My Story

by Jo Malone

  For too long I had been sitting on the sidelines, denying the person I was before cancer skewed my perspective and fogged my clarity. I now realised that without being a fragrance designer, without building something, I’m not whole. I had fought cancer to live but, in terms of personal fulfilment and happiness, I hadn’t been living to the max, engaged with my purpose, carving out a sacred space to be creative. The period away from fragrance had given me what I had wished for in 2006 and time is indeed precious, but, surely, that time only has value if spent being true to yourself, following your heart’s desire?

  I had so many realisations, including the sobering fact that I was forty-eight and didn’t want to grow old feeling the regret of never trying again. Professionally, I wanted that soulful feeling back, the one I felt when playing with notes, not knowing what fragrance would emerge; or when doing a facial, or when walking through Grasse, or when I was on the shop floor. I wasn’t looking to recapture the past. I was rediscovering who I am and, in doing so, reclaiming my future.

  I instinctively felt that there were more fragrances within me, buried deep, waiting to be unlocked. And the mere thought of embarking on a new adventure with Gary – the prospect of building another global business – was a shot in the arm. There was also an element of wanting to prove to myself that I ‘still had it’ after five years away. Part of me had always wondered if I had just been the beneficiary of one lucky break or whether I was, at heart, a serial entrepreneur.

  Can you do it again? Can you?

  That was the question that kept niggling away at the back of my mind, pushing me along. I didn’t immediately have the answer and I’m not entirely sure I felt one hundred per cent confident, but I was determined to give it a good shot.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Admittedly, when taken at face value, we didn’t appear to be in the most promising of positions. No manufacturer, no perfume house, no fragrances lined up, and no idea about our brand image. Before, we had launched with a client list, product and a clear identity, growing organically and being swept along by momentum. Now, with five years of silence behind us, we were sitting around our kitchen table staring at a blank piece of paper, with nothing more than a fervent desire to launch a business. Had that kind of template for success come across my desk during High Street Dreams, my first question would have been, ‘Where’s your product?’ followed by a swift rejection.

  As if our odds weren’t long enough, there was also a minefield of legal restraints to navigate surrounding the right to use my name.

  The non-compete clause had locked me out of the industry for five years but the overall terms, as is commonly the case, meant that I couldn’t freely use ‘Jo Malone’ without being subject to certain covenants and restrictions – my personal identity was inextricably entwined with the brand identity I no longer owned. That’s the restrictive nature of any deal involving a namesake brand, but I don’t think I had previously considered its enormity until seeking to trade again as a fragrance designer.

  In 2006, I walked away with almost a blithe disregard for such matters, thinking I’d never launch another business in a million years. In 2011, I found myself confronted by my own lack of foresight, sitting down with the eminent intellectual property specialist James Mellor QC, receiving quite the education. Put simply, I would, for the rest of my life, have to watch how I used my name, and how I referred to myself in a commercial sense.

  As much as I understood that I had signed away my rights, the stark reality nevertheless made me wince. It felt like I had permitted a monitoring tag to be tied to my ankle, one that would bleep should I ever use my name in the wrong context.

  When you launch a business and start from nothing, it doesn’t cross your mind that the name on your birth certificate will one day have value. When the life-changing dream happens and you sell the business, you can be blinkered by the deal or prevailing circumstances – standing in that Madison Avenue shop, seeing ‘Jo Malone’ everywhere, and not feeling any connection. But it is a truth of life that situations, feelings and perspectives change, and therein lies the salutary lesson for any entrepreneur: even though you don’t think a certain way at the time, still make sure every eventuality is covered, however improbable, leaving the land ahead clear. How I went about selling a business in 1999 wouldn’t be how I’d go about it today, that’s for sure. Such are the lessons that shape us.

