My Story

by Jo Malone

  ‘What was that?’

  WHOOSH! Another one.

  And that’s when I saw it – a gooey waterfall of bath oil so thick it cascaded in slow motion, flowing from the high shelving and dripping over the cupboard beneath, pooling on the floor. The oil in those bloody decanters had started to expand under the heat of the non-halogen spotlights, and the pressure was ejecting the glass stoppers.

  I’m not sure Mya spotted it as I guided her to the door, muttering something about an electricity fault blowing the light bulbs. I ushered her outside, saying it was probably best she return the next day, and I flipped the sign in the window to ‘Closed’. I rushed to the back to grab whatever tea towels were lying around. But it was too late – the Jo Malone version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was about to reach its crescendo. One by one, the decanters started erupting in rapid, almost choreographed succession – the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth – tipping over the decanters and spilling more bath oil. All I could do was look on helplessly until the performance was over.

  Gary, like a man who turned up late and missed the orchestra’s main number, walked in. He looked at me, looked at the floor and knew straightaway what had happened. I could have throttled him.

  We didn’t make the Battersea Park fireworks that evening. We were too busy on our hands and knees – not talking to each other – cleaning up the whole mess until 4 a.m. But I would soon see the funny side, and it has since become a standing joke in the family whenever my birthday rolls around.

  ‘What are we going to do for your birthday this year?’ Gary will say, before completing his own joke. ‘Want to fill some bath oils?!’

  I could probably write a whole other book on the mishaps, comedy of errors, late orders, last-minute panics, and little disasters that felt huge at the time. And Gary certainly wasn’t the only one who occasionally slipped on our steep learning curve.

  When it comes to being creative and interacting with customers, leave it to me. I love nothing more than engaging people in the product, massaging a lotion into someone’s arm to familiarise them with the texture; or giving someone a spritz of fragrance before walking them through the inspirations of a fragrance, the same way a sommelier would point out the different flavours in wine. But when it comes to anything that involves numbers, like tills and running credit cards for example, my dyslexia will hold up its hand and apologise in advance. On one particularly busy Saturday, I temporarily forgot about this limitation. I forgot what the doctor had told me – that when under pressure or stress, my dyslexia can sometimes lead to confusion.

  A queue had formed at the till, so I told Amanda to stay on the shop floor while I ran people’s payments. We had one of those manual, credit card imprinters, and I kept inserting people’s cards into the flatbed tray, sliding across the roller, and taking a carbon copy of the receipt, processing about ten customers in succession.

  The following day, I received a call from one of those ladies, a long-standing and extremely wealthy female client. ‘Jo,’ she said, ‘I’m wondering if you can help me. I’m in Harvey Nichols and I’ve been pulled aside by management who are asking some rather uncomfortable questions. It seems I’ve been trying to buy some tights using a credit card belonging to XXXX’ – and she said the name of someone famous. ‘The last time I used my credit card was in your shop and she was there. I think there’s been a mix-up.’

  To my mortification, I had given her the wrong card, and it would transpire that I had also swapped the cards of two other customers. To make matters worse, when Amanda checked the payment slips, I hadn’t taken a single signature. ‘Jo, you’re not only meant to take the imprint, the customer has to sign for the product, too!’

  I spent most of that day tracing and calling about ten customers, making sure they had the correct credit cards and asking if they wouldn’t mind popping back to sign the payment slip. Most returned – one or two didn’t – but Gary was relieved that I hadn’t frittered away £200 worth of product. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t allowed near the till again.

  Another time, I thought it would be a good idea to create an autumn-themed display. We had put a tree trunk in the window but it looked unfinished and so, during a walk with Gary in Oxfordshire, we picked up a bundle of twigs, broken branches and two-foot logs that were lying around. On paper, recreating a pocket of the English countryside in Chelsea, and tying bottles of fragrances to the ‘tree’, sounded like a great idea; in reality, not so much.

