About
The Alchemy Behind Maison Alchemy
Every great brand begins as base material: a formula, a name, a hunch, a founder's obsession. Most agencies stop at the surface: a logo, a slogan, a content calendar. We go deeper.
Maison Alchemy sits at the rare intersection of brand strategy, marketing, and scientific formulation, one house, one process, no handoffs lost in translation. We build the story and the substance behind it: the identity that makes people stop scrolling, and the formulation that makes them come back. We don't hand you off between departments. Because a brand is not the sum of its vendors, it's the coherence between them.
Our clients are founders and executives building haircare, body care, skincare, home products, food, and beverage, and luxury brands across the World. What they have in common: they don't want a vendor. They want an alchemist.
The Founders
The Alchemists
Mohamed OMERCo-Founder
The Al(Chemist)
- FormationMSc Physical Chemistry, Iowa State
- Most recentlyAVP Foresight & Innovation, L’Oréal
- Before thatColgate-Palmolive · Unilever · Mintel · Revlon
Mohamed's path to alchemy started, improbably, as a crime scene investigator for the NYPD, a career built on reading evidence others miss. He carried that instinct into science and innovation, earning a Master's in Physical Chemistry from Iowa State University before spending the next twenty years inside the world's leading beauty and consumer products companies: most recently as Associate Vice President for strategic foresight and innovation at L'Oréal, alongside senior innovation roles at Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, Mintel, and Revlon, identifying trends, shaping formulations, and accelerating speed-to-market for some of the biggest brands in the category.
- Patents4 global
- Published120+ articles
- Featured byNPR · Marketplace · Bloomberg
- Lectured in20+ countries, 5 continents
- ChairsOpen Innovation, NYSCC
- JudgesCEW Awards innovation committee
Holder of four global patents, Mohamed has published over 120 articles on innovation in the beauty industry and has been featured by NPR, Marketplace, and Bloomberg News. He has lectured on innovation and market trends in more than 20 countries across five continents, sits on the boards of several start-ups, chairs Open Innovation for the New York Society of Cosmetic Chemists (NYSCC), is a founding member of its Scientific Committee, and judges the innovation committee of the CEW Awards.
AlTanoor is his favorite instrument, making sure the right formula fits the right brand.
At Maison Alchemy, Mohamed is the guarantee that the science is real: every formula we put behind a brand promise has to survive his scrutiny first.
Olivier K. ESCLAUZECo-Founder
The Brand Strategist
- Experience15 years, consultant & in-house
- Client range2M$ family offices → Fortune 50
Olivier has spent fifteen years building brands & strategies for companies that needed to move fast and think further ahead than their competitors. His industry experience runs unusually wide: Cosmetics, Food and Beverages, Hospitality, Energy & Oil and Gas, Healthcare, and public organizations. He has worked for Public/Private clients and family offices as small as 2M$ to as large as Fortune 50 companies, both as an external consultant and as an in-house strategist. Across that range, he has helped build brands from scratch: taking early-stage concepts with nothing but an idea and a founder's conviction, and turning them into functioning, market-ready businesses.
- Associate ProfessorSorbonne University (France)
- Associate ProfessorGulf University of Science and Technology (Kuwait)
- Featured onFrench & Kuwaiti television
Alongside his consulting work, Olivier is an Associate Professor at various universities and Business Schools (Sorbonne University (France), Gulf University of Science and Technology (Kuwait)), teaching Corporate Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategic Foresight, and Innovation Management to graduate students and executives. As an expert and entrepreneur, he has been featured on French and Kuwaiti television.
Foresight is his Elixir, and it's baked into every strategy the house builds.
At Maison Alchemy, Olivier is the strategist who makes sure the brand isn't just beautiful. It's built on a growth plan that actually holds up in the market and will still be relevant in the years to come.
"We started Maison Alchemy because we were tired of watching great products fail on bad brands, and great brands collapse under weak products. We build both, together."
Where We Work
Wherever founders are building something worth building.
Paris. The Arabian Gulf. Lagos, Nairobi, and beyond. New York and Los Angeles. Wherever founders are building something worth building, we go there: in person when it matters, and always with the same rigor.
Our Language
The alchemical lexicon.
Alchemists left behind a vocabulary that still describes what real transformation requires. We borrow it deliberately, not as decoration, but because it says what we do more precisely than most modern business language can.
The complete lexiconNine terms, one language
- 01The Elements
- Every brand we build rests on the same essential elements: strategy, identity, content, and formulation. Change one, and the whole composition shifts. We treat none of them as an afterthought.
- 02The Fifth Essence
- Beyond the four elements, alchemists believed in a quinta essentia, a fifth essence that couldn't be isolated, only felt. It's the same in branding: strategy, identity, content, and formulation can all be technically correct and still miss it. The fifth essence is what's left when they fuse: the thing a competitor can copy the tactics of and never quite reproduce.
- 03The Emerald Tablet
- Legend holds that the first principles of alchemy were inscribed on a single tablet of emerald: as above, so below. We hold our clients to the same standard: what you promise above the surface (your brand) must be true below it (your product). The moment those two diverge, trust breaks.
- 04The Rosetta Stone
- A brand built for one market rarely survives translation into the next unchanged. We work like the Rosetta Stone worked: holding the same truth in three languages at once, so your brand reads as fluently in Riyadh as it does in Paris or New York.
- 05Catalyst
- In chemistry, a catalyst speeds transformation without being consumed by it. That's the role we take deliberately: we accelerate your brand's evolution, then step back. The brand is yours. We're the reaction that got it there faster.
- 06AlTanoor
- In the Gulf, the Tanoor is the clay oven where raw dough becomes bread: heat, pressure, and time doing what no other process can. AlTanoor is our word for the working sessions where a brand actually gets forged: strategy sprints, formulation trials, the unglamorous middle of the process where transformation actually happens.
- 07Optima Mater
- Not the base material: the best material. Before we tell a client what to change, we identify what's already gold: the instinct, the formula, the story fragment that was right from the start and just needed refining, not replacing.
- 08The Elixir
- What every founder is chasing, whether they name it or not: the formula that turns a product people try once into a brand people can't quit. Everything we do is in service of that one outcome.
- 09The Philosopher's Stone
- The legendary substance said to turn base metal into gold. We use it as shorthand for the outcome we're chasing on every engagement: the exact point where strategy, story, and substance stop being separate workstreams and start being one inevitable brand.
Bonus, just between you and us
