Michael O’Keeffe – The Genie in the Brown Flask

Aesop’s popularity did not come about as a result of a public endorsement by Angelina Jolie or Nicole Kidman. That wouldn’t fit in with the utilitarian brown flasks, although they do look quite elegant when lined up or balanced on top of one another.

Each Aesop boutique arranges the bottles a little differently, but the unspoken message is always identical. “Less is more, just make sure you take good care of yourself!”

However busy life on the outside may be, inside the shop, located at the best addresses a city has to offer, is an oasis of tranquility. The employees at Aesop’s have a knack for enhancing their customers’ awareness for simple every-day items and lending them a special note. First, customers are offered a cup of tea, while Billy Holiday or Edith Piaf can be discerned in the background. Then, a sales attendant dressed in minimalist style offers a so-called consultation at one of the washbasins where the client’s hands, skin, or hair are thoroughly examined.

“Once you’ve experienced this, you either never come back – or you’re hooked,” Aesop CEO Michael O’Keeffe comments. Aesop customers don’t want to be part of the masses – they want to be treated like individuals. All the more important, then, that the sales attendants do their job as brand ambassadors well. We’re at the company headquarters in Melbourne’s trendy Fitzroy district. Located on a street teeming with record shops, art galleries, furniture shops, bars, and vegan delis, the brick building of the company is one of the trendiest locales.

But rather than announcing the company name, the building’s facade only features a quote by Virginia Woolf: “Why are women so much more interesting to men than men to women?” Aphorisms and quotes are one of the founder’s areas of interest – they can also be found on the packaging of Aesop’s products.

From behind the plain wooden counter, two polite young attendants greet the customers: a woman and a man, both with their hair pulled into a bun. The mood is slightly Japanese, the scent in the air that of a well-stocked organic food store. All Aesop products are based on plant substances, but rather than roses, they smell of geraniums or parsley.

In the plain visitors’ lounge next door stands the company’s CEO, dressed in a tweed sports jacket and rolled-up trousers as if he had just gotten off a bicycle. A sporty impression that is pretty accurate as it turns out. After finishing his studies, O’Keeffe was a professional member of an Italian cycling team.

And until 2012, he was a successful triathlete, but then gave it up as he never found enough time for training while juggling phone calls from three different time zones. “What’s more, I also have a wife and three kids between the ages of 11 and 15. And I really enjoy spending time with them.” He himself is now 46, but he could get away easily as 10 years younger, partly because he’s so passionate about what he does – as if he had only just started working at Aesop’s.

In actual fact, he has been leading the company’s fortunes in an extremely successful direction since 2003.

Integrity, design, and culture are in the company’s DNA.

Aesop was founded by Dennis Paphitis, a hairdresser of Greek origin who is O’Keeffe’s senior by six years. Towards the end of the 1980s, Paphitis started producing plant-based hair care products for damaged hair and selling them to his customers in his hair salon close to the current headquarters.

He filled the tinctures into old-fashioned brown glass flasks, chosen to protect the contents from the sun and light – meaning less preservatives are required. Dennis appears to be not just a clever but also a very erudite man. He takes his inspiration from the ancient philosophers, and the name Aesop (after the famous Greek storyteller) is more than just a whim.

Today, culture and design are still part of the company’s DNA. “He’s full of ideas, like an artist or a philosopher,” his CEO says about him.

Economics and finances, on the other hand, don’t interest Paphitis at all. And so young Michael O’Keeffe was introduced. Michael’s father had run a type setting company where O’Keeffe Junior learned at an early age what sets apart the true entrepreneur: “Learning to identify opportunity – and thinking about growth.” Which is why, after completing his studies in applied sciences and engineering, he tacked on an MBA at the London School of Economics and went on to work as a financial consultant. This was during the dot-com era and a lot of new business models were buzzing around.

Still there was nothing that really convinced O’Keeffe until he was introduced to Dennis and his apothecary flasks with their herbal ingredients. Michael knew he had finally found the sought-after potential. “Inventing new care products based on formulas also appealed to the engineer in me.” And so the highly inventive founder and the well-traveled businessman entered a partnership that soon proved extremely successful.

Each boutique is one of its kind – a good store design has to interact with its neighborhood.

Under Dennis Paphitis’s auspices, the hair care products, which had soon been joined by skin care products, were being sold in the coolest concept stores in the world – for example, Colette in Paris, a fantastic address to be sure. But Michael O’Keeffe sensed that turnover could increase significantly through direct contact with the customers. After only eight months, Paphitis and O’Keeffe opened their first shop in Melbourne, modeled on Dennis’s hair salon. This pilot project met with resounding success.

Today there are over 140 Aesop shops in 18 different countries – but only in cities that are ready for Aesop’s holistic and integrity-based approach.

China, for example, is not quite there yet in O’Keeffe’s opinion. In their stomping grounds, Melbourne, however, Paphitis and O’Keeffe have meanwhile opened nine (!) boutiques, each of them with an entirely different design concept adapted to the individual neighborhood. In the shop on the hipster avenue of Melbourne, just a few blocks away from Aesop’s headquarters, their sales attendant sports some serious tattoos and sings in a band by night.

And what looks like an animal-themed tapestry next to the shop window is actually artwork that Aesop commissioned from a Japanese-Australian artist duo.

The shop in the old building on a street corner in North Melbourne has been entirely decorated in dusky pink, with 100-year-old Viennese bronze washbasins decorating the walls. Mothers pushing prams along the sidewalk can be seen through the big shop windows. The mood at the shop in upmarket Collins Street is different again, more masculine: At lunchtime the shop’s visitors are predominantly men dressed in business suits.

In 2012, Brazilian cosmetics group Natura Cosmeticos bought 65% of Aesop’s shares. Dennis Paphitis retired from active business operations; he had developed many new ideas and interests in the meantime that he wanted to focus on – including a refugee program and a concept store for men. Nonetheless, Dennis continues to come to the office almost every day as a consultant to work on designs for new premises with New York creative director Marcha Meredith and her team. “I keep out of it,” Michael O’Keeffe tells us with a grin – though he’s no stranger to art galleries himself. “It’s very important to me that Dennis is on board – as the founder, he is irreplaceable.”

To ensure that they open the right kind of shop in a new neighborhood, the Aesop team likes to call in local architects who know how their city ticks. Partnerships with local artists – for example, in the form of shop events and joint projects – are Aesop’s way of advertising.

In Basel, they made arrangements with Art Basel for Aesop to deliver products for the VIP goodie bags. In addition, they have also created a website, Taxonomy of Design: an online archive that presents their best salesrooms with all the designers and artists involved in the creation.

Their competitors probably handle things a little differently. From O’Keeffe’s point of view that’s a good thing: “A number of companies have started copying our flasks. But our values, which we have celebrated for over 30 years – nobody can fake those."