My Story

by Jo Malone

  When you find yourself sitting next to someone like Jeremy and you have no idea where to start with a bar’s design, there’s only one thing to do – you ask for help. I’ve never been backwards in coming forwards, and there’s no harm in admitting you don’t know how to do something. People can only say ‘No’, and entrepreneurs can ill afford to be afraid of that two-letter word. There are bigger risks to be taken in business than asking someone for a favour.

  When Jeremy heard my concept, he was happy to help. The next day, he stopped by for a coffee in ‘the think room’, and that’s where he took out his pen and sketched a rough design on a piece of paper. ‘You need something like this, something that curves and looks classical.’

  He didn’t miss a detail, even drawing the foot-rail and the handbag hooks beneath the bar top. He then put me in touch with interior designer Shayne Brady, who would turn that exact sketch into the reality that customers enjoy today: a zinc-topped bar with a curved, ruby glass body which, when seen from above, is the letter ‘J’. It is the centrepiece of a shop that remains aesthetically me: a minimalist, all-white decor that mirrors my own home.

  Drop in and you’ll find the bar with its high-top stools on the left; the recessed shelving filled with product on the right; and straight ahead, at the back, behind a double set of white doors, the purpose-built creative studio. We still had to grin and bear the red-and-black packaging for a while longer – rebranding would take another eighteen months. But even those original colours looked softer and less pronounced when better framed by the white frontage and our first window display – a giant bloom of red and white paper flowers erupting from a Jo Loves gift bag.

  We opened our doors on 11 October 2013, and I commemorated the occasion, and my history with the address, by launching a new fragrance: a floral-scented collection called ‘No.42 The Flower Shop’, themed around my two jobs as a sixteen-year-old, evoking memories of a florist’s filled with lilies, sweet peas, and roses, and a floor scattered with crushed green stems.

  The whole day was hugely nostalgic, not only due to the Justin de Blank era but because Elizabeth Street felt like Walton Street all over again, no more so than the way the community of shopkeepers embraced us. Mauro the restaurant owner sent over pizza. Peggy Porschen brought round her cupcakes. And the boys from Jeroboams wine shop dropped off a bottle of champagne. With those kind of shopkeepers, the team I had around me, and the loyal customers we would attract, I would once again be surrounded by a wonderful retail family. I was back where I belonged, with a shop, in a local street, surrounded by my fragrances. Standing tall again.

  I almost didn’t want that first day to end, and yet I looked forward to many more like it. So determined was I to capture the details of our opening that I bought a red leather visitors’ book so that every customer could leave their name and a message. It’s still in the shop today. Second time around, I didn’t want to forget a thing and, as those pages collected names, I soaked up the atmosphere, the laughter, and the nonstop activity. I watched people’s reaction to the brasserie bar and the ‘tapas’, loving how both men and women engaged with the experience, not only leaving with heaps of product but with a better understanding of fragrance; its art, its beauty, its alchemy, its power to stir creativity.

  That evening, back at home, I shared a glass of wine with Gary, toasting our first day’s trade. And then I did something that we couldn’t do after opening in 1994. I tweeted. I took out my mobile, logged on as @JoMaloneMBE, and tapped out a quick message that summed up how I felt: ‘Once a shopkeeper, always a shopkeeper.’

  When it came to rebranding, we hired the expertise of Pearlfisher, a company I had worked with on High Street Dreams, led by the creative eye of Jonathan Ford. When we met at a local Italian trattoria, he asked what ‘look’ I had in mind. My answer amused him. ‘I know everything I don’t like and I’ll know what I like when I see it,’ I said. ‘The gap in the middle is where you find me right now and I need help.’

  I’m sure he’s had more detailed briefs over the years, but it’s not easy branding yourself for a third time, and I wanted to get it right and explore every option regarding textures, papers, colours, and fonts. We needed the equivalent of the Nike swoosh or Apple’s bitten apple. ‘I want to look at the packaging and say, “That’s me. That’s my signature.”’

  ‘We’ve certainly got a lot to work with,’ said Jonathan, with a wry smile.

