It was a long hot summer for the men of this country, aesthetically, and indeed in terms of fragrance.
No football tournament meant we didn’t have that blissful 3 weeks where it’s acceptable to wear an England shirt every day without looking like you’re on your way to a silly rally, meaning a summer revolving around the usual struggles of trying to pair a t shirt with a pair of shorts without just looking like a toddler. Maybe I’m over sensitive to it as I have a 2 year old boy myself, but I’d wear my favourite pair of blue shorts with a white t shirt and think I looked fairly sharp, then look down at the boy and he’d be wearing the exact same outfit, with the exact same silly socks pulled half way up his silly calves, and by the evening we’d both end up with pasta sauce stains on those white t shirts.
Fragrance wise many of us spend the summer reeking of a heady mix of nivea sun cream and cheap anti-perspirant deodorant but finally, those days are over, the hoodies are back out the cupboard, and as we refresh our looks going into the new season, its not a bad time to refresh our scent too.
And that’s where we come in with... Markfield Cologne
It’s synonymous with traditional British barber shops for a cologne to be stocked and used as part of services in store, its something our founder Matt was doing in many of the inner city shops that he trained at and as soon as we opened Idris it was something we wanted to incorporate into how we operate - using colognes in services but in time developing our own fragrance to stock our shelves with.
We consulted a friend of ours who at the time was developing scents as part of his own brand making scented candles, and we approached him with the brief of wanting to develop a proper ‘all day’ scent, something that you splash on in the morning and immediately feels fresh and citrusy, but stays prominent throughout the day and develops into something a bit deeper and richer as the sun goes down.
So many fragrances nowadays smell great as you put them on but just disappear within an hour, meaning you have to reapply and use more of it up. That was a really big one for us, stick it on in the morning and leave it. We also wanted an accessible price point.
Making a fragrance is more fun than you might imagine when you do it the way we do, in small batches and made by hand. We get up to our Tottenham space where we have an office, set up the pipettes, scales and the mixing jars like GCSE chemistry and it does all feel a bit Breaking Bad. Certain elements need to be heated, certain bits you need a bit more, a bit less, there’s a point in the procedure where you need to be keeping the mixture stirring for about 20 minutes, and then you’re left with this big container of what is essentially very expensive liquid, that you need to distribute into 50 or so very small receptacles, which is maybe the trickiest bit. 
On more than one occasion I’ve been up there with Matt, and one of our hands has slipped, a big splash goes on the floor and you look down and think ‘that’s probably about 150 quid that I’m now going to have to clean with a mop and bucket.’
All worth it in the end as we now have our Markfield cologne, named after the road that our Tottenham space is based upon, a mixture of sandalwood, vetiver, patchouli spice and paolo santo, warm, rich and fresh, a few dabs go a long way and develop into the exact fragrance we wanted. 
And it really feels worth it because you lot love it so much. We regularly sell out of the stuff but, of course, the reason I’m writing this article is because we’ve just finished splashing another load around the office in Tottenham, we’re stocked up and ready for you guys to come and get yourselves smelling warm ahead of the colder months of winter.
