Kélaat M'Gouna was the first place we went looking for something to eat.
OVO did not exist yet. What existed was an idea — that the things worth bringing back from Morocco are not only the ones you can hold: they are also the ones you can taste, or smell. We went looking for a food product and we came back with something else entirely, something we have not stopped working with since.
The valley arrives before you see it. A road that climbs, then holds, then opens onto hectares of rose bushes planted in rows, and a smell that crosses the car windows, the doors, the walls of the houses. In late April and early May, the whole valley smells of it. There is nothing synthetic in that air, nothing resembling the perfumes sold elsewhere. It is the plant itself, and it is enough.
What struck us was not only the landscape but the people in it. You arrive in a valley and you meet a community that has organised itself around a flower — picking before sunrise, carrying the petals to the still, working fast because a rose does not wait.
That is where we met Dr Hakima. She had set up her company with a precise ambition: to help the women of the region earn their own living, and to keep the value of the rose in the valley where it grows. She talked about it the way one talks about a long project, not a short one.
Her hydrolat is the reason we stayed. It is unusually rich in oil — because the equipment to extract the absolute and the concrete is not there. What might read, elsewhere, as a missing step in the process is in fact the source of its quality: nothing is taken out, nothing is concentrated by machine. The distillate keeps its oil, and with it the density, the warmth and the persistence of the flower.
You smell it once and you know where it came from. Open the bottle in a room and the room keeps it for hours. Cook with it, and the dish is not perfumed — it is changed.
We have sold a great many perfumes in our lives; this is not one of them. It is the first product of OVO, and it set the rule for everything that followed: go to the source, meet the person who makes it, bring back the thing itself, and let the material speak.
The rose is picked in Kélaat M'Gouna. The bottle is what reaches you. Between the two, there is a valley, a cooperative, and a woman who decided that the work would stay there.