  I’m not the first founder of a namesake brand to have not fully considered the long-term consequences; to have walked away from the mirror and wondered why my reflection – my identity – was still standing there. But once Gary and I better u nderstood the legal pa rameters, we had no choice but to get on with it and start from scratch. Indeed, it was crucial that in everything we did, the consumer saw daylight between my new venture and Jo Malone London. I had to stand apart and be different – a prospect I started to relish.

  Stare at obstacles long enough and they will only appear bigger. See through and around them and they only diminish. The more I thought about carving out a new identity, the more it felt like an opportunity. It may have made things more complicated at first, but there has always been something thrilling about embarking on an unwritten chapter, not knowing where each turn of the page will take you. I looked at Gary and saw how reinvigorated he was, pumped up for the challenge, feeling the excitement again. Neither of us could wait to get started.

  The irony was that I would effectively be competing against myself, but while that might have been the case in actuality, I could never view it that way personally. It is inconceivable to me that I could ever compete against my own creativity. How can there be proper rivalry if two brands share the same heartbeat, no matter how separate they have to be? Besides, the only rival for any entrepreneur should be the rival within – the person you are, pushing you to be better, week in, week out.

  Either way, I couldn’t afford for sentimentality to become another hurdle. If we were to succeed again, I had to stay focused, so I sat down with that blank page and asked myself the three fundamental questions that each of us should ask ourselves when standing at a crossroads, whether you’re an entrepreneur with a kernel of an idea, or someone who has lost a job or gone through a divorce, looking for a new direction. Those questions are: Who am I? How can I reinvent myself? Where do I begin?

  My answers helped bring me clarity. First: I may no longer own my old brand but I remained Jo Malone the person; that’s who I am, a creator of fragrance. I had sold my name, not my instinct, my nose, my creativity, or the future. I had started with four plastic jugs and a saucepan at the very beginning. I could do it again. Second: I reinvent myself by tapping into the creativity that served me before. I was a different person now and that difference will be reflected in the product I make. Change. Keep evolving. Trust in the one thing you’re good at. As to where I begin, that was easy: today, right now – you seize the moment and physically get to work. And I knew what we had to do – we had to get back to basics.

  The first foundation that needed to be laid was the issue of our new name. I couldn’t think about fragrance without knowing who we were, what we were about, and how we looked. I needed the fixed co-ordinates to find my bearings, otherwise I wouldn’t have anything to connect to. I wish I could write here that it proved as easy as picking out baby names, but it would take weeks trying to figure out a brand that represented my ethos and style – and even then, we would make mistakes.

  Our oblong kitchen table became our base. Gary, forever the prudent one, wasn’t going to pay rent on office space until our idea was more concrete. Over endless hours and weeks, he and I sat there together with Charlotte, and the benefit of our trio was the combined expertise in finance and PR while I flitted in with my creative input. Gary and Charlotte sat in front of their laptops and I sat in front of my notepad – being computer illiterate, I prefer pen and paper – and we tried to think up a brand identity that bore no resemblance to the past. Yet there was no escaping the truth that every fragrance I woul
d go on to make would inevitably be imbued with my character, my signature.

  Dress me up in a clown’s outfit and call me Coco, the DNA of my creativity won’t alter. If Monet had been told to paint cartoons, his brushstrokes would have been unmistakable. If Adele suddenly decided to sing rock, you’d still know her voice. The true nature and ownership of any creation will always reside with the artist, no matter the wall it hangs from, the music system it plays on, or the bottle the fragrance sits in. We now had to dream up a brand that was unmistakably me and yet encompassed a wholly different style. If that sounds like a head-scrambling conundrum, then welcome to the inside of my head in 2011.

  Meanwhile, Gary erected a flip chart in the corner of the room, sketching designs and projecting forecasts as we simultaneously unpacked boxes of sample bottles, lids and packaging – none of which we liked. We analysed colours, fonts and ribbons. We flicked through catalogue after catalogue and called round suppliers to see what ideas they could offer. All we seemed to do was go round in circles as the coffee mugs, the pizza boxes, and the late nights stacked up. It was madness. Absolute madness. As well as exasperating.