  The earwigs, centipedes, and beetles we found crawling all over the shop were not the problem. I walked in one morning, detected a burning popcorn kind of smell, heard a low humming buzz, and then spotted the mini-swarm of wasps. Attracted by our woodland theme, these wasps had come in from upstairs via one of the light fittings but, instead of finding a tree, they had found an array of scents and were having the time of their lives. Cue the emergency arrival of a pest controller.

  Mistakes are the essence of being an entrepreneur; without them, we wouldn’t have the kind of instructive experiences that make us better. I’m not sure what we would have done had we not kept laughing; in fact, not a day went by without a good old belly laugh. And the biggest hysterics came when Gary had what I call ‘one of his Del Boy moments’.

  Sometimes, when I was doing a treatment, and when the shop assistants felt stretched, he would become a stand-in salesman. With his sunny disposition and charming manner, it could be argued that there wasn’t anyone better suited to meet and greet the customers. But, after years in the construction industry, it’s fair to say that it took him a while to master the subtle art of selling.

  One morning, a French lady walked in and the ever-helpful Gary asked if he could be of any assistance. ‘Yes, I am looking for a new fragrance,’ she said, in her exquisite accent.

  ‘And what kind of fragrance are you looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is there one that you can suggest?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Gary, taking a bottle from one of the shelves. ‘This one is just knicker-dropping!’

  And, with that, the French woman put her hand to her mouth, turned on her heels and fled without saying a word, leaving Gary standing there, fragrance in hand.

  ‘What on earth possessed you to say such a thing?!’ I asked him later.

  ‘That’s how I’ve heard you describe it!’

  ‘But that’s what I say to you – it doesn’t mean we say it to customers!’

  The best bit about that story? The woman returned an hour later, when Gary wasn’t there, and bought four bottles of that ‘knicker-dropping’ perfume.

  Becoming a shopkeeper didn’t mean I stopped creating. Far from it. If anything, I wanted to diversify and keep making things, and the addition of scented candles was chief among them.

  I always burn a candle in my home. It is one of the great affordable luxuries, and can fill a room just as much as a bottled perfume. It has the ability to lull us into a whole other state, be it relaxation in the bathtub, romance at the dinner table, remembrance of a loved one, meditation for the mind, or the pure enjoyment of the scent alone. There is something decadently mesmerising about a flickering flame. For that reason, and for the first year only, we bought an outside brand of jasmine- and cinnamon-scented candles.

  Meanwhile, I started experimenting back at the flat, looking to make my own collection. After melting wax with different fragrance compounds, I took my ideas to the manufacturer in Devon. The hard part of working with fragrance is transferring it into another medium, and candle-making proved the trickiest of them all – the wicks didn’t stand straight, the aroma burned out too quickly, and the wax wasn’t the right quality – but, after much trial and error, we got there, and our patience paid dividends in sales. Indeed, our line of scented candles would prove to be almost as popular as the bottled fragrances.

  Beyond the staple product lines, I sold big cellophane bags filled with home-made orange and cinnamon potpourri and priced them up at £49.50. ‘No one’s going to spend th
at much on a bag of dried flowers!’ said Gary. I made fifty bags on a Sunday and they had sold out by Tuesday. I did the same with scented seashells, as tried and tested in our bath. I bought little silver caskets and filled them with amber crystals. I used foam oasis balls to create a scented artichoke ‘tree’ soaked in orange and cinnamon. I felt like a glorified Blue Peter presenter, turning nothing into something and seeing if people would buy it.

  Of course, what the customers never read about are the products that go awry, like the discontinued skin toner I created, only to discover that all the bits floated to the top; or the lime-based body lotion that, no matter how much we tweaked it, constantly thinned out and poured like water; and then there was my ‘Send a Scent’ initiative – a kind of Interflora service where a man in a van would drop off a mini-bottle of fragrance – which I thought was inspired but no one really grasped the concept and, within two years, had died a death. There were dozens of attempts to find the next big thing, and dozens of times we fell short. Mercifully, the products we did get right were selling better than ever before.

