Sofiah Jamil

Brand and heritage storytelling · Singapore · 2023

The brief

Revive a century-old Singaporean perfumery for contemporary audiences without losing what made it Al Zohri in the first place: a story embedded in old Singapore, in a particular Islamic lineage, and in a craft that didn’t quite have a vocabulary in the modern fragrance market.

The lineage

Al Zohri was founded by Kiyai Haji Ahmad Zuhri bin Mutammim — an Islamic scholar, community leader, and my maternal grandfather. His original fragrance recipes had been carried down through generations of our family, alongside the values, relationships, and craft sensibility that shaped them. Reviving the brand meant working with a body of material that was at once cultural heritage and family inheritance.

The work

The project sat at a seam — between heritage and modernity, between Islamic Singapore and a global luxury market that didn’t quite know what to do with it. The work was to find the language that let contemporary audiences encounter Al Zohri without first having to study Singapore’s religious history, while keeping the lineage intact.

Key elements of the work included:

• Narrative architecture that intertwined the personal history of Kiyai Zohri with the broader cultural evolution of Singapore, positioning Al Zohri as both a family legacy and a national heritage brand
• Content creation that translated the perfumery’s artisanal traditions and Islamic provenance into stories that resonated with contemporary Singaporean and global audiences
• Brand framing that preserved the religious and cultural depth of the original house while building a contemporary entry point — so a modern buyer could find Al Zohri compelling without prior knowledge of its lineage
• Cultural translation between the artisanal vocabulary of traditional Islamic perfumery and the language of a competitive global fragrance market

What it took

Working on Al Zohri required something most heritage projects don’t — a willingness to let the inheritance evolve. The temptation, with that kind of legacy, is to protect it by keeping it whole, to insist that anyone who encounters it should arrive on its terms. But that path leads, eventually, to a beautiful object no one outside the family knows how to hold.

The work was instead to keep the lineage intact — Kiyai Zohri, his family, the recipes, the Islamic provenance — while building a contemporary entry point. Heritage isn’t preserved by being respectful. It’s preserved by being legible.

What it became

Al Zohri now stands as an example of how artisanal traditions within Singapore’s Islamic heritage can be both relevant and thriving in the modern world. The revival has contributed to the broader preservation of heritage perfumery in Singapore and to the visibility of local brands in a competitive global market — while keeping a respected community leader’s legacy alive for the generations who never knew him.