  After a month of getting nowhere, I did wonder if we’d ever leave the starting blocks. We seemed to be doing nothing but spinning our wheels in the same spot, and that spot increasingly felt like square one. There was a lot of thinking, planning, theorising and speculating but zero progress.

  At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women event in London two years later, I was interviewed in front of an audience with the magazine’s assistant managing editor Leigh Gallagher and, as we looked back on this pivotal moment, she said, ‘So, this is like, if Howard Schultz was throwing another coffee chain, or if Richard Branson was starting another airline, this should be easy . . . but you were right back at the kitchen table. You were very much a start-up. It’s not a walk in the park.’

  She made a pertinent point, because I think part of me had initially expected it to be a walk in the park. How could returning to something I loved be so difficult? As usual, my own expectations exerted the pressure. But having been denied access to the industry for so long, I was desperate to make up for lost time, which is why the mire of details and technicalities, framed by the legal parameters, felt so frustrating. I longed for the naiveté of those carefree days prior to Walton Street when we made up the rules as we went along, armed with boundless creativity, adhering only to intuition. Everything seemed so simple then. And we didn’t know what the summit of the mountain felt like. Now, in our attempt to repeat that climb, we almost knew too much, and cared too much about not putting a foot wrong. Consequently, the whole process started to feel more engineered than organic.

  One Friday afternoon, at the end of a particularly draining week, I felt thoroughly fed up. I sat on the back step and Charlotte, who felt the collective frustration, joined me. She could see my weariness, and I was done trying to conceal it.

  ‘I knew it was going to be hard,’ I said, ‘but not this hard. I left a business that was flying high, with territories all over the world, and, here I am, unable to find a name, the right bottle or the correct packaging. What are we doing?’

  ‘We’re starting again, and this is what starting again feels like,’ she said. Charlotte had worked with us at the top level and, like Gary, was more realistic about the step-by-step process. ‘We’re going to have to earn the right to come back,’ she said. ‘There is no picking up where we left off. We have to build this house again, from the foundations up.’

  I didn’t admit it at the time, but I think there was a layer of fear beneath my determination. I was scared of putting my head above the parapet. Scared of failing. Scared that lightning in a bottle couldn’t strike twice. Perhaps I viewed the slow grind as an excuse to back away at a time when, let’s face it, the vast majority of people didn’t realise I had left the old brand anyway. I can’t pretend that I was consistently gung-ho and charging ahead, but I believe fear is sometimes healthy. Because once I’ve exhausted the emotion of fear, I tend to come back fighting. Fear represents that inner voice that dares to say, ‘You can’t do this’, and that breeds an even stronger resolve within me.

  Ultimately, I was determined to find a way – the motto that should be seared into every entrepreneur’s mindset. It shouldn’t matter if doors are slammed shut in your face or the legal obstacles seem too high. Find a ladder. Or find a way to climb over the wall. Or dig a tunnel. Just find a way.

  I had a stern word with myself that weekend – a pep talk not dissimilar to that time when house-to-house calls felt like a trudge. ‘If you really want this, you’ve got to prove to life that you want it. Time to dig deep and put into practice all you’ve ever known, gal.’

  By Monday morning, Charlotte didn’t even need to ask where my head was; she knew as soon as she saw me scribbling away. The next day, she bought two mugs. One said, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’; the other, ‘Now Panic and Freak Out’. You can guess which one was mine. We kept them side by side on the table – our daily reminder that with level heads, and maybe the odd freak-out, we’d nail the brand and start making progress. There remained only one other crucial component of the business that required my attention – the one essential tool that I hadn’t used professionally for more than four years. My nose.

