This is the story of how my journey began and led me into the world of Oud and perfumery.
I was born and raised in a small village in Lower Dir, Pakistan. My early education was in a local government school where sometimes our classroom was simply under a tree. I was an average student but always curious. I was never satisfied with just knowing something.
After my MBA, I moved to Dubai and joined our business at Abd Majid Oud in a small office in Deira with only two other employees. On my first day, I called Abd Majid and asked what I should do. His answer was simple:
"Observe first. Everything else can wait"
At first, it felt slow, but with time I understood his approach. Understand first, then promote.
For the next year and a half, Abd Majid remained focused on the distillation units in Southeast Asia and never visited Dubai, leaving me with the space to observe, explore and learn on my own.
Those early years in Deira taught me a lot. Although I thought I knew oud from the family, I quickly realized I had only scratched the surface. For the first two years, I spent more time searching for answers than promoting our products. How and why became the two questions behind everything I did.
Many people from Assam, including family members and friends, generously shared their practical knowledge and experience with me. From cleaning and grading oud to understanding the material itself. Later, travelling to plantations and our distillation units gave me a much deeper understanding.
Abd Majid was always the driving force for me. He believed in me and gave me complete freedom to pursue the direction I believed was right, even when there was no immediate commercial return.
Towards the end of 2019, while attending Beautyworld Middle East, I felt that oud would gradually move beyond its traditional direct use and become increasingly important as an ingredient in fine perfumery.
I started approaching fragrance houses and meeting perfumers. I understood the raw material, but perfumers taught me how they smell oud, interpret its different facets and use such a complex material in a fragrance.
Over time, I realized that oud is praised more than it is understood.
My approach gradually became more educational than commercial. Instead of only promoting oud, I started sharing what I had learned about its origins, diversity, distillation and use in perfumery.
My visits to Europe took me deeper into fragrance houses, where I spent more time with perfumers. This connected my practical experience with the professional world of perfumery and gave me the opportunity to create more awareness about this precious material. Every meeting and interaction brought new questions from professionals, and those questions pushed me to look deeper for answers.
By the end of 2024, I decided to collect the questions people had asked me over the years and answer them through articles. The articles kept growing until they eventually became a book.
In early 2026, I completed Beyond the Scent of Agarwood Oil after countless sleepless nights and time spent away from my family. The purpose was never to show how much I know, but simply to share what I had seen, learned and experienced with oud over the years.
When I look back, my journey started in a small village school under a tree and continued through a small office in Deira, plantations, distillation units and fragrance houses, while Abd Majid Oud grew alongside this journey into one of the most diversified oud oil suppliers to the fragrance industry.
But the curiosity remains the same.
How and Why.
Khalid Iqbal
14-08-2026
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