by Jo Malone
As far as the rest of the industry was concerned, I had dropped off the radar in 2006, and I’m sure some still believed that I would continue to pursue a career in television. Not once had I publicly hinted at making a return, not until sitting down with three journalists for interviews that would be published over the first two days of March 2011, announcing the launch of our new brand later in the year.
Gary, Charlotte and I crowded around one laptop screen on our kitchen table, waiting for the different articles to break the news, and the first that dropped was from Vogue.co.uk with an intro that read: ‘Jo Malone is returning to the world of fragrance with a new company called Jo Loves, we can exclusively reveal today.’
‘No turning back now!’ said Charlotte, who could probably feel my heart racing as I stood next to her.
Women’s Wear Daily came next with the headline ‘Jo Malone Returns to What She Loves’. But my favourite line, probably because it made me sound more rock’n’roll than I actually am, came from Bryony Gordon in the Daily Telegraph the following day, twenty-four hours after everyone had had a chance to read the news: ‘Malone has decided to start all over again . . . It’s like the cosmetic equivalent of Led Zeppelin reuniting. Fashion and beauty websites exploded with excitement when the announcement was made . . .’
Charlotte’s mobile phone and email inbox almost went into meltdown for the rest of the week on the back of those articles, which we followed up with a media release sent out globally. Beauty editors and bloggers from London to New York to Sydney wanted interviews, and retailers from around the world wanted to talk about stocking the brand.
I felt that familiar frisson that comes with the nervous thrill of a launch and the great unknown of each fragrance’s reception. But the one thing I made clear in each interview was the truth that I wasn’t coming back to massage my ego or merge into the crowds. From the get-go, my intent was to create another global brand.
We would ultimately need a flagship store but, initially, our strategy was to launch online until we had re-established ourselves. We were back to being a brand in its infancy and, as Gary pointed out, we hadn’t opened Walton Street until the product had done the legwork and momentum had built. Besides, in an increasingly interconnected world, we figured that an online presence was as good as going global, being open 24–7 in a virtual sense.
The early feedback from our sneak previews to journalists was encouraging. There is no knowing how a fragrance will be received but one acid test is putting it before those writers who feature and review new products. Charlotte had been spreading the word among the beauty and fashion editors, offering samples as teasers, and she kept returning to the office with good news. ‘They’re smelling Pomelo and saying, “That’s a Jo fragrance” or “You can tell that’s Jo” – they knew the signature straightaway.’
I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t punch the air a few times when I heard such comments because that had been a concern of mine – whether people would know it was me. I think that was when I truly felt I’d got my voice back after being muted for so long.
My gut had told me that Pomelo was going to be something special, and I would be proved right. The repeat purchases would be phenomenal and it would rightly earn its own cult status. I often say it’s my ‘best friend’, simply because it was the first to break down the creative barrier and show me that I could still create fragrance like no one else in the world. That timeless scent will be working its magic thirty years from now. That’s how much I believe in its power – I’ve heard, read and seen the lasting impressions. But I don’t think any favourable reaction could top the time when, in the late spring of 2011, Pomelo opened the doors for us into Selfridges.
An early visitor to our new offices was Jayne Demuro, who had overseen the department store’s famous beauty hall for the previous decade. Every luxury brand has to first pass through Jayne before having a chance of claiming counter space on that hallowed stage, and our announcement had clearly piqued her interest.
When we met in the ‘think room’, I didn’t necessarily expect anything to come of this meeting – many curious executives and agents dropped by to take a sniff around, so to speak – but it felt good to be showcasing product again. Outside, the rain was tipping down, blown almost horizontal by a gusty wind. Jayne arrived with a raincoat that was wet through.
‘Here, let me take that from you – I’ll hang it up to dry,’ I said.
Jayne detected the fragrance I was wearing. ‘You smell amazing! What is that?’
Pomelo – once aga in doing all the talking for me.
