How Elad Yifrach Made Luxury Brand L’Objet an Eight-Figure Business

This article is part of Creative Ventures, a series about business success rooted in creativity.

The luxury home design and fragrance brand L’Objet boasts an elegant boutique on New York City’s Madison Avenue. The space, bathed in earthy hues, harmoniously blends handcrafted housewares, decorative items, and scents from the company’s various collections.

For two decades, L’Objet’s founder and creative director, Elad Yifrach, has sustained the business on craftsmanship and creativity. In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the brand recently released a collection of nature-inspired objets (“objects” in French), including a gold-plated ladybug bottle opener and a glazed porcelain bowl designed to resemble cenote wavelets. It also expanded its fragrance line in early May, dropping a new eau de parfum called Blindfold, created with the master perfumer Yann Vasnier.

Yifrach, who lives in Portugal, draws inspiration from his Mediterranean-influenced upbringing and international travels to places such as France, Morocco, and India. Globetrotting has connected him to artisans around the world, forging collaborations with the contemporary artist Ruan Hoffmann and the sculpting duo the Haas Brothers, among others. The brand has also opened flagship boutiques in major cities, including Paris, London, and most recently, New Delhi.

Growing a luxury business is no easy feat, Yifrach told Business Insider. He said entrepreneurs need to self-advocate and have a clear vision of their brand identity and target audience. “It doesn’t matter how great your idea is,” he said on a video call from L’Objet’s Portugal office. “You still need to carve a space for yourself in the market and convince the market that you’re worthy of that space — and that takes time.”

Yifrach founded L’Objet in 2005 when he was in his mid-20s, working as an interior designer in Beverly Hills and developing an interest in handmade decorative pieces. “I was very young,” he said. “So the brand came from a more humble and naive place of just wanting to create, experiment with different materials, and learn a lot.”

Developing his luxury label required a “crazy amount of legwork,” he told BI. In the early aughts, social media wasn’t a commerce-driving juggernaut yet, and online shopping was inferior to coveted shelf space in brick-and-mortar stores. Digital marketing and virtual networking were also still ripening, so Yifrach said he had to rely on face time — not FaceTime.

He met with skilled artisans to learn techniques for making stylish, high-quality housewares, attended events to spread the word about L’Objet, and presented products to stores to sell as merchandise. His first-ever store client was Bergdorf Goodman.

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Yifrach said he had moments of doubt even as his company gained momentum. He remembers opting out of a major trade show so that he could afford to open L’Objet’s first New York showroom in 2010, but he didn’t get very many visitors initially.

“There were crickets. It was really scary,” he admitted. Every time he heard the “ding” of a nearby elevator, he’d jump from his chair, thinking someone had arrived to check out the space. But investing in the showroom gave the company a stronger identity, which helped in the long run, Yifrach told BI.

After 20 years, the company said it has accomplished eight-figure growth and aims to double its revenue in the forthcoming years. Direct-to-consumer channels such as e-commerce and retail have been the biggest growth areas so far this year, partially due to new boutique openings.

The landscape of luxury brand-building has changed substantially since Yifrach founded L’Objet. Omnichannel marketing is king, and cutting through the algorithmic clutter to reach — and resonate with — consumers is crucial. Virality isn’t always dependable, and longevity can be hard to come by.

“You see a lot of these overnight successes that have an identity crisis,” Yifrach said. “The identity was never formed — it was just a lot of fluff.”

Artisanship and timeless aesthetics are two pillars that have helped sustain L’Objet, even in a volatile luxury market, Yifrach said. Sacrificing quality to create products that capitalize on trends might work temporarily, but it doesn’t set a business up for long-term success, he added.

Yifrach noted that luxury consumers nowadays are especially selective about their purchases. “They’re not just buying things for the sake of buying. They want to know what they’re getting and why it’s expensive,” he said. “Brands need to be ready with the right answers. You have to justify more.”

L’Objet’s CEO, Stanislas Le Bert, shared a similar sentiment. “Consumers are more educated,” he told BI during a visit to the brand’s Manhattan showroom. “They want to understand the story and the ‘why’ behind the price. They expect transparency.”

Hannah Reed, a research manager at the market research agency Walnut Unlimited, previously told BI that “the pressure is now on for luxury players” to convince shoppers that their products are worth the hefty costs. “Brands really need to look at design with more intention,” she said, adding that they should “lean into craftsmanship and individuality.”

Yifrach said that L’Objet emphasizes the use of sustainable materials such as organic porcelain and ceramic and 24-karat gold, the purest form of the metal. He said gold is a particularly “fussy” material to work with when it’s plated or painted onto pottery. “It looks like a muddy water solution, and it’s extremely sticky,” he explained. “It requires a steady hand and an understanding of how much force to use when brushing so that you’re not overdressing a piece. You have to sit for hours and paint at a certain rhythm.” Very few people, he added, know how to do this skillfully.

Collaboration has been vital to improving L’Objet’s designs and scents, said Le Bert, a veteran executive in the luxury fragrance and lifestyle space. “There’s a creative dialogue at the beginning of every collaboration before the structure comes in — that moment is crucial,” he told BI.

He added that his perspective — viewing housewares as “vessels of emotions” and fragrances as “invisible home designs” — helps drive important conversations with artisans. “I admire passionate people,” he said. “We like to push back to form a healthy tension that serves creativity.”

Yifrach compared luxury products devoid of ingenuity to music without sentiment. “There are a lot of people who have beautiful voices, but when they sing, you don’t feel the emotion,” he said.

Before any L’Objet piece comes to fruition, Yifrach added, he has to “fall in love” with the idea behind it. The collaborations with the Haas Brothers, for instance, largely stemmed from Yifrach’s interest in exploring fantasy and functionality. And in January, L’Objet released a collection with Ruan Hoffman after Yifrach was inspired by the artist’s witty, playful works.

Yifrach said that if a brand creates designs with authentic artistic expression, it will shine through and speak to the consumer.

Once an item hits the market, the work doesn’t stop there. Le Bert said the L’Objet team scrutinizes how the company can improve its techniques, aesthetics, and business model — a strategy, he said, that’s necessary for any luxury brand to fine-tune its product portfolio. “Curate wisely,” he advised. “Avoiding dilution is key.”

Reflecting on the past 20 years, Yifrach summed up his overarching business philosophy with a pointed credo: “Time is the prime ingredient. That’s how you build a luxury brand — time, attention, intention, and telling your story to the right people, with the right people.”