My Elega began with a question that is easier to ask than to answer: what would we still want to own in ten years?

Most of what we tried failed the test. What survived was short — a fragrance you could wear every day without tiring of it, a wallet that got better as it wore, a linen shirt cut for the climate the linen came from. That list is still the whole company.

Where things are made

Fragrance is blended in Cairo in batches of around three hundred bottles, then left to macerate for six weeks before filling. That wait is the reason our scents smell settled rather than sharp when they reach you, and it is the main reason we cannot make more of them quickly.

Leather is cut from vegetable-tanned full-grain hide and saddle-stitched by hand with waxed linen thread. Hand-stitching is slower than machine-stitching and stronger: if a machine seam fails it unravels along its length, and a saddle stitch does not.

Linen is woven in Damietta from long-staple Egyptian flax and washed twice before it is cut, so it arrives soft and stops shrinking.

What we do not do

We do not run seasons. A piece stays in the collection until we find something we honestly think is better, and then the old one goes.

We do not put a house note in everything so that the range smells coherent. Each fragrance is built on its own terms.

We do not lacquer silver or finish leather to stop it ageing. Both are supposed to change with you. A bracelet that still looks new after two years has not been worn.

The mark

The rosette on our bottles and on our door is a bearing ring: an outer circle, four cardinal nodes, and a geometric e at the centre. It is drawn as a single hairline because that is the hardest way to draw anything — a line that thin has nowhere to hide a mistake.

The four nodes are the four parts of the house: fragrance, leather, apparel and objects. If we ever add a fifth, the mark will have to be redrawn, which is a useful constraint to have designed in.

Getting in touch

We answer our own messages. If something we made is not right, write to us and we will fix it — that is our returns policy in one sentence, and the longer version does not say anything different.