One of Meher Baba's most dynamic mandali was Princess Norina Matchabelli. Here are some hardly known facts about her and her husband's perfume company, and a rare image of her husband.
Prince Matchabelli Perfumes was created by Prince Georges V. Matchabelli who was not only a previous Georgian Prince and ambassador to Italy, but also was an amateur chemist who began creating perfumes for his friends and family as a hobby. Georges was a Russian exile who fled the Soviet Union and immigrated to the USA after the Russian Revolution. 
He and his wife, Princess Norina Matchabelli (an actress whose stage name was Maria Carmi), opened a small antiques shop Le Rouge et le Noir at 545 Madison Avenue. The name derived from Stendhal's novel, red for aristocracy (Matchabelli's origins) and black for clergy (The Miracle, a religious play). They later established the Prince Matchabelli Perfume Company in 1926. Perfumes were personally blended for clients. The first three perfumes were Princess Norina, Queen of Georgia and Ave Maria. The company became known for the many color-coded, crown-shaped bottles designed by Norina after the Matchabelli crown and introduced in 1928 with labels on the underside.
Prince Matchabelli and Princess Vasili in an orphanage
Chris, I have some info to add to your notes about the Matchabelli Perfume Company (PMPC). As you know, I have an MBA and have worked in business marketing, sales, and promotions throughout my career, across the country. The most incredible thing about PMPC was how Norina, and this was all her doing, came up with the concept of marketing very high-end exclusive luxury perfume to the common consumer. She realized the bottle was everything! There was no Matchabelli crown. In Russian Georgia if you were landed gentry you were titled and you could roughly translate that title to "Prince". It is the same as the "princes" from Renaissance Northern Italy. The family lands extended such that little villages and hamlets of people all worked YOUR land and paid you a "tax" of sorts. Then you're a prince. That's what Matchabelli was.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Norina and George were rather poor in New York City but found backers (this part of the company history is shrouded) to create the first perfume store, as you name above. Norina first realized that the New York rich were nouveau riche, and would be impressed by appearances. She alone created the idea of the bottle shape communicating the idea of luxury. Custom glass works were not regularly doing this sort of thing at the time. Most all custom glass works of the time created specialized bottles for the burgeoning chemical industry. A custom bottle shape purely for luxury marketing purposes was a revolutionary idea!!! What better shape than a crown? Remember also that the perfume industry was very tiny at this time. In 1924, Coco Chanel had just entered into agreement with Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, directors since 1917 of the eminent perfume and cosmetics house Bourjois, to create Chanel No. 5, to be sold in department stores in France. Norina and George would absolutely have been aware of this industry event (since he trained as a perfumer in France earlier), and what it meant for purfume sales in the USA. Norina was a genius marketing person (as are many in theater, it's all a show) and had the idea to do the same thing as Coco Chanel, but in New York. PMPC then sought and closed deals with department stores in New York, capitalizing on Norina's theatrical fame and profile. This is how the company became famous and large. It was not by selling small batches of custom perfume to exclusive clientele. It was by having exclusive contracts with national retailers for distribution of the perfumes to specific markets of general consumers. This is why Norina was able to sell the company for what was a very large sum of money at the time (1936), $250,000. She was not only selling the formulas, but also all the distribution contracts. The famous bottle shape was so indelibly connected to the Matchabelli name, it is considered one of the first examples of highly successful luxury identity branding. (Go to Yahoofinance to equate the sum to "today" dollars.) Norina was the president of the New York perfumery branch. She sold the (entire?) company after her divorce and after George's death, probably so there would be no issue of contest of his estate. Surely she asked and was given direct instruction from Meher Baba in what she should do in this matter. She gave all the money from the sale to Meher Baba.
(See https://princematchabelli.blogspot.com/p/history.html for excellent historical details.)
Btw, what happened in Baba history later that year in 1936?