My Story

by Jo Malone

  Our kitchen was smaller than the smallest cell, devoid of any obvious inspiration. It had a single sash window that offered a view of rooftops and chimney pots receding into the distance, beyond Sloane Square. And yet I loved nothing more than being in that confined space, whisking and mixing into the night, trying to adapt and improve my treatments, constantly playing around with different ingredients and essential oils.

  Of course, the thing about experimenting is that not everything will turn out perfectly. One week, I made a papaya mask with sandalwood powder, set in a cool jelly. But three women’s faces broke out in a rash and I had to hurriedly apply plain yoghurt as a soothing balm. Ironically, it was those flare-ups that led me to a breakthrough: the creation of a nourishing gel that calmed everything from rashes to sunburn to blemishes. Before I knew it, clients were raving about this ‘wonder product’, saying how much softer and fresher their skin felt after using it. I made fifty pots of this gel – and it would go on to be a bestseller in the future – leaving me with the lesson that some things are born out of the very problem you are seeking to solve.

  Masks, creams and gels were one thing, but I also wanted to develop my own lotions, so I bought gallon containers of unscented body lotion bases and mixed in different oil combinations, such as lemongrass, rosemary, lavender and jonquil. I also called on the help of a tall, bespectacled, softly spoken man called Derek, who I had come across while working for Mum. He headed up the British office of the Paris-based Lautier Florasynth group which, as well as supplying essential oils and fragrances to half the cosmetics industry, was a stable for some of the finest perfumers in the industry, hence why I valued his expertise. I’ll only use his Christian name because, as Dad used to say, never let daylight in on magic, but Derek would be a linchpin to my future success, helping to pave the way for the next phase of the business.

  He stopped by one week and I told him about my ideas for lotions, saying that one combination of ingredients intrigued me: nutmeg and ginger. As we talked, he said he could supply ‘the juice’ (le jus) – the concentrate of a fragrance that gives any cream, lotion, gel, oil or perfume its name. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said, ‘I’ll put one kilo through as a sample and see how you get on.’

  Within a week or so, a small box of miniature, brown glass bottles arrived – one batch was nutmeg, one ginger – and my experimenting went into overdrive. I wanted to create a lotion with power and punch, so I’d add ten, twelve, fourteen drops into the base, then I’d whisk up a lotion until I was happy with the texture and scent. I had no idea how popular the combination would be until I first massaged it on to the forearm of a client while their face mask was setting.

  ‘That smells and feels unbelievable. What is it?’ asked the first woman I tried it on, and the longer the lotion lingered, the more she raved. Other clients had similar reactions so I started giving them a scoop to take home in a pot, at no extra charge.

  Once the lotion had proved a hit, I set about making an accompanying bath oil, because I had long believed that the sensual experience of taking a bath required more than ambient warmth, steam and a few candles dotted around the edges. It demanded the luxury of fragrance. ‘How beautiful would it be if women could bathe in this same scent?’ I thought. And so soluble bath oils were added to my repertoire.

  Nutmeg & Ginger Bath Oil actually became a gift to those clients who had been with me from the start, presented in my plain, white gift bags – my small way of saying ‘thank you’. In my mind, this gift formed only a sample of limited stock, and that’s when things started going crazy. Clients didn’t only order one bottle of bath oil but five, and then ten. But the tipping point came in one mad month after different people ordered the bath oil and lotion in bulk – as gifts for employees or dinner-party guests – leaving us with orders of fifty, eighty or one hundred at a time. I had to pull in Gary every evening that month to meet this spurt in demand. He’d do a full day’s work as a surveyor and then join me on our mini-production line as I provided on-the-job training, but he never once moaned. ‘You’re working late. Why shouldn’t I?’ he said.