I ran through the collection one by one, giving the story behind each, and Jayne seemed quietly impressed. We discussed my hopes and plans for the brand, the launch in November, and the eventual goal to put down roots with a flagship store. As she stood to leave and put her coat back on, I instinctively spritzed her coat. Spritzed is actually an understatement. I virtually spray-painted it in Pomelo.
The next morning, shortly after 10 a.m., she was on the phone. ‘I got in the lift at work and someone asked me what fragrance I was wearing. I’ve never smelled anything like it, Jo – and it’s still as present as it was yesterday,’ she said.
By the end of that call, and thanks in no small part to the power of Pomelo, Jayne invited us to open a pop-up counter at Selfridges and use that as our launch pad, offering an in-store presence right through until Christmas.
Gary wasn’t so sure. ‘We’re not ready to do this,’ he said. ‘Too big, too soon.’
‘Please! We need to get product out there, and this is a fantastic opportunity,’ I said, thinking he was overthinking it.
‘It’s a mistake. We haven’t seeded properly. The brand hasn’t gained momentum. We haven’t even found our audience yet,’ he said. ‘We’re running before we can walk, but if you want me to start the negotiations, I’m behind you.’
I heard him but, on this rare occasion, I thought I knew better. I also did something I had never done before: I crossed over into his lane – business and strategy – and made a decision with my heart. He had made all the right calls in the past but I was deaf to this one. My need to make a splash, to make my comeback known, and to do it with Christmas bells and whistles attached, proved louder than his wisdom. With my golden handcuffs removed, I was already galloping to the west end of Oxford Street. ‘I can’t think of a better time or better place to announce ourselves to the world – this is how we put ourselves back on the map!’ I said.
The pride before the fall . . .
TWENTY-NINE
Selfridges was the only department store I visited as a little girl – a wonderland where Mum used to take me as a treat when she worked for Madame Lubatti. On rare Saturdays, after closing the salon, we’d walk down Baker Street and pass through Portman Square en route to the emporium that, to my young eyes, was as magnificent as any royal palace with its ‘Queen of Time’ statue and the Ionic columns of its famous frontage.
I’d shuffle through those revolving doors, tucked in tight behind Mum, and watch her browse the beauty hall, dabbing different scents on the inside of her wrist. I’d stand there, at eye level with the product-filled glass cabinets, peering up at the purse-lipped sales ladies with perfectly coiffed hair, who were so glamorous they might as well have wandered off a film set. Mum purchased many of her fragrances there. She also bought me my first Mary Quant grape-crush lipstick and a pair of new school shoes – the shiniest black shoes that I treated like glass slippers because they felt so posh. But the best bit was going to the Brass Rail cafeteria where, on a dark-wood mezzanine outside the food hall, we’d have the most amazing salt beef sandwiches with coleslaw and gherkins, and a hot chocolate. Now that was a real treat. I don’t think I had ever seen so much meat stuffed into a hearty sandwich before! Everything about that store, from its sandwiches and its Easter chocolate to its shiny school shoes, was from a different world, as far as I was concerned.
Even today, I never fail to feel the extraordinar
y sense of adventure that founder Harry Gordon Selfridge wanted shoppers to experience when he opened the store to much razzmatazz in 1909. His American vision brought a revolutionary creative flair to London and changed the face of retail forever, from the glamorous showcasing of merchandise and ‘splendid’ in-store promotions to the spectacle of crowd-pulling ‘window shows’. You can still sense his theatrical spirit, even within the modernity of its decor and style. And one thing that never changes is the marketplace buzz of retail activity.
There was none of the usual hustle and bustle when we arrived on the eve of our launch on Monday 6 November 2011, the day after my forty-eighth birthday. That’s because it had just gone midnight, and the store was deserted save for a scattered team of cleaners and the odd cleaning truck trundling along the aisles with its rotating brushes polishing the marble floors. Selfridges at witching hour is a surreal place to be. All the Christmas decorations were up – sparkling blue bows strung between Roman columns and magnificently decorated trees – but the festive music, like the air conditioning, had been turned off. Each floor was as still and silent as the mannequins in the windows. Every word Charlotte and I spoke, together with every footstep, seemed to echo within a library-like hush.
