The Sons
There are two of me. The server and the sun. They have been at war my whole life.
The server is the man you have been meeting. In the store. On the phone. In the DMs.
When I engage a client directly my number one desire is to give them the best experience possible. I do not sell product. I engage to people's needs in the moment. I am extremely present. I solve for something that was missing in that moment.
Over 20,000 of you have bought from us in the last ten years through various points of evolution. Only a small percentage of you actually know me. But for those I have engaged directly, I know we had a great time. You probably spent more than you intended. And after, it was so worth it.
How can I say this with certainty? Because even now, as I have started this crazy mission of nerding out and writing to a customer base we previously did basic-nothing-of with, I have received tons of personal messages. People vibing with what is going on. Buying. Subscribing. Locking in.
That is the server. That is the man most of you have met.
Now meet the other one.
Storyboard · two men, one body
I am a problem solver. I can fix almost anything. I have no limitation to my creativity. I believe I am good at almost everything I touch. I have extreme discipline. Extreme focus. I am extremely patient.
I am also a wet short fuse. Takes me a while to light up. But when I do I blow quick.
I hate incompetence. I hate ringtone-chatters, people who repeat what they heard without ever having lived it. I reserve my opinion for things I know through experience, long reflection, deep study of human patterns, and what is most likely to produce the outcome. Engage me on this and I can talk forever.
I am also the man who will go cold on you with no warning. Here is the cycle. I over-give. Because I want you to grow. I want you to flourish. I will pour into you until I have almost inhibited your own agency and you have become entitled to it.
Then comes the moment when you falter on the shared drive for the mission. And I cut you loose. Then you get mad. Because I am cold as a MotherF*kA* about it. Because no level of mediocrity will keep me down.
This is the rough cycle. People love me a lot. Then turbulence hits. They want comforting. I am not willing to give it. Because I do not have time for that.
Here is what I did not know as a kid.
Bullying is the fathers fighting through their sons.
This is not the 1800s anymore. The fathers cannot duel. Cannot war over territory the way they used to. Cannot settle a bloodline argument with their fists in the public square. The outlets closed. The energy did not. So the wars move venues.
The wars the fathers did not finish, between brothers, between bloodlines, between countries, between classes, the sons carry into the schoolyard the next morning and the bodies they swing them with are each other's. The schoolyard is the displaced battlefield. The boys are the new soldiers. They fight wars they did not start, for fathers who cannot tell them what the war was even about.
Bullies are not mean. Bullies are full of inherited cargo with nowhere else to put it down. And the bullied are not random. The bullied are the boys who already opted out of the game. Who somewhere quietly decided: I am not playing this. So the game comes to them. Because the game cannot tolerate an opt-out. You have to pick a side. You are either fighting or you are the thing being fought.
Then the world's conditioning kicks in. Bad is bad. Good is good. So most boys force themselves into one of the two sanctioned roles and spend the rest of their lives performing it. A life of pretense. A few enter their villain arc.
The Fathers fight. The Sons carry.
In Chapter II I named the lineage as the head of the house. Six generations. The men were stewards. The house moved sideways. This is the same diagnosis, one generation down. The sons are the transporters of the wound.
Yet somehow the fight always comes to me anyway. I am a sigma, leave me in my corner and I bother no one. But the game finds the opt-outs first. When I cut you and you make me the enemy, it is because the standard slipped, not because the love did.
My favorite character is Batman. The anti-hero. I see so much of myself in him. My mask is the pacified. My interior is the sun. Come too close and you will be scorched.
Storyboard · the war moves venues
Everyone tells me the same thing. Yeah. I know. The reason I do not is because I am ashamed of who I really am.
I never wanted support because of my story. That would feel like cheating. Because I know my story defies all odds, and I made sure I picked the hardest way to break every barrier in front of me. This business has been a live therapy session for me. Me, seeking the self-worth to know I am enough by standards I imposed on myself and then struggle to meet.
Even opening in LA. I got on a flight. Landed. Walked up and down Sunset, Melrose and a bunch of streets for two days straight. No planning. No appointments. I book hotels once I am in the city. I do not plan ahead. I am a freestyler. Including this letter, I started cooking this in my head moments before I sat down to write it. Off the top of the dome. As Jay says.
I found a store. Contacted management. Said I want it. Looked at it for five seconds. Signed a contract. Flew back to South Africa. I did not know a single person in LA. No contractor. No idea how I was going to pull it off. I knew I would figure it out. I did.
People say congratulations on opening in Beverly Hills, it must have been challenging to get here. And in my head I roll my eyes. I have not even begun.
I have been self-employed since I was 22. By 23 I was running a multi-million dollar business in South Africa at exchange rate value. Making money has never been the challenge. I am great at sales. I am great at building product people want to buy.
6 weeks in the kitchen, 20-hour days · 14 days of public transmission
Storyboard · what you have been reading is the surface
What you have been reading these last two Sundays is the surface of something I have been making since before most of you knew I existed. The 14 days is the opening note.
But here is what I see when I walk into a room. I see other sons. Mirrors walking around reflecting in each other's eyes in unconscious incompetence. Each boy seeing his own un-named wound in another boy and lashing out at it. Because naming it in himself is impossible. So he names it in the other.
In Chapter I I started with the man in the mirror. Chapter III is harder. The sons are not just mirrors of themselves. They are mirrors of each other. And none of them know what they are looking at.
Hurt people hurt people. The whole world is quietly hurting.
So why am I here, writing this to you at this hour.
I am ripping the bandaid off.
The reason I have not advertised myself is shame. I have a side of me that is my rocket fuel and I have been shying away from using it. Because every time he triggers, I alienate the room. Because I go into beast mode. And at this level I am lethal. The only thing on a shark's mind is eat. I get laser-focused on the goal and I will get there with or without you.
