She’s too humble to shine a light on her own work (or even mention that it came out!), but Style Section L.A. co-founder Erin Weinger wrote a badass cover story for Entrepreneur magazine this month on artisanal perfume company Le Lebo, which has a store in L.A. on West Third Street.

The story of the brand starts off with the co-founders giving up high-profile careers as perfumers for Armani to start their own small company selling a product they believe in (perfume made in the old-school, pre-synthetic style). Many struggles — and countless naysayers — later, they hit the jackpot, and now own a $4.5 million perfume business.

Erin writes:

“So Penot moved out of his fancy downtown Manhattan digs and shacked up with Roschi [his biz partner] in a one-bedroom, sixth-floor walk-up, where he spent the next 18 months sleeping on the sofa. Each kicked in about $100,000, and in the end, four close friends contributed roughly $30,000 (one of them used his work bonus; another, Penot later found out, sold his car). The money allowed Penot to hire top perfumers and buy expensive, pure ingredients, but it was still a far cry from the millions he had hoped to score from formal investors.

“Fortunately, nobody trusted us,” Penot says with a chuckle. “We realized that the energy we were spending in trying to convince people to invest could have been spent in creation and trying to do things cheaply. Because if someone had given us $2 million to create Le Labo, we would have spent it.”

Lessons learned? Trust your instincts, go grassroots and be prepared to occasionally be shot down to ultimately ascend! Oh, and become an expert at something.

Photo of Fabrice Penot by David Johnson, courtesy of Entrepreneur magazine.