Should a fragrance house grow its own crops?

Matière Première’s Metal Lavender, launched in April 2026, is the third fragrance the house has built around lavender it grows itself, on one of the largest organic flower farms in the south of France. Backed by Kering Beauté, which took a minority stake in June 2024, it is the kind of move that gets described as the most direct sourcing strategy there is.

We grow, distill and formulate. So it is worth saying plainly what that sentence hides: as a way of securing raw material, growing your own is the most expensive option available, and it is not close.

What growing your own raw material actually costs

All-in, our own production is more expensive than buying the same material on the market. Systematically, not occasionally, and not by a rounding error.

The reason is not inefficiency on our end. It is what we are being compared against. The market price for many naturals is set by imported material and, more awkwardly, by adulterated material. An oil that has been extended, rebuilt or quietly blended costs less to make than an honest one, and it competes on the same price line. Anyone growing a crop, harvesting it at the right moment and distilling it properly is competing against a number that was never built on the same terms.

There is a second reason, and it is structural rather than commercial. Planting takes years to reach useful volume. Demand does not wait, and it moves faster than a crop cycle. So even a house fully committed to growing its own supply will be buying on the market during the ramp, and again whenever demand outruns the plot. Vertical integration does not remove you from the sourcing market, it just gives you a second, slower supply line alongside it.

Put those together and the honest scorecard is short. On cost: never justified. On timing: never justified. On storytelling: always justified.

Then why practise vertical integration at all

Because the last line of that scorecard is not a consolation prize.

What growing your own actually produces is a story nobody else can supply, and unlike the oil itself, that story is genuinely scarce. A brand can buy lavender oil from twenty suppliers. It cannot buy the fact that the lavender was planted, cut and distilled by the people telling you about it. That is the asset, and it is worth being clear-eyed that it is a marketing and trust asset rather than a procurement one.

That reframes what “growing the raw material yourself” means in practice. Read literally, it suggests a brand should buy a farm. Read usefully, it means building a direct relationship with whoever actually grows the plant, which for most houses means partnering with a producer rather than becoming one. The producer carries the agronomic risk and the cost disadvantage. The brand gets the traceability and the narrative. Both know what they are trading.

What Kering Beauté’s stake in Matière Première buys

For a luxury group, taking a minority stake in a single-material niche house is a way to reach that kind of relationship without operating it. Kering gets access to established craft credibility and to a supply story it did not have to build, while the brand gets development resources and distribution it could not fund alone.

The stake has also proved durable through a reshuffle, which is the part worth noting for anyone assessing this model’s stability: the June 2024 investment in Matière Première is separate from the $4.7 billion sale of Kering Beauté’s larger license portfolio, Creed plus the Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga and future Gucci fragrance licenses, to L’Oréal, announced in October 2025 and completed on March 31, 2026 (Cosmetics Business; Business of Fashion). The commercial momentum is real too: Matière Première closed 2025 with retail sales of about €80 million, up more than 70% year-over-year, across four freestanding stores in Saint-Tropez, Paris, Berlin and London (WWD).

What vertical integration means for producers and cooperatives

For a cooperative or a producer in Africa, the Gulf or Asia, the useful read is that large groups increasingly secure differentiated supply through satellite brands rather than under their own name. A trust relationship built with a niche house can connect you, in effect, to a much larger group. It is a different route to the same destination as Firmenich’s direct, in-house sourcing teams in India and Africa, capital and brand-building instead of perfumers on the ground.

For a brand weighing the same move, the question to answer honestly is which asset is actually being bought. If the goal is a cheaper or more reliable kilo, growing it will deliver neither, and a direct contract with an existing producer will get closer for a fraction of the commitment. If the goal is a supply story that cannot be replicated, and a defensible claim about how the material was actually made, that is worth paying for, and paying more is precisely what it involves. The same distinction between a verified claim and a well-told one runs through who captures the value when perfumery adopts a local tradition.