  Occasional days of hectic trade had now become an everyday occurrence. Within a month of opening, our 340-square-foot space proved too small to handle everyone, so customers had to queue outside. If there is one truth about queues – other than the mystifying capability of the British to tolerate them – it is their magnetic effect. When people see a line, it creates intrigue; when you have intrigue, you attract custom.

  People have asked me if there was one moment when I first realised that the business was starting to explode. The answer is one Saturday, three weeks before Christmas: the shop was rammed; I stepped outside, and the queue must have been twenty-foot long. Author Malcolm Gladwell describes the tipping point as ‘that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire’. Witnessing that line outside, I sensed that we were crossing some kind of special threshold.

  Inside, you’d have thought we were holding an oversubscribed cocktail reception. Gary, Amanda Lacey and I were swamped, and the shrill of the phone in the background was relentless. And so began the start of an amazing first Christmas, when our little street crackled with festive spirit as every business owner did their bit, from festive-themed windows, in-shop decorations, mince pies for customers, and carols playing in the background. Brian Turner was a star on those Saturdays. When he saw the queues forming, he brought out trays of mince pies, laughing and joking with our customers. That man was a joy to be around, and he exemplified the community and love that we would never have known had we stayed in the safety of our third-floor flat.

  There were no exceptions when it came to queuing. Once, the security guard for one famous person came into the shop and dropped a heavy hint, saying his client was waiting in the car and didn’t have long.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid she’s going to have to queue like everyone else – those people outside have been waiting a long time.’

  It didn’t matter to me whether you were a VIP, a member of royalty or a dowager from Belgravia, everyone was treated the same. Did that mean some security guards had to line up and hold their client’s place? Possibly. But not one single person was allowed to queue-jump or receive preferential treatment and, to be fair, no one ever complained, at least not to me. Although there was a funny moment when David Linley, the son of Princess Margaret, stopped by to purchase a gift for his wife Serena.

  He had queued patiently outside with my dear friend Ruth Kennedy, who was the managing director of his furniture design company. Ruth had been supportive of the business from the start, and understands retail from the boots up. Over the years, I would often fall back on her wise counsel – and we would often laugh about this one particular day.

  The shop was once again heaving and, as David shuffled along the line and approached the entrance, he was a true gentleman, holding open the door for a lady who was leaving . . . followed by another . . . and then a stream of ladies . . . and then a couple. The steady stream of comings and goings meant he was standing there for a good minute or so. David, dressed in a black jacket and matching polo-neck sweater, was graciously thanked by each customer, who had clearly mistaken him for the Jo Malone doorman, rather than a member of the Royal Family.

  As the tills kept ringing all the way up to Christmas Eve, we realised that we were woefully ill-prepared for the festive crowds that flocked to Walton Street each year, and we certainly hadn’t anticipated demand on the scale we experienced. We found ourselves replenishing the shelves four times a day. Six months of product sold out in six weeks. By the time we reached the end of the financial year in April, we had in those six months essentially already hit our five-year goal. But, as incredible as that was, I derived most fulfilment from knowing that my fragrances were making a positive difference to people’s lives.

  Nothing beats the feeling of a customer, in person or in writing, raving about a fragrance: how it smells to them, the emotional connection they feel, the memories it evokes, and how they can’t imagine wearing anything else. Like fashion and music, taste in perfumes and colognes is such a subjective thing, and yet the fondness with which people talk about my fragrances – and the way newspapers report how each scent built its own ‘cult following’ – will always mean the world to me.

  Occasionally, I would hear about a fragrance’s unexpected benefits, too. Ruth Kennedy was once standing in line at a pharmacy in New York when one of my scents proved too much for a gentleman she passed in one of the aisles. ‘He came up behind me and asked me to marry him because I smelled so good!’ she laughed. ‘That’s when you know you have a great fragrance, Jo!’

