My Story

by Jo Malone

  And that is how the BBC series High Street Dreams came into being.

  Within the week, Jacquie had hooked me up with a production company called Twofour. Within the fortnight, we had an outline of the format. Within the month, we were sitting in front of programmers at the BBC who effectively commissioned us there and then. Jacquie Drewe is my kind of straight-talking, make-it-happen woman.

  Initially, I had no interest in being a host. I thought I could be a sort of consultant producer who would make occasional, advice-led appearances. I had no interest in being a television personality. ‘But they don’t want a personality,’ said Jacquie. ‘They want you as the on-camera expert because that’s what will give the programme gravitas.’

  One or two screen tests later, plus a few more of Jacquie’s confidence boosts along the way, I entered the world of television as a debut presenter with no real idea about how it worked but excited about using my experience in a non-commercial capacity.

  I made only one request as part of my first TV deal – I wanted my former communications director Charlotte McCarthy to be part of the team. In the fragrance industry, she had been my right-hand woman and I knew that in order to find my voice in TV, it was important to have her by my side. Charlotte had stayed on at Jo Malone London and she, like me, had missed working as a duo, so this represented a fantastic opportunity to join forces again. Once she was onboard as a producer/publicity manager, I felt happier about entering a totally alien but exciting environment.

  Was this a diversion I would have ordinarily taken had my choices not been so limited? Probably not. But I’m a doer, not someone who can sit around killing time. And when Jacquie Drewe first floated the idea, I came back to those three choices I had faced when torn between staying with Mum’s business or going solo: change your mindset, change your situation, or accept it. This time, I chose to change my situation, intrigued to see if a new landscape would lead to other things. I didn’t necessarily know where this road would lead, but I knew it would lead somewhere and lift me out of a period of stagnation.

  It felt good to have something to sink my teeth into, and ‘something’ was better than nothing. Besides, I had long felt that not enough was being done to encourage or equip young entrepreneurs with the necessary information and know-how, so here was my chance to provide whatever insight I could, not only to the contestants but to viewers with small businesses – the same reasoning that would motivate my own column in the Evening Standard a few years later.

  In a small way, this series was also about me finding my voice again. Only this time, an idea in my head wouldn’t become a fragrance but a four-episode show on primetime BBC1 on Monday nights, up against Big Brother on C4 and the Wormwood Scrubs documentary on ITV.

  Together with a team of researchers and my co-host, the property developer Nick Leslau, we scoured Britain looking for contestants. We travelled north, east, south and west during the second half of 2009, visiting food shows, fairs and markets to find people with great product, a fascinating story, and fire in their bellies; entrepreneurs who had the self-belief that can walk through walls and never give up.

  We came across hundreds of contenders but, in the end, we had to whittle down an exhaustive list of applicants to eight contestants, covering the markets of fashion, homeware, children’s products, and food and drink. We would film between January and March 2010, on the road and at a purpose-built set in Maidstone, but the format wasn’t about anyone competing or winning investment; it was about mentorship, helping them to develop their brands in preparation for each of them to pitch to a high street retailer. I’ll never forget the first day – and I’m not sure producer Alison Kirkham will either – because a last-minute tizzy left me fearing a repeat of my fluffed Heinz TV ad. At concept stage, and during screen tests, I experienced no jitters about being on camera. But when I walked on set into a hive of activity, buzzing with crew, I suddenly felt like the non-swimmer I am, jumping into the deep end. And just as I realised how deep the waters were, one of the directors thrust a script in my hand. No one had mentioned anything about a script. ‘Just look through it,’ he said. ‘We will go over it tomorrow.’

  No one knows I’m dyslexic. What am I doing here?! Who was I kidding?!

  I felt like a fraud who was going to be rumbled.

  With filming due to start the next day, I returned to my hotel that evening and experienced a full-blown panic attack. Or maybe it’s what they call ‘stage fright’? Having never been on stage, I wouldn’t know, but I’d never known anxiety on this scale. It felt like my throat was constricting and I was running out of breath; that fight or flight surge – and I wanted to run. The other thing that panic tends to do is amplify self-doubt, making failure appear guaranteed. All I saw was me drowning in front of a nation of viewers.

  I’ve gotta get out of this . . . I’ve gotta get out of this.

  The only way I found calm was to calculate on my phone how much I was going to have to pay the crew, production company and the BBC for cancelling the project. Yes, that’s what I was going to do – I was going to quit. Far rather pay a heavy cost in sterling than the price of humiliation.

  The next morning, after a fitful night’s sleep, I collared Alison on set and asked to have a word. Alison is one of those cool, calm and collected producers, though I feared what I was about to say was going to test her unflappability.

  ‘Look, I know this is a bad time to tell you, but I’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ve got the wrong person. I’m not sure I can do this. I’m really sorry.’

  Understandably, she looked totally dumbfounded. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I said, pulling the script from my handbag. ‘This – it’s not me.’

  With that, she took the script from my hand, ripped it in half, and handed it back. ‘That’s for everyone else, Jo. We want you to be unscripted. Just be yourself! Is there anything else?’

