My Story

by Jo Malone

  Vicky foresaw only one problem with my plan. ‘We haven’t got any product, Jo. What happens if someone wants to smell a fragrance?’

  ‘You tell them stories: how I made it, what inspired me, what the fragrance is meant to conjure.’ Dad, standing at the stall, telling the tale of the clipper he’d painted, describing its history and the voyage it was embarking on. ‘Stories have the power to connect, so let’s tell the story behind the product.’

  Without a website and because our phone lines weren’t yet connected, we had to think of a way of diverting our customers from Walton Street. We hadn’t put up any ‘we are moving’ notices at the old shop, so we knew they would still head there. We decided to arrange a chauffeur service, hiring four cars and four drivers, to pick up each customer, ferry them to Sloane Street and back, and then deliver the orders later. As I pointed out to Gary, if a chauffeur-driven car doesn’t equate to luxury, I don’t know what does.

  His initial embarrassment over this impromptu street trading soon fell away when he realised we were earning almost the same as we would have done in the shop. To any passers-by, it probably looked like we were signing people up or taking names for a petition; certainly, no one complained and we didn’t receive a visit from the council.

  I don’t think Vicky and Lorna ever expected to be so busy as they stood there, day in, day out, taking orders. Out of all the memories that we’d amass in our new premises, I don’t think anything topped those ten days when our makeshift market stall in Sloane Street turned out to be our first triumph.

  The shop opened in September 1999, complete with limestone floor and shelves in bays along the walls. And there was one innovative touch that we had been keeping under wraps – ‘scent booths’. Not dissimilar to a bank of telephone booths in a luxury hotel, they had touch screens allowing customers to select any kind of note they desired. Each selected category brought up a list of my fragrances; with one press of a tab, a vent released a quick spritz of that scent.

  I was probably more excited by this addition than the customers but, naturally, not everything would go smoothly. Four days after opening, I discovered that none of the screens worked – the vents only released shots of air, minus the scent. Clearly, no one had dared tell me or, worse still, no one had noticed! Every customer up until that point had selected their scent and walked away saying, ‘Oh, I love it! Oh, it’s wonderful!’

  ‘Well, they’re still buying the fragrances!’ Vicky pointed out.

  I’m pleased to say that we fixed the technical hitch and the ‘scent booths’ were a great success. Free ‘Fresh Air by Jo Malone’ would be available for a limited time only.

  Unlike Walton Street, we wanted to announce our arrival in style – you don’t arrive at either end of Sloane Street with a whimper. We hired a lighting guru called Charlie Fisher who brought pizzazz to any event, and pizzazz was what he provided, beaming a projection of ‘JO MALONE’ not only on to the pavement but high into the sky.

  We threw a cocktail party for three hundred guests, inviting every loyal client, friend and supplier who had supported us since the beginning. Of all the riches that success can bring, nothing is greater than the riches of friendship, and I think that’s why that night felt so important – it was our ‘thank you’ to so many.

  One special ‘thank you’ was reserved for Steven Horn, who had created a shop worthy of flagship status. Without his craft and guidance, I honestly don’t know where we’d be, so, before anyone else arrived, the three of us disappeared to the boardroom downstairs, leaving our maestro of catering, Johnny Roxburgh, of The Admiral Crichton event planners, in charge.

  Behind closed doors, and with a few teary words, we presented him with an engraved Cartier watch to commemorate the occasion. Meanwhile, as we heard the footsteps of guests on the shop floor, Johnny’s shrill voice started telling us to hurry up.

  I went to the door and pulled the handle. Locked. Wait, did I lock it? No, I didn’t lock it. Gary tried, thinking I was being weak. It was when Steven couldn’t open the door either that we realised it had jammed. Johnny was by now outside, wondering what was taking us so long.

  ‘JO! JO!’

  ‘JOHNNY! JOHNNY! We’re trapped in here!’

