One of the major perks of running a blog such as this is the opportunity to travel to different places and meet interesting new people. I feel it’s such a privilege and I am so blessed everytime I have the chance to enjoy it. Earlier this year I took some short trips to the beautiful city of love – Paris – courtesy of French label Paco Rabanne. I was invited to experience the launch of their new menswear fragrance Invictus that will be released next month. As the campaign was pretty much a big secret I couldn’t really reveal anything about my trips other than a few Instagram shots. But now the lid has been lifted…
Read more about the elaborate campaign of Invictus by Paco Rabanne, its involvement with 7 different athletes from all over the world, how I created my own perfume and what my and Berlin’s role in this is going to be, after the jump.
The Invictus Campaign with Nick Youngquest
On my first official Invictus trip to Paris back in March a group of international bloggers including myself was introduced to the new campaign of Invictus, the new men’s fragrance by Paco Rabanne. While their previous frangrances centered around rock’n’roll fame and furtune, this new one has a completely different theme: sportsmanship and victory. Makes sense, as probably everyone wants to be fit and successful. For their campaign film they used the Australian sportsman and athlete model Nick Youngquest as a spokesman – considering their otherwise quite smooth models for previous campaigns Nick comes as a surprising but welcome choice. With his tattoos, scruffy look and Aussie charme he is a total winner in my book. Enjoy the Kanye West inspired campaign film above and some behind the scenes photos below.
The Launch Event in Paris
A few months later I traveled to Paris a second time to join the official launch presentation. We got to mingle a little with the charming Nick and had the chance to get a preview of the fragrance and its base ingredients. As it turns out these matched the ingredients that we got to play around with on our previous visit where we had the opportunity to mix our very own fragrance in the same lab where they developed Invictus. I was super excited about this and very ambitious with my own fragrance. In fact I took the time to go through the complicated mixing process twice as I wasn’t a hundret percent satisfied with the first try. But the final result which I named “Franck” (pronounced the French way and meant as a pun on every French person who insists on writing my name with a “ck” even though there is only a “k” in Frank) is actually not bad at all (even the head perfumer who did the Invictus fragrance said so) and I’m actually enjoying wearing the fragrance. So a big thank you to Paco Rabanne, IFF labs and Ykone to let us do this! Some impressions of the launch event below.
The Invictus Award and the Berlin Contestant
So, you wonder how this all ties in with Berlin and myself? Well, it actually does. One part of the campaign of the new Paco Rabanne fragrance is the Invictus Award. It’s a contest between 7 athletes from different countries from all over the world who compete with each other in a quest to get their dream fulfilled: support for their own sports-related projects. Seven international bloggers including myself have been selected and assigned each to one of those 7 contestants from his own country. Every one of them has a different sport and when I was first introduced to this plan I was a bit nervous I would get a guy who is into football or some other sport that I would not be able to relate to. But as luck has it I got the most fun and colorful one of them all: My contestant Markus is a Dragonboat man. Well, it sound more Game of Thrones than it actually is, but it involves a super colorful and beautiful boat and a bunch of really fit guys rowing it. It will be a pleasure to squeeze in between them in their amazing boat 🙂 All the other contestants have super boring sports and totally don’t stand any chance against my man Markus 😉 Check out the teaser trailer of the video documentary series about the Invictus Award.
More about some fun sports, the Invictus fragrance by Paco Rabanne, the Invictus Award and some amazing prices for you to win coming soon…