  Even though ‘just be yourself’ isn’t the easiest mode to find when a TV camera becomes your shadow, my anxiety subsided when I realised I could speak off the cuff. ‘Okay, that’s great,’ I said, blowing my cheeks. ‘I’ll give it a go!’

  Insecurities: I’m not sure they ever leave us, whatever success we achieve – mine certainly haven’t – but I think many of us can shrink in the face of an overwhelming situation, without stopping to consider what our capabilities might be if we push through the fear. Sometimes, we’ll succeed; sometimes, we’ll fail. But I hate to think how close I came to ducking out of that opportunity, especially when I went on to thoroughly enjoy the experience. Talking into a camera and being on set felt like the most natural thing in the world, in the end, even though it would be a short-lived foray into TV land. Sadly, the series wouldn’t get recommissioned because, as good as our ratings were, they weren’t a match for the viewing figures that Wormwood Scrubs pulled in. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why that was so, but there was much I had to learn about television.

  I learned the hard way that every programme depends on the necessary ingredient of ‘jeopardy’ – the high stakes and conflict that hook the viewer. I’m not sure I fully understood that concept until one episode when a woman contestant became visibly upset about some aspect of her business, and the director stopped filming – or, at least, I thought he had.

  I removed my lapel mic and disappeared with this woman into a private room, wanting to console her. When I re-emerged, I didn’t understand why people were frowning, until it was explained that ‘by removing your mic, you denied us that drama’.

  I didn’t find it easy thinking like a producer, viewing every interaction, on or off camera, as potential material. I wasn’t necessarily cut out for television in that regard, but the wonderful part of the experience was getting creative again, advising on branding, packaging and marketing, immersing myself in all matters retail.

  Over the three-month period of filming, I met some amazing people and some of the entrepreneurs we featured were a joy to work with,
like teachers Jo and Kay, who founded the ‘flibberty’ with its children’s playtime den kits, and Claire, who designed her own luxury pieces as the Special Jewellery Company.

  But no one better defined the get-up-and-go entrepreneurial spirit more than Roland and Miranda Ballard, with their company, Muddy Boots. Unafraid of risks and graft, they had left behind two media careers to produce quality, ethically farmed Aberdeen Angus beef, and we took them from a farmers’ market to Waitrose supermarket, which now stocks their burgers in more than one hundred stores. Since then, they have gone from strength to strength, and they epitomise the kind of small-business success story I love to see.

  The power and value of entrepreneurs, whether it’s your shopkeeper on the street corner or the owner of a local factory, truly hit home during the filming of High Street Dreams, and I often said that Britain needs thousands of small businesses to drive ‘a Dunkirk economy’. When this country was called to rescue all those people from France in 1940, the bigger boats couldn’t get close to shore. It was the little boats, which set out from Ramsgate to rescue 70,000, that ended up bringing 300,000 home. And that’s what we’ll always need to keep this country on its feet: small businesses flying the British flag all over the world.

  While the daring to be an entrepreneur is incomparable to the courage of those seven hundred private boat owners and fisherman, I truly believe that the people in small vessels are as important to reviving our economy as the generals at the helm of the corporate ships.

  What I couldn’t know when I signed up to do the programme was that in trying to help others achieve their dreams, this series would lead to me rolling up my sleeves again and returning to the high street, prompted by an unexpected trip down memory lane.

  It was snowing, and even my brown winter coat struggled to keep out the chill as I stood in the middle of a terraced street in Mile End, East London. On such a grey morning, a camera crew, bright lights, and a blonde-haired woman wearing TV make-up tend to attract attention, and two hooded teenagers on bikes hovered in my peripheral vision as I awaited my cue for a scene-setting ‘long shot’ – walk up the road and knock on the door of our featured family.

  ‘What ya doin’ just standing there?!’ one of them asked, laughing to his friend.

  I pretended not to hear. The director had already advised me not to engage them.

  But this kid was annoyingly persistent. ‘Oi! I asked ya what ya doin?!’

  I flashed him a look, put on my most authoritative voice and said, ‘Operation Bumblebee.’

  I don’t think I’ve seen two kids skedaddle so fast, pedalling furiously up the road.

  ‘Annnnnd action!’ the director shouted.

  I walked halfway up the street and turned down the path leading to the front door of Hardev Singh Sahota, a grandfather who had first started making hot chilli sauce in his kitchen in the 1980s. Together with his eldest son, Kuldip, he had been selling Mr Singh’s Sauce at trade shows, and we were preparing their pitch to Asda. I was sceptical at first as to whether this venture could take off but they bowled me over with their family spirit – the mum, two other sons and daughters-in-law all mucked in – and their passion for the product, which was mixed in a shed at the far end of their backyard.

  I donned hairnet, white coat and Wellington boots to join father and son on that production line, and the space was so small that the cameraman had to sit on one of the shelves, with his head smushed against the ceiling. We also had to contend with the overpowering smell of chillies, to the point where it made my eyes and nose water. It wasn’t the most comfortable of set-ups and yet the compactness instantly reminded me of the tiny kitchen where Gary and I had first started. And then, as I filled the glass bottles with sauce and screwed on the lids one by one, the jolting flashbacks came thick and fast. The white lab coat. Making product. Filling bottles. The confined space. Helping build a brand – the whole experience was transporting.