  I could have taken the Cartier watch off Steven and gifted it to Johnny when he got us out of there, using a hammer and a screwdriver to jemmy the door.

  Gary said the night felt like the big wedding celebration we’d never had as kids. And it did. I felt such overwhelming love and gratitude for every single person in the room, but what none of them knew was how much was shifting behind the scenes, and the secret that Gary and I had been harbouring for almost four years.

  As we opened Sloane Street, our business was growing faster than we could accommodate, galloping at such a rate I didn’t know how we would keep up. There had been days when I worried about finding ourselves in a place where we’d be out of our depth. We had built the great ship Jo Malone and steered her into waters we didn’t think were possible, but now we needed a new crew and fresh navigation to help us set sail around the world.

  And so, in October 1999, we made an announcement that nobody saw coming.

  We’d sold the company to Estée Lauder.

  EIGHTEEN

  Informal discussions had actually been taking place in the background since 1995, twelve months after opening Walton Street and before Bergdorf Goodman’s approach. We hadn’t told a soul because Estée Lauder had recently become a public company, so confidentiality was imperative. And, as someone who likes to keep her cards close to her chest until there is something to say, that suited me, too.

  One journalist would later note that the cosmetic titan entered our lives under the radar, ‘slowly but quietly’ – and that aptly describes the tempo of our unhurried dance as they courted us and we weighed their intentions, long before active negotiations began.

  Acquisitions are a bit like marriages: regardless of the instant attraction, you need to think with your head as well as the heart. You need to feel a synergy and you need to trust the other party implicitly, because the union is supposed to be for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Estée Lauder looked attractive and promised an exciting future, but Gary and I were in no mood to rush in; we wanted to explore every detail to the nth degree, which was why, with everything else going on, it turned into such an elongated process.

  Our dance had started as most interactions do – with a business card.

  Four suited executives entered the shop towards the end of business one day in the winter of 1995. One of them, a tall, bespectacled, grey-haired gentleman, did all the talking but didn’t exactly make the purpose of his visit explicit. They, too, were checking us out, placing a toe in the water. The most he said was how they had been watching our growth with interest, and how they would be ‘interested in having a conversation at your convenience’. With that, he slid his business card, face down, across the desk.

  I didn’t turn it over in front of him. After all, this wasn’t the first confident suit that had wandered in – we’d had buyers and venture capitalists in before, not to mention the mystery man with the million-dollar offer on day one. But once they had left, I looked at the card: Bob Nielsen, Head of Prescriptives Division, Estée Lauder Corporation.

  My heart went boomph!

  I rang Gary. The next day, he made the phone call. Within a week or two, Bob returned with another of the executives from that first visit – Pamela Baxter. When you think of the humanness behind a corporation, you think of someone like Pamela, a bob-haired, Coco Chanel look-a-like, who I loved the second we were introduced. She had recently overseen the launch of two Tommy Hilfiger fragrances – Tommy and Tommy Girl – so it was clear that Lauder was exploring different avenues in fragrance. I assumed Walton Street to be one such avenue, but both Pamela and Bob, and various other executives who came through our doors over the coming months, never went beyond expressing an interest in ‘ways we could work togeth
er’. They made all the right noises but we remained none the wiser. Did they want to invest? Were they going to ask me to collaborate on a new fragrance? Or was this a buyout?’ ‘However we fit into this whole equation,’ Gary told me one night, ‘we aren’t rushing in feet first. Remember, they have come knocking on our door, not the other way round.’

  Ultimately, Lauder’s team extended an invitation to visit their headquarters in New York. We flew in on 6 January 1996, to be greeted by the beginnings of a blizzard as a record nor’easter dumped two feet of snow. Our flight was the last one to land before all airports closed. As our car crawled its way from JFK into Manhattan, all I could think about was the magazine article I had read on the plane as we came in to land: an interview with Bobbi Brown, talking about her brand after selling to Estée Lauder the year before. In the quotes attributed to her, she mentioned how ‘incredible’ her experience had been with such a ‘phenomenal partner’, and how it was leading to steady growth overseas. I knew that this was our flashforward, as seen through another’s eyes.

