Feature | The CHESHIRE Magazine
experience and I wouldn’t want to pass that on to the people who buy my product.’ Inspired by local fruit and vegetable markets, the new fragrance includes notes of orange, rose and carrot with musk and pimento – Grant travelled to the renowned perfume-making town of Grasse and returned with the oils and a pipette for his experiments. ‘It has always been my dream to do it,’ he says. As for the packaging – the pillar box red design was originally mockedup on a home computer and road-tested in airports around the world. ‘There was no perfume in a red bottle in any airport that I could find: as red is my favourite colour, I thought that was the right thing to do. Then the doubt came in and I thought “These other brands must know something I don’t”. But then I interviewed a gambler in Las Vegas who was 30-years-old and worth £100 million. He had made a fortunate from trademarking the phrase “Who’s your daddy?” and putting it on T-shirts. He told me; “more than anything you should be able to walk past your product from five metres away and say, ‘That’s Jack, the fragrance’”. I printed out cards with the branding and colour, put them in front of something, walked away and took a photograph. And that’s as commercial as I got.’ In Grant’s own words, running a company has been difficult at times. ‘Finding time to sit and make models and work on the next fragrance is the icing on the cake part of it. The sheer business side of it – I had no idea how timeconsuming it would be,’ he says. ‘However, having written and directed an autobiographical film
(Wah-Wah) several years ago, the experience of getting it made and trying to get it financed was the best preparation I could have had.’ On days when he is not on set – he is currently filming the drama Jeckyll and Hyde – he wakes at 6am and is often on email handling logistics, press appointments and fragrance deliveries until midnight, with the help of an assistant named Olivia. He considers the fragrance work a refreshing antidote to acting: ‘I’m not singing the blues about it,’ he explains. ‘It’s exciting and challenging and a whole new deal for me. At an actor at my stage of career, you are so looked after once you’ve got the job – getting the job is still the same old schlep and fan dance – but once you’ve got the job, apart from learning your lines, you are essentially shielded from reality. You’re picked up, taken to work, people then paint your face and fix your clothes; they tell you the clothes to wear and how to move. You’re relinquished from an enormous amount of those day-to-day responsibilities when you’re playing a part, which is the opposite of this business where you have to triple-check everything. But I’m enjoying it.’ He credits the internet with having made things easier. ‘I’m very fortunate to be launching a fragrance in a time of social media. Being able to Instagram it and tweet about it is good and the response is phenomenal. If someone buys something then they have a way of directly contacting me. To have an online dialogue with a paying customer is invaluable.’ Financially, he tells me the perfume is performing well: Jack was Liberty’s third
‘I am a one-man brand. If the business fails – it was a gamble that I had to take’
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