see the light of day. But our latest launch, the number 14 isila, which is kind of a warm floral scent,

Kara Goldin 22:09
super beautiful. Yeah, it’s a super

Matt Berkson 22:11
beautiful scent. And that, that one in particular, took a long time to kind of make it kind of work. And, you know, constant revisions, because we never really had a warm floral in kind of our collection, and it was a huge missing link. And, you know, now in developing sense, you know, we wanted to kind of create something that really encompassed, you know, a beautiful floral scent, and kind of have this warmth of vanilla at the base, and keep it modern and interesting to kind of, You know, the consumer. And it was just a very difficult scent to get, you know, right, but I feel like she really nailed it in the end, and that’s kind of one of our standout scents in the last few last year. And yeah, we’re super excited about that scent. What’s

Kara Goldin 23:18
one thing that you know about the clean I guess, whether you call it clean beauty or clean fragrance, more than anything that is is confusing. You think to the consumer that a lot of things are labeling and talking about themselves as clean, and we know that that is not always fact. So I’m so curious you working in the industry and sort of, what have you seen that is, I guess, to some extent, frustrating when you know that you’re doing the right thing and you see other brands that are not, yeah,

Matt Berkson 23:54
yeah, the whole clean kind of movement in beauty and fragrances is very complicated, mainly because there’s not, like, a set standard of what, quote, unquote clean is. Sephora, you know, they’ll have their own clean standard. Credo has their own clean standard. I mean, of course, they’re all very similar, but they definitely have slight variations. And then kind of within, you know, as we’ve grown, the regulatory regimes in each kind of country and jurisdiction have their own kind of ideas of what clean is. And then with the consumer, there’s a huge confusion, especially when it comes to fragrance. You know, clean is assumed to be just something that’s completely made of natural essential oils, um versus, you know, synthetics, which you know, upon face value. You know, I understand from a consumer. Point of view. Like, you would think that like, Oh, if it’s synthetic, it’s, you know, it’s not clean, but it’s actually kind of quite the contrary. There’s a lot of reasons you use synthetics. We kind of use a combination of what we call Safe synthetics and natural essential oils, and without getting too kind of far in the weeds. There’s a lot of reasons to use synthetic, sometimes natural, essential oils create, you know, have very harsh allergens, so you’ll get a lot of reactions from customers. So, you know, you actually want to create a safer fragrance by using the synthetic counterpart. We’re a vegan and cruelty free brand, so any musks will use synthetics. And then there’s certain points where some of the kind of natural ingredients would kind of contribute to deforestation or endangered kind of animal habitats or endangered plant habitat. So in that, you know, there’s reasons to kind of use synthetics as well. So there’s a lot of education with customers. And being kind of the crazy founder that I am, I’ll respond in detail to every one of them, just to kind of really make sure that they, you know, completely understand our thought process behind kind of clean and, you know, one of the obvious ones, like, you know, our parabens, the last the latitates, and a new one that’s kind of like coming to the surface are fragrance preservatives like bhts and stabilizers as well. So there’s constant, constant changes to our formulas, which has been really difficult to kind of maintain the exact same scent profile while, you know, trying to remove more and more kind of things that you know could be endocrine disruptors, and you know, could technically be harmful that a lot of people still use to this day. But you know, we want to kind of stay at the forefront in terms of kind of clean beauty, and you know, especially with body care, that’s kind of an area where you can really make decisions to make you clean, versus fragrance, where, you know, especially with the node of perfume, you’re kind of limited to alcohol as the base. And you you know, if you have to really just focus on your fragrance formulations and, you know, and we’ve subscribed to kind of complete transparency. It’s been, you know, an industry standard since the beginning, never to disclose because when when you look on the back of a box, you’ll just see fragrance as an ingredient. But within that fragrance. There’s, you know, 30 to, you know, 80 different ingredients within that and, um, we’re always happy to disclose that to customers who are really concerned about certain ingredients. Um, so, you know, we try to be radically transparent with with our customers as well. But it’s, it’s, it’s always changing, and there’s just a lot of education to be given and learned as well. Like, it’s fascinating how knowledgeable some of our customers are and have brought attention, you know, things to me that, you know, I further research and kind of plays a part in how we formulate things in the future. So it’s like a really fun, exciting kind of back and forth with our customers as well.

Kara Goldin 28:50
That’s amazing. So I read that that investment, you have not taken investment, and how not taking investment has helped, or maybe in some cases, challenge the way that you run the business. I’d love for you to to educate us and on sort of how you’ve done this, because you built an incredible business. And I think many people think that they have to take money in order to go and and start something. Yeah,

Matt Berkson 29:26
I mean, it’s, you know, obviously incredibly difficult to, you know, scale a beauty brand, especially kind of working with major retailers by bootstrapping the thing. But, you know, I think over time, if you can sustainably grow and remain profitable, it pays huge dividends in kind of developing a brand. Because, you know, if you’re a founder, um. With a vision, I think it’s just extremely important to kind of maintain that vision and not have any kind of outside influence on your vision, which you know, is extremely hard to do, but I think too just kind of, you know, with me having an operational background, and even how Marie launched the company, how we kind of just did everything ourselves early on, and really weren’t looking for investors in the beginning. We just always, you know, we built the company kind of from the ground up to be a profitable business, you know, like we, I think, up until the last three years, you know, that our was the first time I hired, you know, kind of higher level executives in our team, which, you know, have been amazing. But you know, for the first, you know, seven years, it was just all Marie and I, and, you know, like the little things, like, you know, we operate our own warehouse, which is kind of not the most common thing anymore, and we just kind of had this mentality that kind of every aspect of the business, we just had to figure out ourselves. So, you know, as we grow, you know, there’s been times where I’ve talked to a lot of investors, and, you know, really kind of was interested in in, you know, seeing if it would work for us. And, you know, I’ve met so many amazing investors, and I just still, even in year 11, don’t think it’s the right time for us to kind of consider it, because we just have, we have so much more kind of to do with our brand before we, you know, kind of take it to the next level and, you know, bring in partners and and stuff like that. But over the last few years, it’s, you know, it’s been, you know, harder and harder to kind of watch everyone around you kind of go from C to series, A to B. And, you know, have a lot of capital to do, you know, a lot of things. But, you know, we’ve kind of built a scale where, you know, every year it’s like, we’re kind of be able to compete, you know, with with a lot of these brands in our own kind of in our own way, and we do more and more each year so, but it’s been difficult. And, you know, it’s it like, if I had to do it over again, you know, I would probably still do it the same way, but you just never realized kind of how much, you know, pain you’re gonna have to go through throughout the process. But you know, that’s that’s kind of part of, you know, being an entrepreneur, definitely.

Kara Goldin 32:54
Well, you guys have done such an amazing job of building a company that does have options at this point too, when you’re profitable, when you’ve built an incredible brand that has really focused on the quality, as you have Miz on Louis Marie is just absolutely beautiful. So thank you so much, Matt for joining us and sharing a lot of your journey and stories. I could talk to you forever, but it’s really, really beautiful what you and your wife Marie have built. So thank you again. We’ll have all the info in the show notes, Mazon, Louis, marie.com, and then all of major retailers have it as well. But thank you for listening everyone. And thanks again, Matt, appreciate it.

Matt Berkson 33:45
Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun. Thanks

Kara Goldin 33:49
again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now. You.

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