This is the problem. Because the other side of me is the server. The one who over-gives. And those two men, in one body, produce the cycle I just described. The over-giving creates the entitlement. The beast cuts the entitlement loose. The server takes the blame for the cut. The cycle resets.
over-gives
becomes entitled
cuts it loose
Storyboard · the cycle that ran my whole life · IV the server takes the blame · reset
I have been pacifying the beast my whole life so I do not lose the people who came in through the server. I am done pacifying. This letter is the valve.
I am offering myself as the service sacrifice for everyone reading this. We are all mad. Everyone is carrying something they cannot say. Everyone is bullied by life in their own private way. Everyone has a beast they have caged in service of being loved by people who could not love the beast.
I am the valve popping off for you.
That is the offer. That is what I am here to do. I take that bad, the rock, and I alchemize it to gold. I let the pressure out of my chest so the pressure can come out of yours.
You do not need to do it the way I do it. You do not need to write a letter at 4am. You do not need to fly 28 hours and book hotels on arrival. You do not need to take the third option that no one taught you was an option. You just need to know it exists.
I watched the Michael Jackson biopic. I have been lit up by The Last Dance. I have been watching athletes excel to levels that go beyond logic. That is my jam.
But here is the thing I did not understand about MJ until recently. I grew up in the 1990s. I only knew the megastar. The version on stage. The version on TV. The version the world was already worshipping. I never knew his childhood story. Then I learnt it.
Bullied as a kid. Beaten by a father. Berated by the world. And it all clicked.
MJ. Kobe. Tony Robbins. Michael Jordan. Every great I have ever studied in their field, they all say the same thing. I built this MotherF*kA* brick by brick. The bricks were hurled at them. They picked them up. They turned them into a house.
The chapter has a score. The greats who built brick by brick, scored into one playlist. Press play and read the rest of this movement inside it.
Listen on SpotifyA maison. A maison that would store their hurt being. A maison that would give them a home to nurture and grow the monsters within. A maison from which, when ready, they would unleash to the world.
This is what the word has meant the whole time. The maison is the structure built from the bricks that were thrown. Throw dirt on me, and grow a wildflower.
It is not a fragrance company. It is not a luxury brand. It is the architecture every great performer has always built so they could survive their own interior long enough to share it. MJ had the stage. Jordan had the court. Kobe had the floor. Tony Robbins had the room. Batman had the cave. Saint Pablo had the page.
I am building Maison Monbeau.
He was not just a musical genius. He was a performative master. He had the outlet. He went on stage and became the baddest monster in the room. And because the outlet was sanctioned, because the stage was the agreed-upon place where the beast could come out and dance, he did not have to destroy anyone to feel the size of his own power.
That is what is missing for the rest of us. An outlet. A sanctioned place where the mask comes off. Where the rage and the fire and the unused potential get to express themselves through ritual, performance, scent, craft, communion, and the man walks out lighter than he walked in.
That is what I am building. The maison is the stage. The fragrance is the costume. The membership is the door. This is the answer to why fragrance, why luxury, why now. It is not about smelling good. It is about having a place to take the mask off.
Storyboard · four ways in, one world
Only 195 spots left. The window is open. If you came here for comfort, this is not that. You can take what you bought and go in peace. No hard feelings. I genuinely wish you well.
But if you came here to feel something real, stay. I am about to. I need you to help me unchain this beast. Trust me to deliver on what I am saying. And you get to be part of it.
I am a Sagittarius. I am not into astrology. But some things align. You are still here. So give it a try. Give me a chance to shine. Give me permission to carry the weight of your human desire to feel something at the magnitude of greatness.
And I will light you up like a sports car in your driveway the first time you put your foot down and the engine does what it was built to do. Like a prancing stallion grazing grass, until the moment it remembers what it is and runs. Like the desert sun in the middle of summer.
If you are not ready to make it sweat, the engine gags. It slows. This is the battle cry to light up the engine.
For those who came here to be offended, I would rather offend you now with a direct message than later when you thought I was some nice saint. When in fact I am Saint Pablo.
This is my stage. This is my performance. And I bring you the baddest concept in the game.
Here is what I am actually asking you tonight. I want you to get mad. I want you to find the war you have been carrying, for your father, for your brother, for the boy who hit you in the schoolyard, for the boss who took the credit, for the partner who would not love the beast in you, for the version of yourself you abandoned to stay safe. I want you to feel the full size of it. Without apologizing. Without softening. Without performing the pacified.
But hear me. With great power comes great responsibility. The fire is not the gift. The fire is the raw material. The gift is the channel. The stage MJ stepped onto. The court Jordan stepped onto. The floor Kobe walked. The room Tony Robbins filled. The page Saint Pablo wrote. The cave Batman went down into. Every man who has ever moved culture has had an outlet that was bigger than the room he was raging inside. You need one.
So here is what I am going to do. I am not leaving you with a question. I am leaving you with a doorway. There are four ways into the maison.
Half a man.
Half a beast.
You are enough.
You choose how you enter.
There is no wrong door. Pick the one that is yours, and step inside the house the voice was always speaking from.
The Founding Cohort is 105 of 300 claimed and seals July 4. After that, this door does not reopen.
- The Serverthe man
- The half the world has met for a decade. In the store, the message, the relationship.
- The Sunthe beast
- The half kept under control for twenty years. Not the danger, the builder.
- The Valvethe release
- Where the pressure finally goes. The maison as the place the heat is allowed to leave.
- Mask Offthe act
- The decision to stop dimming. To be seen at full size, both halves at once.
Type set in Playfair Display, EB Garamond, and Cormorant SC.
Of an edition catalogued through Independence Day, MMXXVI.
Maison Monbeau · Storytelling is the essence. Scent is the medium.
