Crabtree & Evelyn
Born curious, grown wild.
Crabtree & Evelyn was founded in 1971 by American film distributor Cyrus Harvey, who had been running a small Cambridge, Massachusetts soap shop called The Soap Box since the mid-1950s. After meeting English designer Peter Windett in London, Harvey rebuilt the business around a faux-Victorian botanical aesthetic, naming it for the crabapple tree and the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn. The brand grew through the 1980s and 1990s into a global mall fixture, selling soap, hand cream and eaux de toilette built around single-flower and herbal themes — gardenia, lily of the valley, summer hill, evelyn rose. Headquarters moved to London in 1980 with the opening of the Kensington Church Street store. After ownership changes, bankruptcy in 2019 and acquisition by Asia-based investors, Crabtree & Evelyn has narrowed its retail footprint and now sells primarily online and through a smaller set of stores.
Releases
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