  He’d also help with the labelling. I had a roll of sticky labels that we fed through a second-hand typewriter we’d bought for £25. Using two index fingers, I’d stab out the name of the product to be affixed to the back of the bottle; on the front, I’d use pre-printed stickers from Prontaprint bearing my initials, ‘JLM’. With our first big orders out of the way, we didn’t think we’d face another rush like that for a while. How wrong we were!

  As a result of those bulk orders for different events, more than one hundred new people returned to buy more, saying it was ‘the best thing we have ever smelled’. This was the moment when I believe Jo Malone the business truly took off.

  Things became so busy in the run-up to Christmas that I pulled in a friend whose sole job was to answer the front door to the passing trade we had never envisaged – a whole new clientele only wanted product and we were swamped with hundreds of orders through December.

  By the time our days finished at gone midnight, rows of gift bags filled one entire side of the living room, as well as the space between the bay window and the back of the sofa. Each morning, the eight shelves of our pine bookcase were fully stocked with product. By the end of the day, they were half-empty.

  EMI Records had started referring us to its people – artists, agents and producers – and one female executive came to the flat one morning, looked at those shelves and said: ‘I need to buy something for the team. I’ll buy the lot.’

  How tempting that was, but I didn’t have time to replenish the stock for the rest of the day’s clients, so I agreed she could take half and I’d make up the remainder of her order within the next forty-eight hours. I hated turning business away. Indeed, I can remember only one other occasion when I had to do such a thing. Robert Redford was shooting the movie A River Runs Through It on location in Montana. Someone connected with the production called to say they wanted me to create a fragrance ‘to keep the mosquitoes away while Mr Redford is filming’. I didn’t know where to start with that time-sensitive request, and I certainly didn’t know how I’d find the time, and so I had to leave Robert Redford to fend off the mozzies by himself.

  Not everything I made would become a commercial product. As I kept trying out combinations of ingredients, many creams and lotions would never go beyond the treatment room and my circle of clients.

  Since that first batch, Derek had sent me a bunch of different fragrance samples, and I happened to pick out a vial of peach concentrate – to imagine this scent, think about placing a peach to your nose and smelling the blush of its skin. That same week, another client had brought me a pot of honey from a beehive in the country, and, as I looked at the vial and pot side by side on the kitchen countertop, I decided to give that pairing a try. I heated the honey, added some oil with the peach, created a paste and then mixed it all into a body lotion base.

  The first client who sampled this concoction was Jennie Elias, an interior designer and one of my original twelve clients. The moment I massaged a small amount on her arms, she was sold. She couldn’t get enough of my peach and honey lotion but the only problem was that, as the honey solidified, it sometimes sent tiny crystals rising to the surface. One shake of the bottle would mix everything together again but it was a flaw I wasn’t happy with. Jennie didn’t care, and I struggled to prise those bottles away from her. ‘It’s fine, it’s fine, don’t worry,’ she’d say. She wasn’t the only fan, either. Little bottles of that lotion would visit two or three royal palaces throughout Europe, too. Peach and honey – good enough for certain royals but, in my mind, not good enough for general sale; forever to be a secret shared with a limited number of clients.

  Gary and I held our ‘board meetings’ in bed on a Sunday morning – the one time we had a proper chance to catch up with each other, as well as air anything about the business. He’d get up, nip to Piccolo’s on Sloane Street and buy two bacon sand
wiches while I brewed some coffee; we’d then crawl back into bed and sit there, leaning back against our pillows, with notepads on raised knees, and discuss where we went wrong and what we could improve. And then, at the end of each month, we’d sit in the living room and spread our bank statements on the floor, cross-referencing them with my Ryman’s duplicate-page invoice book to calculate what money we had left over.

  Eventually, we earned enough to throw out the foam ‘mattress’ and buy a sofa bed – talk about going up in the world! But the most satisfying financial moment would come in 1994 when I received a letter from the NatWest bank, acknowledging receipt of my final £450 payment and confirming that the debt inherited from Mum had been cleared. It had taken almost five years.

