In work and play, entrepreneur and artistic director Ramdane Touhami desires to create &ldquo;wow bubbles&rdquo; otherwise known as experiences that drop jaws, turn heads, and shift expectations on what great products and brands should be.

In 1995, Ramdane Touhami was homeless. He was a skateboarder with a streetwear brand named, Teuchyland. Fresh from fleeing Toulouse after being ambushed by local thugs who stole proceeds from his merch, he re-established his life in Paris by applying the reckless abandon his favorite sport demanded. With grit and uncompromising vision, he rose from his humble Moroccan roots to the top of the fashion industry.
 His career is full of spikes and ascents. When he helms brands, they usually begin to trend upward. Back in 2014, he reinvented the aesthetic identity of Officine Universelle Buly, also known as Buly 1803, with his wife, Victoire de Taillac. In 2021, the brand was absorbed by the LVMH group and is now continuing to expand its reach in Manila, Bangkok, and Taipei, among other capitals.
 &ldquo;One foot in the past, and one foot in the future&rdquo; is Touhami&rsquo;s motto. When he revived Cire Trudon, the oldest candle manufacturer in the world, he showed that tradition can be as attractive as modernity. Not one to yield to trends, he&rsquo;s always standing where he isn&rsquo;t expected to be &mdash; from his stint in Japan for the brand, And A, to his latest project, The Gazoline Stand, a cheeky upgrade on the concept of the petrol station situated at the 7th arrondissement of Paris.
 By bringing a wow factor in each endeavor, he&rsquo;s come a long way from being down and out in the City of Lights. Today, he&rsquo;s a resident of the world whose role as a retail polymath enables him to bring a piece of all the places he&rsquo;s seen in the proximity of our zip codes.

Hi Ramdane, how are you? How did you spend your holidays? Very busy with my new projects. The holidays seem far away. I had my first trip to Oman with my family. I loved it.
 You&rsquo;re a frequent traveler &mdash; where are you at the moment? How do you sustain your creative mobility amid the pandemic? I&rsquo;m in Paris heading to Japan for a month at the end of the week. I stayed with Victoire and the kids for five weeks in the countryside during the first lockdown in 2020, but since then, I managed to travel quite a lot mostly between Japan and Europe. There were lots of testing and paperwork involved.
 Buly is expanding to so many cities. How did you find out about Manila? Do you pick the cities or do the cities pick you? I wanted to join a friend I used to work with. I loved the work I did with him with Cire Trudon. The Philippines is not a country where one thinks first. At the base of the project, it was a gift for a person who worked with us and who wished to return to his country after years spent in France. I had the idea to kill two birds with one stone. It&rsquo;s a beautiful story &mdash; a return to our roots and the opening of a new one for the Officine.
 You have such an inspirational career trajectory. From once being homeless, you&rsquo;ve made many cities your home. What mindset and circumstances got you there? I&rsquo;ve always had fun and happiness [whether] as poor or rich. That doesn&rsquo;t change. When you have no money, you have a lot of dreams. When you have a lot of money, you have a lot of problems. When you sell a business, you know what you get, but you don&rsquo;t know what you lose. By traveling and settling in the four corners of the world, I realized that Paris was not the center of the world as we were taught in school.
 I&rsquo;ve read from a previous interview that you hate the idea of how the term &ldquo;luxury&rdquo; cages the essence of your brand within the fashion sector. But on a positive note, how do you define luxury personally? The term &ldquo;luxurious&rdquo; is very easily misused. Nice products and being well taken care of is what luxury is all about these days. You have to produce a time and service bubble, a &ldquo;wow&rdquo; bubble. That&rsquo;s my definition of luxury. When you&rsquo;re having a shitty day, you go into a store and you&rsquo;re pampered. It&rsquo;s full of magic, and it can change the course of a day! You go buy a soap...It&rsquo;s so anecdotal! But you&rsquo;re taken care of during this act of purchase; you&rsquo;re offered calligraphy, a gift paper. It&rsquo;s an opportunity to exchange with the host, Buly, who is interested in who will receive the present to adjust the advice, to suggest the best. Look at the effect of a smile on the human psyche. Buly takes this approach in order to devote his service and all his attention to the client. This is the keystone of the institution of which I&rsquo;m still the artistic director.

Daikanyama, Japan

Parco, Japan

Giftbox

Tell me about your partnership with Victoire. You&rsquo;re into skateboarding. She&rsquo;s into 19th-century French perfumeries and literature. How did both of you manage to marry your tastes? I would say first my tastes are wider than skateboarding, same for her. We are both very curious and eager to keep learning every day. We also like to live the same way. We built a family lifestyle we both enjoy. Everything else is a personal matter.
 I find it admirable that even if you&rsquo;re not formally educated in the industries that you&rsquo;ve set out to pursue, education and the preservation of tradition are among the foremost values you ingrain in your team. What&rsquo;s your preferred mode of education especially since you tackle many disciplines? I read a lot. School education is not the same as quality education. I prefer to make my own choices, my own speed. School was not made for me. I prefer to learn on my own with time. Books are what choose me. Travels, experiences, and observation too.
 As a multi-hyphenate, what&rsquo;s the first skill or talent that got you to where you are now? Don&rsquo;t listen to others. Never. For some, it&rsquo;s not a quality at all. It&rsquo;s a real talent for me. A creative company is not a democracy, it is a dictatorship, to achieve the initial project. If you&rsquo;re doing federation, democratic union in business, then don&rsquo;t build a brand. It&rsquo;s not a common project. As far as I&rsquo;m concerned, I listen to myself, and I don&rsquo;t give up.

You&rsquo;re working on the &ldquo;institution of business.&rdquo; In your own criteria, what makes a brand an institution? The accumulation of details that are repeated every day. Like a religion! The repetition of small services...repeat, repeat, repeat...to elevate them to art. It&rsquo;s the success of a brand, which is a really banal thing, and which suddenly stands out and becomes an institution.
 How did The Gazoline Stand come to fruition? Tell us about this childhood dream. I had trouble sleeping whenever I saw a gas station. Apoplexy. I always knew I wanted to own one. Not at all! I wanted to see if anything could become possible and that my method could be applied to other things other than soaps, candles, and fashion. And in another way, to put a little subversion and itchiness into a very aristocratic and conservative historic Parisian district. We could not, unfortunately, honor our program of selling kebabs and prayer rugs, just to shake up and especially deliciously provoke. [Laughs] But we were still teased because the storefront was too colorful as a hint of fantasy and new joy flooded our doorstep.
 You&rsquo;re also working on your creative agency Art Recherche Industrie. Can you expound on your modus operandi: advocating homemade and zero-outsourcing? You have to avoid diluting the creative process, and always stay in this little dictatorship that I have a hand on, to obtain a pure and perfect process. When you involve the outside world, you seriously weaken the original idea. Just a reminder: no creative democracy!
 You mentioned that in Shintoism, bad quality means &ldquo;small death.&rdquo; Can you share experiences in your life where you&rsquo;ve suffered from these so-called small deaths? Did they inspire any of the solutions you present in your products? Shintoism is a philosophy that inspires me in my work and creativity ethic. It&rsquo;s symbolic. It&rsquo;s about respecting your own standard and creating only the best.

That&rsquo;s my definition of luxury. When you&rsquo;re having a shitty day, you go into a store and you&rsquo;re pampered. It&rsquo;s full of magic...

The Exclamation Economy: Ramdane Touhami's Creativity Redefines Retail's Wow Factor

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