This is the story of how my journey began and gradually led me deeper into the world of oud and perfumery.
I was born and raised in a small village in Lower Dir, Pakistan. I began my education at a local government school where at times classes were held outside under a tree.
What stayed with me from those early years was curiosity. I always wanted to understand how things worked and why they were done in a certain way.
After completing my MBA, I moved to Dubai and joined our business. At the time we were working from a small office in Deira with only two other employees.
On my first day, I contacted Abd Majid (CEO & Founder of the group) and asked what I should do.
His answer was very simple that Observe first, Everything else can wait.
At the time, I did not fully understand what he meant. Later, it became one of the most important lessons of my career. Before trying to market something, understand it.
For the next year and a half, Abd Majid remained focused on our distillation work in Southeast Asia. This gave me the space to observe, explore and find many of the answers myself.
I had grown up around this business, so naturally I thought I understood it. Once I started working with it every day, I realised how much I still had to learn.
Those early years in Deira became an education for me.
I spent a lot of time with people from Assam, including family members, traders and friends who had years of experience with agarwood. They shared their practical knowledge with me, from cleaning and grading oud to understanding the material itself.
I kept asking the same two questions.
How? And why?
Later, travelling to plantations and spending time at our distillation units gave me a much deeper understanding of the journey from the tree and resinous wood to distillation and the finished oil.
Throughout this period, Abd Majid remained the driving force behind me. With his guidance and the work of our team, we continued to grow the business and build a strong presence across the GCC.
In early 2019, We came up with the idea of looking more closely at where our oud oils were actually going and how they were being used by our business partners. As we looked further into it, we found that much of what we supplied was ultimately being used as an ingredient in perfumes rather than as a scent directly.
Towards the end of that year, while attending Beautyworld Middle East, that idea became even clearer to me. I began to see a much bigger role for oud beyond its traditional use and wanted to understand more deeply how oud could be used in perfumery.
That thought pushed me towards fragrance houses and perfumers.
I understood agarwood from the production side, but perfumers helped me understand it from another perspective. They showed me how they smell oud, interpret its different facets and work with such a complex material in a fragrance.
Over time, I realised that oud is widely admired, but not always widely understood.
This gradually changed my approach. I became less interested in simply presenting an oil and more interested in explaining what was behind it. Its origin, species, raw material, distillation and olfactive character.
My visits to Europe took me further into the professional fragrance industry. Every meeting with perfumers and fragrance houses brought new questions. The questions I could not answer pushed me to look deeper.
By the end of 2024, I decided to collect the questions I had received over the years and answer them properly through a series of articles.
Those articles eventually became a book.
In early 2026, I completed Beyond the Scent of Agarwood Oil.
I did not write it to present myself as someone who knows everything about agarwood. I wrote it to document what I had seen, learned and experienced, and to connect the production side of agarwood with the way it is understood and used in perfumery.
Looking back, only the places have changed. From a village school in Lower Dir to a small office in Deira. From oud markets to plantations and distillation units, and from there to fragrance houses and perfumers.
But the curiosity remains the same.
How? And why?
Author
Khalid Iqbal
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