CitrusRasasi
Rasasi is an Emirati fragrance house founded in Dubai in 1979, in the souk of Murshid Bazar in Deira. Run by the Kalsekar family across three generations, it took the opposite path from the merchants of its neighborhood: composing with raw materials from the Gulf tradition rather than reselling European juices. It now exports to dozens of countries.
Rasasi perfumes
A shop in the Deira souk
Abdul Razzak Kalsekar opened a small perfume shop in Murshid Bazar, in old Deira, in 1979. The neighborhood's trade lived at the time off the import of European fragrances; his stance was to work with raw materials from the Gulf's olfactory tradition, attars included.
Six of his sons took over the business, each on his own task, and it was their joint work that took the house from shop to company. The family's third generation has since joined, and the capital remains family-owned.
From shop to industry
In 1986, the family built its first factory on a five-thousand-square-meter plot in the Jebel Ali free zone, then just created. The zone's authority recounts that the project was born from a billboard glimpsed on the road to Abu Dhabi, and a phone number jotted down on the fly.
The network now counts more than one hundred and sixty-five stores, concentrated in the Gulf countries, and an export distribution spanning more than sixty countries. The Jebel Ali factory remains the house's production tool, which manufactures in the emirate what it sells under its name.
Two registers under one name
The catalog holds two fronts. Oriental compositions of tradition on one side, with the raw materials and formats of the Gulf; on the other a range referred to as Western, of which Blue Lady was the first title and the founding success.
This dual register is what the house presents as its trademark, and what explains why a single name covers bottles very far removed from one another.