  Ever since I first understood the abilities within my sense of smell, I never took them for granted or assumed they would be forever within reach. Indeed, there are accounts of perfumers who lose the power of smell because the olfactory nerves into the limbic system of the brain have, like a muscle, atrophied through lack of use. My obvious concern then was that if a few months of chemotherapy had once dampened the effectiveness of my nose, would a long passage of time have the same dousing effect? I had no field of reference in that regard. If an opera singer rests her voice for four years, does it come back as strong? If a footballer doesn’t kick a ball for four seasons, can they ever return as sharp? The only way of finding out was to retrain my nose, day by day, note by note.

  In accepting how slow this process could be, I had actually started testing my nose in the months before we began working on a brand, setting aside two-hour, daily blocks, as I used to do. I took out the vials of notes I had boxed away, along with my fragrance sticks, weighing scales and pipettes . . . and then I did too much, too soon, bowling in, as usual. I sniffed some strong musk and jasmine notes that overpowered my nose, to the point where I couldn’t smell anything else for days, which sort of defeated the purpose. So, I had to go easier and take it more slowly, as you would if you were returning to the gym after a lengthy absence.

  I’d slice a mango and wait to see a colour or hear a sound, or I’d take an old citronella note and ask myself what could make it sharper – a drop of camphor or eucalyptus? I’d sit for hours with fragrance sticks – one in my left hand, one in my right – wafting them beneath my nose, seeing what the combinations would trigger, if anything at all. We had rose bushes, rosemary and lavender on the back terrace, and I’d spend hours sitting there, with my eyes closed, trying to get those floral notes to lock together and paint a picture, but nothing special happened. Yes, one or two ‘nice’ accords came together but I wasn’t interested in creating nice. I needed something memorable, so I kept plugging away, going for walks around the neighbourhood, stopping to smell the flowers in different garden squares, or breathing in the aromas as I passed cafés and restaurants. I’d also hum tunes in my head but none of those tunes translated into anything. Nothing came back to me naturally, as if fragrance itself couldn’t reach me, as if there was a block in the frequency between us.

  But as painfully slow as this time proved to be, I tried not to overthink it or get stressed – a mind cluttered with thoughts would only hinder creativity further. Indeed, when the telltale flicker happened – the breakthrough moment – it was when I was relaxed, sitting in the living room with Gary, not consciously working my nose.

  He had his guitar out and I was reading a book when I picked up the musty s
mell of wet plaster, as if the interior walls were damp. I got up and started sniffing, wandering over to a corner in the living room, like a dog tracking a scent. Gary couldn’t smell anything and thought it was my imagination. ‘No, there’s water in these walls,’ I said, but, to touch, they were bone dry. I told management, suspecting a leak somewhere – they said, no, nothing was wrong. A few weeks later, leaking water behind the walls flooded the flat of the man downstairs. I think I knew then that my nose was kicking back into gear. Granted, detecting leaks and being as accurate as a barometer didn’t guarantee the creation of another bestselling fragrance, but it was an encouraging sign nonetheless.

  In the following weeks, similar encouraging flashes kept happening. I told Gary that I could smell rain; half an hour later, it poured down. Another day, I told him I could smell snow – same thing. ‘Nothing wrong with your nose,’ he said. ‘It’s like a dog with butter on its paws – it will always find its way home eventually!’

  Once my nose started to ‘work’ again, everything else fell into place – the name and our first brand image soon followed and, again, a moment of spontaneity unlocked the inspiration. We had thought of so many name permutations that I was almost punch-drunk with suggestions, most of which I have obviously consigned to forgotten memory. We had sent ourselves crazy playing our own version of Blankety Blank with ‘Willcox ___________’ and ‘___________ Scents’ and ‘Jo ___________’.

  At one point, Gary and I thought that we’d combine our names and call ourselves ‘Gaz & Jo’ but Charlotte soon shot that idea down in a ball of flames. ‘Ab-so-lute-ly not! Makes you sound like Chaz and Dave!’ she said. But that provides its own illustration about how much we were reaching and grasping for the answer. Someone even raised the idea of using an image of my face but I didn’t see the point: few people know what I look like, and my original philosophy remained – only the fragrances should lead.