  We bought a bottle of champagne that night and, you guessed it, a Chinese takeaway, pinching ourselves about how far we had come. ‘Can you believe this is happening?’ I asked Gary. He laughed – one of his snorting laughs that twitches his nose. ‘Believe it?!’ he said. ‘We don’t have blinking time to believe it!’

  We would come to realise that success begets success, and I think many entrepreneurs will associate with this: once you begin to feel successful, and embrace the natural momentum of the business, you tend to manifest a confidence that magnetises more success until it snowballs. Not that it makes it any more believable. Gary and I found the pace of our success almost preposterous – the speed of growth, the dizzying amount of orders, the volume we were shifting. I just wish there had been a pause button that could have allowed us to stop, step back and savour it more than we did. But we had to keep moving on to the next, and the next, and the next thing to do. From the outside, it may well have appeared that our lives were work, work, work, which was true. But there was a ‘quality of life’ in being side by side, sharing this incredible adventure, growing together, in our element.

  Ask any mountaineer about climbing a summit they never thought they’d get the chance to ascend – they won’t recount the fatigue, only the thrill of the experience. I would go back and relive every single hour of the climb Gary and I were attempting, without knowing the height of the mountain, or how capable we were. We decided to neither look up nor down. We simply kept looking at each foothold, kept focused, and kept powering on.

  THIRTEEN

  In Columbus, Ohio, in the 1860s, a chemist called Dr John Pemberton owned a laboratory where he manufactured medicines and photography chemicals. He was renowned for his innovative use of drugs, mixing this with that to invent some new tonic. One such experiment led to the creation of a hugely popular fragrance he called ‘Sweet Southern Bouquet’. But, as healthy as those sales surely were, nothing made him as famous as his next product.

  After moving to Atlanta, he was tinkering with his recipe for French Wine Coca – comprising Peruvian coca and the kola nut – when, in response to a prohibition on alcohol, he cooked up a caramel-coloured sugar syrup in a brass kettle. He replaced the wine with the syrup, added carbonated water and, hey presto, he had the formula for Coca-Cola, a drink he initially advertised as a refreshing ‘nerve tonic’. His bookkeeper registered the brand name in 1886 and Dr Pemberton would go on to make a small fortune. In the first year alone, he sold twenty-five gallons of his syrup. Ultimately, he would sell ten billion gallons globally.

  I love stories that inspire me, and nothing inspired me more than this account of a chemist who took a departure from the norm, dabbled with something new, and created a product that changed the world.

  In the early summer of 1993, I had face creams, lotions, bath oils and gels, but my instincts suggested that I needed to go in a different direction. I felt the business needed something more; that a hole needed filling. I smelled the memory of Madame Lubatti’s lab and the aromas from Fields & Co. I saw Mum’s favourite fragrances on the dressing table in her bedroom. And then a light bulb came on: ‘I wonder if I could take the fragrance from lotions and bath oils and turn them into an eau de cologne?’

  The thought alone excited me; moreover, it felt like a natural evolution for the business. But I had no idea where to start. My elementary understanding of Harry’s Cosmeticology certainly wasn’t going to cut it. Skincare creams, lotions and bath oils were one realm, but fragrance-making belonged in a faraway, artisan’s galaxy.

  As much as I could rely on my sense of smell, I wasn’t a perfumer – one of those technicians that the industry calls a ‘nose’ (le nez). That’s a whole other craft, the DNA field of the industry, where master craftsmen break down scents to a molecular level and turn concepts into compositions into product, drop by drop. When it came to making fragrances, I was in the dark without so much as a torch. I needed to find a perfumer who would be willing to collaborate and, for that, there was only one place to go.

  On the British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle, Paris, I was under no illusions about the scale of this undertaking. On the face of it, I can see why my plan looked a little overambitious: a one-woman band, working from a flat, with limited recognition and zero training, wanted to build a fragrance that, in her mind, had to be wholly original. I’m not sure even Dad would’ve taken those odds.