  Bottle it, label it, package it, PR it, sell it, make it fly. Remember how that feels?

  The director was issuing instructions from the doorway, the cameraman was asking me to step aside for a better angle, and I was trying my hardest to stay focused and be present, but the past kept speaking to me.

  This is what makes you happy. This is what you can do again.

  As soon as we finished filming, I stepped outside to find Charlotte waiting in the yard and, before she could say anything, before she could even ask about the scene, I blurted it out: ‘I’ve got to make fragrances. I’ve got to start again.’

  ‘I was wondering when you were going to say that,’ she said. Charlotte never did buy my often-stated assertion that I’d never go back into business.

  Before I had even removed my coat and hairnet, I was imagining the launch of different shops across Britain and America, leaping way ahead of myself. In a matter of seconds, I had gone from filling bottles to building a global brand.

  As ever, Gary would be there to keep my feet on the ground, wanting to make sure that I was not simply reacting to nostalgia, so we decided that if I still felt the same in a few months, then we would seriously explore the idea. With about eight months remaining of the lock-out period, we had time to consider it carefully, he said.

  I decided to sit on my hands a little longer, but while many thoughts run through my mind and out the other side, this one would anchor itsel f and refuse to stay quiet, growing louder and louder – and everything I did after the show seemed to nudge me nearer to a reunion with fragrance.

  When it came to mentoring, I didn’t seek only to steer the small crop of talent on High Street Dreams; I also wanted to do my bit in helping to inspire the next generation of businessmen and women. As different schools and colleges invited me to give talks about brand-building and creativity, I viewed it as a tremendous opportunity because, if left to me, entrepreneurship would be folded into the national curriculum.

  Young people are not only thinking quicker and smarter, they appear to be more savvy, innovation-minded and prepared to go it alone, building apps, launching YouTube channels, and pushing crowd-sourcing campaigns. We seem to be blessed with a new age of outside-the-box go-getters unafraid of risk, and we can only benefit if we better cultivate such vision and ambition at grassroots level. Children’s experience of entrepreneurship shouldn’t only be limited to lemonade stalls outside the front gate or jumble sales in the garage.

  Josh’s school in central London was one of the first places where, alongside three other mothers, I experimented with ‘entrepreneur lessons’ in one class, focusing on the four ‘P’s: product and packaging (which is art and science), pricing (maths), and placement (English for marketing/storytelling). We discussed costs, profit margin, VAT, product quality, and the value of PR, before embarking on the task at hand: the design, creation and sale of a yo-yo, as manufactured by David Strang, an Australian toy maker whose expertise we used on High Street Dreams and whose charm went down a storm with the pupils.

  The most remarkable thing happened as we selected two designs for the yo-yos that were sold among pupils and families at £6.95 each: not only did the children, aged between eight and nine, earn an overall profit of £300 for charity, but I noticed that it was the kids who struggled academically, or came from a more difficult background, who proved to be the most creative, the quickest thinkers, and the best at problem-solving. By their nature, entrepreneurs swim upstream – they can be different, quirky or loners – and they are often bored with theory and only interested in ‘doing’. I can’t think of one other subject other than entrepreneurship, where grades and socio-economic factors are rendered irrelevant – such lessons, if adopted nationwide, could be the greatest leveller and source of confidence for those who don’t ordinarily shine the brightest. Stimulate interest at a young age, and we stand a better chance of stimulating the economy many years down the road.

  I had a lot of requests to talk at school assemblies to inspire the children, but it was the teenage pupils at one school who ended
up further inspiring me.

  I was giving a talk about the construction of a perfume and, instead of passing around different vials for pupils to smell, I decided to turn it into an art lesson, taking out a paintbrush and different paints to show how I connect scents with colours when a fragrance comes to mind.

  I stood there in front of an easel, presented a lime note around the class and I painted what came to their minds: lime green, green grass, and fields. I took a mango note and they saw yellows, sunshine, and crystal clear waters. When I presented those two notes together, as an accord, and asked the class to smell and listen for a sound, one girl shouted out, ‘I hear a violin . . . and a drum in the background!’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘now look down at your feet – what do you see?’

  Another girl’s hand shot up in the air. ‘Sand and white pebbles.’

  We painted this picture together, through smell – I told them this was ‘Alice in Wonderlanding’, peering through the looking glass of creativity. Children are so comfortable and spontaneous with their imaginations, and it stirred the embers of mine.

  I deliberately hadn’t worked or tested my nose in more than four years. I hadn’t seen colours or heard sounds. I wasn’t even sure if my sense of smell would ever be as sensitive or effective as it used to be, but standing in that classroom, seeing those young minds light up and react to fragrance, I saw in them the same magic that once brought me alive. Each experience I was having only confirmed the feeling I’d had while bottling the hot chilli sauce. As we entered the late autumn of 2010, it wasn’t only an instinct or a curiosity that propelled me; it was a compulsion to return to what I did best.