Abel founder Frances Shoemack takes her Aotearoa brand global with new vanilla Double Scoop.
In the garden of the Carmen guesthouse in Amsterdam, a scoop of burnt honey, wild rosemary and toasted sesame ice cream lands in a coloured glass coupe. But this isn’t your average sundae. The ice cream is chef Ellie Bouhadana’s, made to taste like a fragrance. The coupe is Helle Mardahl’s, hand-blown Danish glass that looks like a sweet you’d keep rather than eat. And the fragrance is Abel’s Double Scoop, a grown-up vanilla built to unsettle what people expect vanilla to be. On a balmy night in a heatwave, and with a single cello playing, the three arrived to be tasted, held and smelled at once.
For Frances Shoemack, the timing gave the evening its charge. Abel began in Amsterdam and spent recent years headquartered in Wellington, where Frances grew it into a name with international reach. She’s now moved the company back to Amsterdam to connect more easily with its growing community there, Europe being the market that has taken to it most. Abel remains a New Zealand company, going global on its own terms.
While Double Scoop is intangible, Helle’s glass is the opposite — colour and form you pick up in your hand. Ice cream in her coupes lets guests read the scent through the object: playful and colourful, sweet with an edge. “You want to give them a lick,” says Helle, and each serving became an art object.
Double Scoop came together like a recipe, in layers. “It’s a vanilla built by two people who don’t wear vanilla,” says Frances. “That friction is what makes it interesting.” She and Abel’s master perfumer Isaac Sinclair had worked together for years without once attempting vanilla, so the brief had an edge from the start: toasted, milky, sophisticated, nothing cloying. Toasted sesame brought a nutty, savoury warmth. Rosemary was the note that opened it up, lifted from a memory — the rosemary salted caramels Frances used to carry to Isaac in Paris from a Wellington chocolatier. Ellie mapped the same layering onto her ice cream: burnt honey, wild rosemary and toasted sesame, savoury running beneath the sweet.
The collaboration began with Frances as an admirer. She’d followed Helle’s glass from afar, bought a piece during lockdown, and reached out from New Zealand to propose working together. With Abel now in Amsterdam the two are near neighbours, and this garden party brought them together in person.
Helle came to glass after fashion and years in fine art, and is clear about what turned her towards it. “I wanted to make objects people can actually use,” she says of leaving the art world’s solitude for something warmer and shared. Her studio, mostly women who’ve stayed for years, works to a line she repeats like a motto: make every day more beautiful. She doesn’t design to seasons or release schedules, and each piece is hand-blown in small runs, priced to be kept.
Keeping the work scarce is deliberate. A guest called her the antidote to fast, throwaway design, and she takes it as the point: glass made by hand that you buy because it brings you pleasure, then keep, the way Abel’s customers keep a scent. Frances knows that attachment. Abel’s fragrances are made gender neutral, a quiet stand in an industry long sorted into his and hers, and people bond to a bottle as identity. Once, when Abel planned to discontinue a fragrance, a single customer bought 40 bottles rather than live without it.
Two practices, one led by a perfumer, one by a glassmaker, both women working in fields shaped by men, found each other over a shared instinct to make ordinary days worth more. Introducing a scent at an evening like this shows where Frances is taking Abel as it steps onto a bigger stage: fragrance as the centre of a world people can step into and carry home in memory.
abelfragrance.com
Interview Alice Lines
Photography Rebeca Valls
The post The scoop on Abel’s latest fragrance, direct from their new home in Amsterdam appeared first on Homestyle.
