2024-09-26 12:03:06
Jannis Lucian Groh and Vianney Lancres quickly realized that customer loyalty would not be a problem. When they opened the doors to the Harry Lehmann perfumery for the first time in March, customers were already waiting in the street. The empty glass bottles were empty in their bags. As they used until the perfume expires in 2022, they want to keep the bottles filled with their favorite perfumes.
Regular customers are also immediately available online, as Lancres said. As soon as the webshop went online in November, the first orders started coming in. The parcels go all over the world; But what inspires Groh and Lancres the most are the people who send them handwritten letters. Maybe it’s always the adults who list exactly what they need and also talk about how they bought from Harry Lehmann in the past.
It was clear to the two men that by placing the 98-year-old perfume on Kantstrasse in Charlottenburg they would receive an inheritance. But they did not expect that we would show them much gratitude and enthusiasm.
Not everyone sells perfume by weight
Harry Lehmann is not just any perfume where you can buy regular brands from big companies. It is an institution and a piece of Berlin’s cultural history. When it opened in 1926 near Potsdamer Platz, the founder Harry Lehmann advertised a USP, a unique selling point, as we would say today: In addition to artificial flowers, he sold the first perfumes by weight.
There are large glass cases in the store where the ingredients are bottled. The creations are also mixed according to the customer’s requirements. Marlene Dietrich, it is said, bought her violet perfume from Harry Lehmann. It is still available today: “Sweet, strong, individual” is how Violet Eau de Toilette is described in the online store.
Since opening, Jannis Lucian Groh and Vianney Lancres have offered a total of 72 perfumes under the Harry Lehmann brand. Most of them will be familiar to regular customers, including two new creations, with more to come, developed in collaboration with a perfumer.
Respect for the Berlin lime trees
Lindenblüte, a bottle homage to Berlin with its many linden trees, has always been popular. And there is also Eau de Berlin, it smells much less sweet than linden perfume, more fresh, pure, like an old perfume. There are also fragrances with sophisticated names like Mirage, St. Tropez, Desert Wind and Calypso. Wearing perfume has always been a little escape from the world in front of the bathroom mirror.
The perfumery has been at its current address at Kantstrasse 106 since 1958, after stops on Friedrichstrasse and at Bahnhof Zoo, and at first glance it doesn’t seem to have changed. A bright shop sign with an elegant pen type, apothecary bottles in the shop window, 1950’s furniture, you can all recognize it before.
But Jannis Lucian Groh, 31 years old and Vianney Lancres, 33 years old, born in Berlin, invested many working hours in the renovation, supported by friends and family. When they received notice last year that the perfume was closed after the death of the last owner and grandson of the creator Lutz Lehmann, they already had experience in a related field, with the Hoefe fragrance brand.
“Great happiness” for both Berliners
The two met around ten years ago while studying business administration. Lancres was born in Charlottenburg, Groh has lived around the corner from the store for a long time. They both walked past it often but never shopped there. The fact that they found out about the closure was “very fortunate” for them, according to Lancres.
“Everything was touched once,” Jannis Lucian Groh recalled of the months of renovation. The old wallpaper has to be removed, as well as two layers of linoleum and a layered layer. They cut the decorations in the sand, and added a black top to the place where they were painting in order to get the necessary equipment, such as a card reader.
With the small table, they achieved on a small scale what also works on a large scale with the store and the brand: set up, modernize, according to modern tastes without destroying the aura. Bottles stood in a row on the wooden table and on the shelves – Eau de Parfum in square bottles, Eau de Toilette in ovals – as if they had always been there.
In the shop window, Groh and Lancres found from archives, old photographs, business books and bottles. Mrs. Dahlmann also knows how things are with Harry Lehmann. When he was seventeen, he passed the shop in Kantstrasse once, just went in, asked about work and waited until it closed. Of course Groh and Lancres did it again.
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