  While that work began in earnest, I receiv ed a call from Downing Street, inviting me to be one of the creative ambassadors for Britain’s GREAT campaign – an international promotion of the UK, building on the national pride generated by the Diamond Jubilee and 2012 London Olympics. I soon found myself at a dinner at No.10 hosted by Prime Minister David Cameron, sitting alongside the likes of David Bailey, Stella McCartney, Katherine Jenkins, Kelly Hoppen, Barbara Broccoli, and Ken Hom – a team of fellow ambassadors selected from the arts, fashion, design, and business.

  The GREAT campaign would take us to Istanbul and Shanghai, and, as someone who is proud to be a British creator, I couldn’t have been more honoured to be involved. I’ll champion our nation’s culture and enterprise as loud as anyone because I believe our small island has a continent’s worth of creative and innovative talent.

  Istanbul saw the first Festival of Creativity in May 2014, where the other ambassadors and I presented our wares and stories. Shanghai followed in March 2015, with HRH Prince William leading proceedings – the first time in thirty years that a member of the Royal Family had visited mainland China. Our prince was a trouper. Not once did it feel like he was a far-removed royal; it felt like he was one of us, an enthusiastic part of team GB, standing together as one voice, telling the story of great British business.

  The one thing I expected to do in Shanghai was demonstrate creativity by introducing my fragrance brasserie. What I didn’t expect was to provide a lesson in how entrepreneurs have to think on their feet when plans go wrong.

  Twenty-four hours before I was due to give a speech and ‘set up shop’ at a building on The Bund – a famous waterfront area on the banks of the Huangpu River – I was sitting with a client from Singapore, listening to a merchant’s speech in the main hall of a conference centre, when Charlotte whipped in from nowhere and sat beside me, looking rattled.

  ‘I’ll talk to you after this,’ I mouthed.

  But she shook her head firmly. ‘I need to speak to you right now.’

  It transpired that we had a slight problem. A month earlier, we had shipped our tapas inventory to China in preparation for the big event. The shipment had reached land – it just hadn’t reached Shanghai. The props we relied on – the tagines, cocktail shakers, glasses, paintbrushes, velouté guns, boxes and gift bags – didn’t have a hope of arriving in time. All we had with us were three bags of product and some branded boarding that the campaign had organised. At the very festival where our future king was present, Jo Loves was in danger of being the only British brand that was closed for business even before opening.

  One of the organisers looked as flummoxed as we felt. ‘As I see it,’ he said, ‘you have two choices: fix it or cancel.’

  I looked at Charlotte; she smiled because she already knew my response.

  ‘We’ll fix it,’ I said. ‘We’ll make it work.’

  How I said that with a straight face, I’ve no idea. But when encountering a brick wall in business, you have to find a way over, around, under, or through, even when the answer doesn’t appear so readily apparent. Fortunately, in Charlotte I had someone who, like me, doesn’t dwell on a problem; it’s find a solution or go home. Which is why we found ourselves tearing around Shanghai that afternoon in a mad panic, trying to source makeshift materials. That search was starting to look hopeless when, at the eleventh hour, I spotted a building in the distance and could have sworn it was a mirage – an IKEA store; a little corner of Brent Cross in Shanghai. I could have wept with joy, especially when we ran inside and realised that it stocked almost
everything we needed and more. We ended up adding red chopsticks, rice bowls, and soup spoons to my tapas routine. As for the cocktail shakers, I called a friend at The Langham and he kindly let me borrow a pair. I think that might count as my best ever recovery in retail!

  The next morning, to please the local crowd, I came up with an idea for serving a fragrant version of dim sum – cotton-wool balls left to soak in a rice bowl filled with bath cologne before being picked up with chopsticks in order to breathe in the scent. We served this ‘dish’, along with the rest of the ‘tapas’, four times an hour. Within the first fifteen minutes, ten people had gathered around our bar. Within the hour, as word spread, and as four local TV crews took an interest, we had more than a hundred people queuing up, including three generations of different families. Dim sum proved a big hit, but it wasn’t the only addition to my repertoire that month.