Having left Gary at home with Josh, I oversaw the team of shopfitters who would construct our unit through the small hours of Monday morning, ready for opening at 9 a.m. The pop-up had become its own phenomenon in my time away but it wasn’t anything new – the concept of a temporary retail presence had been around for years in the form of trunk shows, which was how we first became a blip on the American radar in the 1990s. Only now, the stage was far bigger and the radar global, which was probably why I felt a rush of excitement as the workmen unwrapped our unit and crates of product. At that hour, it was like being caught in a dream watching our counter get built, piece by piece.
There were some apprehensions, too, mainly because pop-ups don’t ‘pop up’ at all. When you’re there, witnessing the construction, it’s actually an agonisingly slow process. It would take them eight hours and I’d count every minute of that race against the clock, leaving us one hour to stock the shelves and be bright-eyed and bushy tailed for the first customers.
Another reason for my nervousness was down to our location – fifty feet away from Jo Malone London. It was a proximity I hadn’t even considered, or looked for, until half an hour after arriving. I had been so wrapped up in getting everything ready that I hadn’t paid attention to the sleeping brands around us. My view was partly obscured by other counters but the irony was stark – the old brand I had boxed away in my head would now be a near neighbour and, come morning, I’d be in direct competition with my own name.
I won’t lie, part of me wanted to go over, touch the boxes, smell and breathe in the memory of Lime Basil & Mandarin, and almost put my arms around the counter while no one was looking, pretending for a second that it was still mine. Two things stopped me: a sense of respect for keeping the past where it belonged; and the fact that one of the country’s leading beauty bloggers, Jane Cunningham, was shadowing me. At Charlotte’s prompting, I had embraced the new world of media and invited Jane to share the experience, allowing her to ‘live’ blog what she referred to as a ‘complete overnighter with Jo Malone’. So, you can see why it made PR sense to keep my sentimental temptations to myself. But over the course of that night, I did catch myself looking over a few times, thinking, ‘How on earth did it come to this?’
Looking at my established name fifty feet away and seeing Jo Loves slowly forming right in front of me was the strangest feeling. Mr Selfridge once famously said, ‘To work is elevating. To accomplish is superb. To fill one’s time with profitable enterprise is to leap forward in the world’s race and to place beside one’s name the credit mark of effort.’ I now saw two credit marks under the same iconic roof, and I think that will probably be the closest I’ll ever come to an out-of-body experience. It felt like I had been split down the middle: half of me over there, dressed in cream and black; and the other half with me, trying on red and black for size. And the new me felt like the underdog. An underdog against my own name. With no idea whether success or failure lay ahead.
Indeed, my new packaging provided another degree of trepidation, not just on this night but in the weeks beforehand. When I had first seen the designs for the pop-up, I’d had my doubts about how our red boxes would look in the classy environs of Selfridges. Those doubts didn’t go away when I showed Isy Ettedgui, who had inspired our first brand’s packaging. ‘It’s not you. It’s too loud, too hard,’ she said. But I chose to overlook that advice, the same way I pushed away Gary’s caution, telling myself that it would look better in reality than on paper.
The pop-up was a complex design that relied on a lot of technology because it incorporated a ‘Smell Pod’ – a booth where customers could step inside and use touch screens to select each fragrance’s story, or a quick spray of each scent. As a result of that elaborate facility, and due to other hitches along the way, progress was painfully slow.
Jane Cunningham summed up the atmosphere at 2.54 a.m. when she ‘live’ blogged and wrote: ‘It’s a bit like Night at the Museum . . . but no Ben Stiller. Jo can’t keep still – it’s clearly all so exciting for her – but, like all of us, she is looking tired now. We just want to start putting bottles of Pomelo on the shelves but the fitters are nowhere near ready for us, but they couldn’t go any faster . . . there’s really a lot at stake and there just isn’t room for any error at all.’
