How the work began.

The year the world fell quiet, Neil began drafting fragrance formulas on a yellow legal pad and working through raw materials one vial at a time. No brief, no client, no deadline. He learned the craft the way it has always been learned, by smelling and starting again.

Stephan, drawing on a background in design, printed and cast the early forms because no glass supplier in South Africa could make what we wanted. The resin worked. It was not right.

One Saturday he found a second-hand kiln on Facebook Marketplace and taught himself slip-casting from a YouTube channel.

For four years the work happened entirely by hand, in a single room, by two people. Twenty vessels a batch. Every seam fettled by hand. Every bottle filled one at a time. There was no team and no plan beyond making the next batch better than the last.

Ben Colling joined as a partner in 2024. He had met the work first in his own home, where an interior designer had placed one of the early White Quarry diffusers. He reached out to meet us.

Ben brought the relationships and a steady forward gaze. Together we commissioned bespoke compositions, refined every vessel, and began to build the company as something meant to last.

In January 2025, Neil left law and Stephan left design, and both committed to Sir Jacobs full-time. We took our first studio at Riversands, hired a caster and a fettler, and installed kilns large enough to make at scale. The work was the same work that had started on a garage floor.

Sir Jacobs makes nine fragrances, with a tenth in composition, and a collection of porcelain that has grown past twenty pieces. The company is now registered in the United Kingdom as well as South Africa, and the work is finding homes far from where it began.