  As part of the GREAT campaign I had been asked, along with four other perfumeries, to interpret our country through a fragrance. Without even thinking about it, I knew my theme had to be the Union Jack, and the hook had to be the Norma Jeane white rose. White roses were in my garden, my grandmother’s garden, and the Queen’s garden; they formed my wedding bouquet; and they are the flower that Gary or Josh buy me every Friday evening. And the white rose note, which I braided with the fresh, clean, citrus of lemon leaves, feels quintessentially British and classic. That’s why White Rose & Lemon Leaves will always be my ‘flying the flag’ fragrance – a reminder of the trip when we needed a good dose of never-give-in British resilience, with a bit of help from our Swedish friends at IKEA.

  Back in the autumn of 2010, in the months before announcing our new brand, I was walking through Times Square in New York City when I noticed a ridiculously long queue outside Pop-Tarts World – a pop-up café from the makers of the biscuit-like pastry that was seemingly a staple snack of most American childhoods.

  Curious about the product that led to such foot traffic, I wandered over to find people lined up at a machine called The Varietizer, which custom-made Pop-Tarts. I watched as women and men, and boys and girls, used a touch screen to select six different flavours before a robotic arm compressed their flattened pastries. I thought it was pure genius – customers could have a hand in making their own favourite snack. And this is the direction that retail is headed – the millennial consumer has a taste for interaction with brands, whether it’s sharing a creative experience or being part-involved in the creation of a product. Consumer and creator can become one in so many ways, and the Pop-Tart World example got me wondering if I could do the same with a candle.

  In May 2015, after four years in development, we finally unveiled the fruits of that wondering: the Candle Shot Studio, based in the back room at Elizabeth Street – the creative space I had always intended to use as a way of involving and engaging the customer. Here, they can co-create their own bespoke Shot Candle, choosing one base scent and a ‘shot’ of another. The base is already set within the glass, hollowed out so that the ‘shot’ slots into its centre. A Tahitian gardenia base could be shot with mango, or Mint Mojito with petitgrain. Each pairing is melded together with a quick blast of a blowtorch. What I love about this is watching people choose their fragrances, leading to a combined scent that they have played a part in building.

  This is what I want to keep doing as Jo Loves continues to grow: pursue more innovative products, experiential concepts, and memorable fragrances. The journey of this brand has taken me across the spectrum of emotions, and it has challenged every part of who I am. It’s been tougher than I could possibly have imagined and yet the power of a retail adventure, combined with my passion for fragrance and the prospect of seeing us go global once more, continues to motivate me on a daily basis. And as we build and expand, we do so with colours and packaging that now resonate and represent who I am, because that final element – the rebranding – finally fell into place in 2015.

  In the weeks before leaving for China, I had been at my desk in the office, staring at an uninspiring sheet of product labels – all white, bearing only the black font of our name. I remember noting the void of emotion in those labels, wondering if we needed a silver colour, or a gold, or a striking symbol to inject some energy.

  In previous weeks, each proposed design for our new look that I had been shown hadn’t resonated, although the team at Pearlfisher had already locked in two ideas: the use of a Union Jack and a mass of white space, representing patriotism and undiluted creativity.

  As I continued idly to toss ideas around my head, I started to play with a bottle of Shanghai Red nail varnish that a friend had sent ahead of my trip. I was just fiddling around when – and don’t ask why – I dipped the end of a pencil into the varnish and let one drop fall on to a label; it landed as a neat red globule just beneath the words Jo Loves.

  Behind me, our new product development manager, Naomi Harford, whose desk was out of sight and around the corner, shouted out, ‘Have you red-dotted that candle for approval, Jo?’ By now, I had bought reams of adhesive red dots from Ryman’s to continue our product-approval system.

  I was about to answer Naomi, and reach for another sticky red dot, when the light bulb above my head switched on. I looked down at the label where the drop of varnish was beginning to dry – a red dot. That’s it! My signature, my seal of approval, the mark that said a product was mine.

  I jumped up and hurried over to Naomi, taking the label with me.

