FOUNDER - COLLECTOR - CURATOR
Sudhir Gupta
Facticerie – The Factice Collection
Inspiring the world to rediscover and revive the art and beauty of factices.
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Inspiring the world to rediscover and revive the art and beauty of factices.
Humble Origins Leading to His Lifelong Passion.
In 1992, Sudhir Gupta emigrated to the United States from India. Like so many others, he had arrived full of hope, uncertain of his future, but armed with an engineering degree and plans to work tirelessly in order to earn money and study for a master’s degree. His goal was simple and clear: To build a future a childhood of poverty in India had denied him.
Gupta’s first job was a low-paying, entry-level cleaning position in a perfume shop on Canal Street in NYC. The work was humbling but changed his life in ways he could never have imagined. It was there he saw his first factice –an over-sized Nina Ricci L’Air du Temps perfume display bottle with intricately intertwined frosted glass doves atop it.
This extraordinary bottle was one most of the most beautiful things Gupta had every seen. Enchanted, he had to possess it. After saving money from his weekly paycheck of $200, he was finally was able to offer the owner of the shop the $2,000 required to purchase it. It was, however, not the end, but the beginning of the story of how he would somehow fund a collection of factices before they disappeared into the dustbin of history.
Timing is Everything and Failure a Great Teacher
With graduate school put on hold, Gupta began to buy and sell rare, hard-to-find perfumes out of his house, plowing his profits into the acquisition of more factices. Opening a retail shop in Westchester County, New York, in the middle of the Great Recession, he learned the painful truth of timing. Closing it in 2010 was painful, but its lessons reaffirmed his purpose.
He pivoted to wholesale fragrances, and working alone – often 80 –120 hours per week, he built a thriving enterprise with revenues exceeding $1 million a year. Growing the business organically, he became renown for the discontinued and hard-to-find fragrance. Finding his niche, resellers and customers increasingly discovered him.
Gupta’s company, Eau de Luxe, continued to grow, making the Inc. magazine 5000 five consecutive years from 2014 to 2018. This year, Gupta earned the rare honor of being named to the Inc. 5000 Honor Roll — an extraordinary accomplishment for a business fueled not by marketing, but by exceeding expectations of products and services.
Sharing His Collection and Preserving History
Today, these iconic fictive fragrance bottles risk being lost and forgotten. After thirty years in the industry and building a collection that exceeds 3,000 iconic factices from all over the world, Gupta has found the best possible way to share these magnificent artistic wonders and preserve these timeless manifestations of fragrance history for future generations.
The Facticerie,
Facticerie: The Factice Collection boasts an extraordinary number of these works of art dating back to the 19th Century. As each fragrance and bottle of perfume captures our emotions and memories that transcend time, each factice is a precious work of art that takes us on its own journey, and in a magically intimate way, reveals its own secrets.
True to his values and the passion consuming him for more than three decades, Gupta is doing it his way. Always the Anti-Entrepreneur, following his heart, living his dream, fascinated not by the transaction and the dollar, but by preserving and sharing a magical but endangered part of perfume history.
Guinness World Records
And now the authority on world records has taken notice and is recognizing Gupta’s rare factice collection as a unique, one-of-a kind treasure that can’t be missed.