  Such stories were gratifying, because, in that pre-social media age, Gary and I had no way of tracking how the product was being received, or how far the ripples extended outside London. A customer made a purchase, walked away with a bag bearing my name, and that was the only context we were afforded. I had no idea how the product was being talked about by my peers in the fragrance industry either.

  I remember when someone first said to me: ‘You’re changing the language of fragrance, Jo. Everyone’s talking about you.’ My first thought was, ‘Am I? Are they?!’ I was immersed in my own bubble, enjoying the experience of watching our little business grow. I didn’t even think about the bigger picture; not straightaway, at least.

  Of course, I had read about the kudos we were receiving but at no point did I think that our little operation would ever – could ever – get noticed by one of the perfume houses in Paris. Just because a singer-songwriter sells out a local music venue most Saturdays doesn’t mean that a record label will come knocking. I wouldn’t know it at the time but, in later years, I would hear the story from one perfume house in Paris that a big brand sent its people to check out the shop discreetly ‘to find out what you were doing so differently’.

  In my mind, I wasn’t necessarily being ‘different’. I was simply following my intuition and naming fragrances after their ingredients – a trend that most brands appear to adopt today but, back then, I suppose that simplicity made me stand out. ‘Simplicity’ sums up my approach. I believe that the hallmarks of quality and luxury are discernment, not fuss, not razzmatazz, not bells and whistles. Understated. Subtle. Like a scent that gradually makes itself known and quietly commands attention.

  I can reflect on everything now but, in the mid-1990s, I had no time to consider the impact of what we were doing. All we could do was carry on throwing coal on the fire to keep the operation rolling along. But I was never too busy to create, and that’s what I was asked to do when I was invited to collaborate on two fragrances: one for French Connection, the other for McDonald’s.

  Understandably, Gary had a bit of a wobble over both approaches, and his concerns went something along these lines: ‘DON’T YOU THINK WE’VE GOT ENOUGH GOING ON?’ But Alisa Green, then married to French Connection founder and chief executive Stephen Marks, was a facial client and she asked if
I’d ever be interested in helping create their first fragrance.

  As the company’s creative director, she was someone I admired enormously. Furthermore, it was an opportunity to be involved with Stephen, an old-school retailer who had established the fashion brand in 1972, and had caused a stir in the mid-1990s with a masterstroke of marketing, using the company’s initials – FCUK – for a now-iconic ad campaign.

  As busy as the shop was, I viewed opportunities to work with greats like Alisa and Stephen as educative experiences that held their own value. Here was a chance for me to challenge myself: could I create for another brand? I think any self-respecting entrepreneur can challenge themselves outside the boundaries of their own business.

  The end result was a clean, citrusy, grapefruit-scented cologne with a wonderful woody note running through its centre, and I was as proud of that fragrance as any. I can say the same about the one I designed for McDonald’s UK to mark its twenty-first anniversary since opening in Woolwich in 1974 – a unisex fragrance that we called First Generation.

  Some people asked at the time why I’d work with McDonald’s when my brand was high-end luxury, but I felt that enquiry spoke more to a very British obsession with class than it did to my reason for doing the project. Whatever I do, and with whomever I work, my creativity is never compromised – the beauty and luxury lies within the bottle, not the point of sale. In the same way I don’t look at people on a different level, nor do I grade opportunities that arise. Working on a market with Dad had taught me that much.

  Besides, one of my chief considerations in weighing up an opportunity is the people I’ll be working with, and CEO Paul Preston, whose wife Mary was a face client, was someone I respected. I also liked the motivation behind the fragrance – it wasn’t for general sale; it was a ‘thank you’ gift for staff to mark the anniversary.

  Going into McDonald’s UK was my first experience of stepping into an all-male boardroom as I presented my samples to executives. I could tell a few of them were thinking, ‘We’re McDonald’s, why is this woman here?!’ but I did derive enjoyment from watching those fourteen or so suited men from a fast-food empire take the A, B, and C sample bottles, sniff them and give their opinion on the lime and verbena fragrance I had created. I like to think that I wasn’t the only one who learned from the experience.