  By nightfall, New York City had virtually ground to a halt, in unison with the rest of a paralysed East Coast. More than twenty inches of snow fell, whipped up by wind into deep drifts. Buses didn’t run, the subway stuttered to a halt, and the only thing moving along Madison Avenue was the odd pedestrian skier. But our meeting at Estée Lauder would go ahead. In the face of a storm, it was business as usual, which I suppose was an encouraging sign.

  Our welcome couldn’t have been warmer inside the General Motors Building, on Fifth Avenue, almost opposite Bergdorf Goodman. In the boardroom, about twelve smiling faces had gathered, making us feel like visiting dignitaries. Bob Nielsen joked that he was glad to see ‘a little bit of light snow’ hadn’t stopped us. I reminded him that it takes a lot to deter weather-hardened Brits. That opening gambit sums up the tone of the relaxed exchanges throughout the day, though some soft balls were lobbed into our court: did you really start this from your kitchen? What are your inspirations? What do you think makes you so different? How have you found your first year in retail? Without a doubt, we were being vetted as well as wooed. But still, no one fleshed out ‘the ways’ we could work together. It seems that was being left for another time, one year down the road, when we would finally get to the meet the king of the industry himself.

  We met the ebullient Leonard Lauder at his penthouse apartment in the Upper East Side. A breakfast meeting, over eggs, smoked fish and toast, illustrates how relaxed everything was. By now, we assumed he had received every ounce of feedback from the executives who had visited the shop and seen our Saturday queues for themselves. So the fact we were sitting there, in his home, told us something.

  What was instantly obvious from the way he spoke was his love for the industry; he talked about it with the passion of youth, not a man of sixty-two, and I knew there and then that there was something special about him. He understood the entrepreneurial spirit, having witnessed his mother build her eponymous company in 1946. This background perhaps explains why Leonard, the one-time delivery boy turned CEO, seemed to understand so much of our journey. Few people we’d met had understood the challenges involved, but he knew what it took to find your voice, build a brand, and keep evolving. He also reminded me of my dad in many ways: the charm, the pristine suit, the storyteller and, as we would discover in the coming months and years, the consistently engaging company.

  Looking back, if ever there was a moment when I thought, ‘This is where I’ll feel safe’, then it was at that breakfast meeting. And yet, however relaxed we were in each other’s company, we still skirted around the edges as two noncommittal parties sounding each other out, exploring boundaries, playing the long game.

  We wouldn’t meet again for another few months, this time in London on Grand National Day, at the Mirabelle restaurant in Mayfair.

  In the cab, I was incredibly nervous, suddenly worried at the prospect of someone spotting us with Leonard. We were nowhere near the stage of active negotiations but the situation felt so secretive, and so loaded with possibility, that I felt twitchy. ‘Relax!’ said Gary for the umpteenth time. ‘No one’s going to see us and, even if they did, they wouldn’t twig.’

  As we took our seats, Leonard’s calm demeanour soon put me at ease, and we continued from where we had left off in New York, although the conversation centred on our product lines and vision and what we foresaw for the business. There was clearly a desire to move the dialogue along to a more formal footing.

  Before coffees arrived, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. My head was spinning. Everything Leonard said made me foresee a deal that would send our brand not only around America but around the world. As slowly as the wheels were turning, I felt the promise of such an enormous opportunity and it was a lot to process, so I took a few moments to gather myself before heading back.

  As I walked out of the ladies, I heard a familiar woman’s voice. ‘Jo!’

  Oh God, no. I turned around to find a journalist friend heading my way.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here!’ she said. ‘Who are you having lunch with?’

  I panicked. And when I panic, convincing white lies are the last things that come to mind. ‘Oh, that’s my uncle! My uncle from Ireland, he’s a horse trainer . . .’

