A View From The Top: Sarah Rotherham, chief executive of Miller Harris

Anyone who says the high street is dead has not met Sarah Rotherham. She is the chief executive of Miller Harris, the fabulous luxury perfumer, which first made headlines creating a bespoke fragrance for Jane Birkin before Samantha Cameron bought one of its candles for Michelle Obama.

Rotherham knows that to keep shoppers on the streets she has to give them a good time. Which is why her latest Miller Harris store in Canary Wharf includes art exhibitions showcasing young London artists as well as specially commissioned music to go with the art and the fragrances.

“I don’t like ‘cookie-cut’ clone shops. We are creating spaces where customers can experience the fragrances, engage with the storytelling behind them, learn something new and enjoy themselves. It’s not about being sold to.”

In another experiment, Miller Harris will be hosting readings of Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night in independent bookshops around the country to coincide with World Book Day. Her staff will give away thousands of scented copies of the book while fragrance specialists will be on hand to explain how its latest fragrances – called ‘Tender’ and ‘Scherzo’ – are made.

She read Fitzgerald’s novel while on holiday in Puglia last year, and was inspired by the passage which talks of – and she reads from the book – “kaleidoscopic peonies massed in pink clouds, black and brown tulips and fragile mauve-stemmed roses, transparent like sugar flowers in a confectioner’s window – until, as if the scherzo of colour could reach no further intensity, it broke off suddenly in mid-air.”

“Isn’t that gorgeous? The images stuck in my mind,” she says.

So she commissioned two top perfumers to interpret the words. “I wanted to get the smell of those black tulips and the pink clouds into a scent. My two perfumers have done this brilliantly using 400 ingredients to create the right notes, smells that take you back to the glamorous and decadent 1920s.”

Today Rotherham is back to the present in Shoreditch where she plots the next stage for Miller Harris and its 40 staff. Backed by private equity firm, Neo Capital, and the founders, Lyn Harris and her husband Christophe Michel, she wants the business to grow tenfold over the next five years and open new stores in the UK, China and Hong Kong.

“Miller Harris is a young London brand so we can mix urban with modern bohemia with no legacy to worry about. London is the most creative city in the world, and I want our perfumes to reflect that wonderful edgy spirit.”

Rotherham looks pretty edgy herself: her short white-blond hair is tinged with pink, she dresses in black (or white), wears big heels and often dons a hat.

She came to perfume by chance. As a young textile designer, she adored using Molton Brown beauty products but was so appalled by the customer service that she wrote to head office and told them so.

The boss, Charles Denton, invited her in for a chat so she could explain what was so bad. She left their meeting with a sales job, and that’s when her love affair with perfumes began. “It was like going back to school for me, a creative time when I was learning about the different ingredients, how perfumes were made and how smells affect the mind and spirit,” she explains.

Rotherham stayed seven years, during which she travelled the world expanding Molton Brown’s overseas operations and then ran its UK retail operations. “Charles was a brilliant mentor, taught me everything from sales to marketing to the profit and loss, and we worked as a great team.”

So great was the turnaround that Denton went on to sell Molton Brown to Japan’s Kao Corporation for £170m: staff had a share stake too.

She was then approached by Penhaligon’s, the British fragrance brand whose founder had been perfumer to Queen Victoria and the aristocracy, to be head of global sales.

“If I am honest, the brand had become a bit naff. The stores were old Victoriana, stuffy carpets and not very welcoming.” She set about ripping out the carpets, without knowing what was going to replace them – the dark floorboards have become something of a trademark – closing some of the shops in bad locations and pruning staff.

After a year or so, she became general manager and found herself doing the annual audit without a finance director. “I learnt on the job, and by the seat of my pants. It was a baptism of fire but I had fantastic support from the board and the private equity backers.”

Before long, Rotherham was speeding around the world again, visiting the great perfumeries in Grasse, opening new stores in Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau, and shutting down what she describes as “ego-projects”.

At just 32 years of age, she was promoted to chief executive of Cradle, the holding company for Penhaligon’s as well as L’Artisan Perfumer and the Erno Laszlo skincare brand – later sold. Under her watch, Penhaligon’s grew to 18 stores in the UK and 25 overseas, while sales rose from £9m to £35m worldwide. When she joined, 90 per cent of the business was UK-based and when she left the split was 50:50.

“Our challenge was to take a quintessential British perfumer and give it a modern edge. It was a good time to be doing this as men’s grooming was taking off. Men were starting to want to look smart again, even if it was brogues with jeans.”

As well as running the business side of Penhaligon’s, she was back in the laboratories, sniffing scents and learning more of the craft from the master perfumers. Juniper Sling, one of Penhaligon’s bestselling men’s perfumes, was her idea after drinking a gin and tonic in a bar one evening with a friend who was also a gin geek. “It’s such an English smell.”

Another top-selling men’s fragrance was inspired by a visit to Norton & Sons tailors in Savile Row when she went looking for a new campaign for dapper gentlemen. “The smell of the beeswax the tailors used to preserve the paper patterns was amazing. They have archives going back hundreds of years. I wanted to bottle those smells.” So she asked her perfumers to visit, and come up with the suitable olfactory notes. They did; the result was Sartorial.

After eight years, Rotherham was twitchy.

“I found I was repeating myself: chasing the same global goals. I needed a change.” She became chief executive of another British luxury brand, Aspinal of London, the leather goods manufacturer, which sounds as though it’s been around for decades but was started 17 years ago. “It is a wonderful brand that had an old English voice. But it needed a new tone.” Sales tripled in the three years that she was there until she was lured back to the world of fragrance last spring.

“I loved being in a new sector but perfume is my passion. I couldn’t say no to the offer. It gets to all your senses. I can’t leave my wrist alone,” she says, laughing.