A long weekend that never ended.

Eighty Advanced began with two friends, James and Adnan, working unremarkable jobs in unremarkable buildings near Liverpool Street. We met over a shared frustration with the high-street fragrances on offer in 2018 — synthetic, loud, and forgettable by lunch. Adnan, whose family had come to London from Karachi in the seventies, kept a small bottle of his grandfather's Hindi OUD on his desk. We would sometimes open it on a Friday and the entire floor would smell of resin and rain for an hour.

In February 2019 we flew to Dubai for what was meant to be a long weekend — a wedding in Jumeirah and two days at the souks. On our second afternoon, lost in Deira, we wandered into a perfumer's shop above a spice stall. The owner, a man named Mr. Rashid, sat us down on a low cushion and, without asking, began layering oils on the back of our wrists — rose taifi, then sandalwood, then a single drop of aged Cambodian OUD that was older than either of us.

We missed our flight home. Then we missed the next one.

By the time we returned to London, we had ordered three kilos of aged oud chips, two bolts of Egyptian cotton, and a notebook half-full of perfumers' names. The "Eighty" in our name is not romantic — it is literal. Our first attempt at a signature scent used eighty separate raw materials before we settled on the final twenty-one. We kept the number as a reminder that restraint is its own kind of luxury.

Within a year, we had moved to Dubai full-time and opened a tiny studio in Al Quoz. The scarves came later, almost by accident — Adnan's mother sent over a stack of silk hijabs she had embroidered for the wedding of a cousin in Sharjah, and three of our perfume customers asked, quietly, where they might buy one. We commissioned a small run from a workshop in Khan El Khalili, then a larger one from a weaver in Como. Today, our scarves are made between Dubai, Cairo and Como, and finished by hand in our own workshop.

Eighty Advanced is still small. Two founders, four perfumers, a handful of seamstresses in Al Quoz, and a logistics partner in Dubai South who handles every parcel that leaves for London, Manchester, New York and Los Angeles. We do not sell in department stores. We do not run paid sales. If you are reading this, you have already done the harder half of the work — you have found us.

From our small house to your hand. Welcome.

— James & Adnan