  ‘Ohhhh,’ she said, with mock surprise. ‘How odd that he’s sitting here with you on today of all days – Grand National Day.’

  As I scrambled for another desperate lie, she moved quickly to save me from further embarrassment. ‘Jo! I know exactly who that is!’ she smiled. ‘Good running into you. Enjoy your lunch.’

  Rumbled. Well and truly rumbled. I hurried back to the table, terrified that our secret was out. ‘Leonard! Leonard! A journalist has spotted us. And I told her you were an Irish horse trainer!’

  He and Gary couldn’t stop laughing, which at least made me feel better because I honestly thought the cat was out of the bag. As it was, I fretted about nothing because the journalist had the decency not to print a word, not even a social gossip piece. Indeed, we managed to keep all our future meetings, which were held primarily in New York, under wraps. As time marched on into 1997, our deal with Bergdorf Goodman actually helped provide the perfect cover for our regular presence in Manhattan.

  The more due diligence we did, and the more we discovered about Estée Lauder – from their team and members of the workforce – the more sure I became about the fit. We were introduced to Leonard’s wife, Evelyn, who was beautiful, smart, funny, and able to put her finger on any issue at hand. In meeting her, I realised that we shared the same kind of values, both in business and in family, and another part of the jigsaw fell into place.

  There were many nights when Gary and I tossed and turned, throwing around the pros and cons of an acquisition. The heart said ‘yes’ but the head pondered whether we’d be swallowed whole and lose control of everything we had built. Change was inevitable but releasing my grip on the reins wasn’t proving so easy to do. I wanted everything to change, and everything to stay the same. I think what eventually convinced us to enter into active negotiations were the assurances from Leonard and others that ‘staying the same’ was exactly what would happen, and that I’d retain control. John Larkin, their financial director, and one of the team we trusted and loved the most, assured us from day one that, ‘We will keep everything as it is – you’ll carry on what you’ve been doing.’

  It seems amazing to me now that our dance with Estée Lauder went on for a good couple of years before negotiations even began, sometime around mid-1998. And it would then be a further year before a deal was struck. In that time, and because we had no experience of global organisations and global deals, Gary and I had sounded out many friends who worked at that level, and Ron Dennis was chief among them. He knows as much about the mechanics of deal-making as he does about Formula 1 and we came to rely on his wise counsel.

  By this stage, our business had grown into a far more appealing prospect, with the success of Bergdorf Goodma
n. In addition, we opened three more shop-in-shop units: at Holt Renfrew, Toronto; and at Saks Fifth Avenue in Chicago and Troy, Michigan. Overall, we were in a far stronger negotiating position than when Bob Nielsen first walked into our shop.

  Gary and I stepped back at that point and left it to the merger-and-acquisitions professionals: our lawyer and lifelong friend Jeremy Courtenay-Stamp, who brought in deal-maker extraordinaire Peter Hansen. People have long been intrigued about the deal we struck but what goes on in the negotiating room should be treated the same as that which goes on in the treatment room – it should stay behind closed doors.

  There would be many clauses, technicalities and points to wade through but, for me, four points were important: that I retained creative control; that my loyal team were kept on; that we built the business with Lauder within a shared vision; and that the financial terms were worth it. As Gary said, ‘They’re not just buying stock on the shelves and a shop on the street, they’re buying your expertise and the future of the business which exists in your head.’

  I’ve never revealed how much money was involved and I don’t intend to now, suffice it to say that it was not as much as some reports speculated but it was more than some had predicted.

  By the time the paperwork was ready to sign, we were already scheduled to be at the Holt Renfrew store in Toronto, where I was doing a personal appearance. So we spent the weekend in Canada before flying to New York to execute the deal on a Monday morning, at 9 a.m. sharp, in front of a phalanx of lawyers in a huge corner room of a law firm inside the General Motors Building, several floors below Estée Lauder. The news was publicly announced on 25 October 1999.