  ‘That’s me – that’s our logo,’ I sa id.

  Charlotte came over, and we stuck that one label on a bottle of Pomelo, and we all had the same wow-moment. My name, above a slightly raised dot, suspended in lots of white space: vivid, emphatic, yet simple.

  And that was the final piece of the jigsaw that the Pearlfisher team needed to go away and bring everything together for the subtle but sophisticated design that is our branding today: the dominant white with red lining and bows for the boxes and gift bags, and a colourless, embossed Union Jack wrapped around each box. Four years on from that humbling moment in Selfridges, we now had the impactful first impression we needed.

  Look out for that red dot – it’s a stamp I intend to leave all over the world.

  In many ways, 2015 represented a turning point – the first time since launching that I felt we were swimming with the tide. But never one to rest on my laurels, I decided to take Naomi to Grasse, the place where I first fell in love with fragrance. I hadn’t returned to the town since my maiden trip in the 1990s, so it seemed the most obvious place to be reinspired and seek new ideas.

  Naomi joined Gary, Josh and me on a weekend visit and, as we touched down at Nice airport, I couldn’t wait to roam the market and sit in the square in that same spot outside the brasserie.

  After checking in at our hotel, we headed into the old town but, as we rounded the corner and the square came into view, my expectations received a rude awakening. Everything had changed. The abundance of flower stalls had been replaced by merchants selling second-hand clothes, bric-a-brac, and touristy souvenirs. The brasserie was closed. Even the fragrant air of jasmine and rose seemed to have lost some of its regality. The charm and magic – everything I had once fallen in love with – was missing. Only the cobbled streets and the picturesque backdrop were unchanged; the beautiful frame was there but the oil painting was missing. I had stepped into nostalgia only to find that nostalgia was all that remained, and the sense of disappointment was crushing.

  Once back at the hotel, I voiced my sadness to the concierge at the front desk, but I could tell from his easy sympathy that I wasn’t the first devotee to complain about change. ‘Have you been to Mougins?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  He picked out a pen from his breast pocket and wrote down the route on the tourism leaflet he handed me. ‘Go there tomorrow – you will feel better,’ he said, as if he was a doctor writing out a soul prescription.

  Mougins is six miles to the east of Grasse and, as we approached this old medieval citadel,
my heart beat a little faster, sensing something around the corner. I wasn’t to be disappointed this time. The tourism bureau described it as ‘a place that time forgot’ and it certainly felt ancient in character.

  As we explored the old town, the history that seized me was that of Pablo Picasso, who withdrew from public gaze to spend his final years at a farmhouse on the village outskirts. Mougins, with its hilly location and beautiful landscape, had been his artistic refuge, and it was not hard to see why – I could almost smell the creativity in the air as much as the scent of pine and French rural life. I assume that’s why Christian Dior and Yves St Laurent also bought homes locally. Instead of perfume houses and the celebration of fragrance, this was a place that embraced artistry and innovation, and the geniuses who had been residents.

  As we walked the narrow streets in between tall, compact townhouses, my nose wasn’t filled with notes but my head was filled with inspiration. Every signpost I saw – from the bronze sculptures in the street to the painters sitting in the sun with their easels and paintbrushes – pointed me towards deepening and expanding my creativity.

  For a long time, I think part of me had wanted time to stand still, and for things not to have changed. I probably looked over my shoulder more times than I should have done, trying to maintain an attachment to the past, looking to reconnect with an old feeling that could never be the same. Maybe part of me had returned to Grasse for that same reason – to go back to a familiar setting and re-enact the same magic. But not every memory can remain intact, and not every circle can be completed.

  Instead, I found myself in a different place that resonated for different reasons and, as I stood outside a building where Picasso used to paint – a studio, I think it was – I started to understand the shift. The brasserie. The tapas. The Candle Shot Studio. The red dot. The new look. The new me. I came to realise that Grasse represented who I once was – the past, the beginner, the search for myself in fragrances. Mougins represented who I am now – the future, the designer, and the pursuit of artistry within my creativity not just fragrance. Happiness in a different landscape.