  What’s more, I was acutely aware that my feet would be walking in the crater-sized footprints of giants. After all, Paris was where the perfume house of Galimard supplied fragrances to the court of Louis XV; where Guerlain created a scent for Queen Victoria; and where a perfumer called Ernest Beaux developed Chanel No.5 in 1921. Since then, from the 1920s through to the 1960s, other legends established themselves, such as Givenchy, Christian Dior, Hermès, Lancôme, and Yves St Laurent. But I didn’t have any pretensions about competing with, or being like, the big brands. To me, they were the shiny, polished monoliths that were part of the landscape, not my considerations. I was in the embryonic stages of a creative exploration, finding my feet. I knew my place – a tadpole in an ocean – and I think that very perspective was the reason I didn’t feel daunted.

  At that stage, my only motivation was the love for our little business and the development of our product line, as if led by some mission statement written by my creative soul: ‘Forget what everyone else is doing, go in your own direction, get it right but, most of all, be original.’

  And yet I felt bold enough to walk up the gravel driveway of an industry, approach its French doors, pull back the big brass knocker and ask its experts to show me the way. To some, that might seem audacious but all of us have to start from the beginning, in whatever we do. Instead of asking, ‘Why me? Who am I kidding?!’, I prefer to switch it around and ask, ‘Why not me?’ Sometimes, you have to bowl into certain situations, and I was unafraid of bowling in anywhere or approaching anyone.

  I’m sure this attitude stemmed from having high-profile, hugely successful clients who made me feel their equal. Once you’ve seen beyond the masks of celebrity, it’s easy to see beyond the facades of the great perfume houses. But I also never doubted that I could make fragrances, hence why I never felt inferior. All I needed was one door to open and one person to show me the way, just like Dad had with face creams. That would be the key to unlock my future.

  My great difficulty was that I hadn’t been a voracious student of perfumery and I didn’t understand, let alone speak, the vernacular of the industry, nor did I know the technicalities of odour structure. One journalist wrote that I arrived in Paris with a fixed composition that was ‘considered so unorthodox, it required a protracted pilgrimage to find a perfumer who would collaborate’. I wish I had been that prepared! I actually arrived with no ‘brief’ – the written concept that people in my position usually pitch to perfume houses – and not a single idea in my head. Starting lines didn’t come much greener than that, and walls not much higher. Yet, some deep sense of knowing kept pushing me forward, undeterred. And there was one other factor – my old friend Derek, the only friend I had in the industry, whose guidance would steer me.

  When we first spoke about my plans to create a fragrance, I threw a stream of questio
ns at him. How do I go about this? Which perfumers will work with me? How do I get an ‘in’? In my naiveté, I thought that working with a perfume house would be like having a direct relationship with old suppliers like Fields & Co. and Baldwins. ‘It’s not as easy as that,’ Derek said. ‘And I’m going to be honest – you’re too small for them, Jo.’ Kind and candid – that’s why I liked him. He had a valid point, too. I was the face girl who had recently ordered one kilo of nutmeg and ginger; the big brands were ordering thousands of kilos of compounds from his company. But as much as I heard and respected what he said, it didn’t put me off. I wasn’t going to be told ‘no’ under any circumstances.

  The next time I spoke with Derek on the phone, I said, ‘I’ve thought about what you told me, and I accept that I might be too small for them, but I’ve had some further thoughts and you might think differently if—’

  ‘Jo, me thinking differently won’t change the reality. I’m sorry. I’m not sure we can help you in the way you are asking,’ he said, or words to that effect.

  But in my mind, there had to be someone willing to help. And I had a sneaking suspicion that if I kept pushing my luck, Derek would relent and at least introduce me to one of the perfumers at Lautier Florasynth. ‘When are you next going to be in Paris?’ I asked him one day.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to make fragrance and I’m going to see you there,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Okay, but I can’t promise that your trip will lead anywhere.’