Without endless coffee and the sugar rush from a shared box of Quality Street, I don’t know how we would have kept going. Not until 4 a.m. did the counter truly start to take shape – and that’s when my earlier doubts were confirmed. Our brand image was all wrong. It didn’t look better in reality than it did on paper.
I had gone downstairs to stretch my legs and was standing on the escalator, coming up from basement level to the first floor, when I first caught sight of our big, hard-edged, matt-finish, vivid red-and-black box, amplified by the luxury setting of brass, glass, copper and silver. Everything else sparkled; we were loud and brash – a galling realisation five hours from opening time.
Up ahead, I could see Charlotte chatting with our guest blogger, who was no doubt awaiting my gleeful reaction, when all I could think was, ‘Oh my God. What have I done?’
Isy was right: it wasn’t me. Gary was right: we hadn’t been ready. I can’t remember what I ‘officially’ said to Jane but her blog observed that I looked ‘remarkably laid-back’, so my poker face must have been effective. I might not have had straight aces in my hand but that’s hardly something I was going to admit when the stakes were so high – that would have been PR suicide. No one would have a clue that Jo didn’t love the clothes that Jo Loves wore; only Charlotte would know, along with Gary, who would arrive at nine. But what else could we do but take the hit, deal with it and move on?
Behind the brave face, I quietly kicked myself, but I soon put this tone-deaf error into context: yes, it didn’t look great, and nor was it the dream start I had envisaged, but it wasn’t fatal. I had every confidence that the main star of the show – the fragrance – would still shine through. My name would be back out there and each bottle of product would make itself known, backed by that morning’s press launch. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate the red and black – it grated more than anything else – and I accepted that we’d have to live with it for the immediate future. But I knew there and then that we’d rebrand, although not straightaway – that would have looked even worse, and the last thing I needed to do was make another hurried decision.
When you’ve messed up, even when you feel sick on the inside, business is about pushing through the mistake and learning from it – and the humbling lessons are the most valuable. If any part of me thought that my return was going to be straightforward and obstacle-free, then here was the abject reminder that building a brand doesn’t work that way and doesn’t respect past glories.
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In my blinkered focus to get the fragrances right, and in my rush to get back in the game, I hadn’t looked carefully enough at the packaging. Those colours were never me, but what is red if not an alert or an attention-seeking cry that yells, ‘I’m here! I’m back!’ It was all about being heard again, rather than an identity that represented who I am. I had been so hell-bent on putting daylight between the old and new – to appease the lawyers and tick all the contractual boxes – that I had gone to another extreme. And when Selfridges came knocking, all I could see was a repeat of our Bergdorf Goodman moment – the chance to accelerate and short-circuit a young brand’s necessary growth. I stupidly believed that we could shoot to the top straight out of the starting gate. How ironic it seems to me now that I, this person so terrified of failure and humiliation and being imperfect, could make such a monumental misjudgement. Had I taken a breath, stepped back and waited another year, I’m sure the mistake would have made itself known and the red-black episode would never have happened.
But one imperfection aside, there remained lots to smile about, and not even the issue of the packaging could ruin what remained a momentous day.
The counter was built by 8 a.m. and Vera, our sales manager, arrived to stack the shelves while I attended a breakfast launch for all the Selfridges employees, so that they were briefed on the latest in-store product. I then returned home, changed, and was back on the floor to meet the press later that morning. To be fair, the day couldn’t have gone better as we created the kind of in-store hype that I had missed. Trade in the run-up to Christmas was swift, and the write-ups and reviews, in magazines and on blogs, raved about the new fragrances. And seeing our bags walk out into Oxford Street felt wonderful. I even managed to convince myself that red and black looked festive.