Through school and a series of jobs, including dental technician, window washer and dry cleaner, he never lost that unlikely obsession. In 1994, Glazman, who had moved to Boston nine years earlier, finally combined his passion for scents with the design expertise of his wife, Alina Roytberg, 37, launching a tiny line of six perfumed soaps that the two wrapped and labeled themselves. Just five years later, their company, Fresh, makes more than 500 products, including lotions, fragrances and cosmetics, priced from $7.50 to $76. It took in more than $10 million last year at its boutiques in New York City and Boston and in tony stores such as Barneys New York and Bergdorf Goodman. The couple's five-year plan calls for new Fresh stores in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Paris.
How have they pulled off such stunning growth so quickly? Fresh's faithful coterie of celebrity clients credits its unusual mix of natural scents—like chocolate, milk and tobacco flower—with packaging so exquisite it seems a shame to unwrap. Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow swear by the Cranberry Lemonade lipstick; Brooke Shields gave the Cyclamen fragrance to bridesmaids at her 1997 wedding; actress Gina Gershon loves the Milk line he's cause it "makes me smell like a baby." Adds celebrity makeup artist 15 Kevyn Aucoin, who often gives the soaps as gifts: "It's so cool the way Fresh combines different senses."
Even as a small boy, says Lydia Glazman, 61, her son "liked everything that smelled good." He found a kindred spirit in Alina, a budding fashion designer whose family had fled anti-Semitism in Ukraine and landed in Boston in 1978. A mutual friend introduced them in 1983, but Roytberg admits that "we didn't make much of an impression on each other." When they crossed paths again in 1989, "the timing was right," she says. They married eight months later.
In 1991, Lev and Alina opened a beauty supply store with $10,000 borrowed from their families, traveling frequently to Europe to research body-care products and the companies that made them. Three years later, they began to create and sell their own line. While Lev concocts the products with technicians at Fresh's laboratory in France, Alina comes up with the eye-catching packaging. The Petite Soaps are wrapped in inlaid cotton paper and hand-tied with silver wire and a tiny amethyst or some other semiprecious gem. The Milk bath comes in a glass container shaped like a milk bottle. "They have so much respect for each other's abilities," says Alina's father, Leo, 62.
For Lev and Alina, work and family are well-blended. Even at the three-bedroom condo outside Boston that they share with daughters Thais, 4, and Dalia, 18 months, "we live and breathe the products," Lev says. "It's like a romance as we put it all together."
Julie K.L. Dam
Phyllis Karas in Boston
- Contributors:
- Phyllis Karas.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
