Jo Loves: Jo Malone CBE

As a girl in 1970s London, Jo Malone learned how to make face creams by going to work with her mom at a private skin care clinic. By the time she was in her 20's, Jo was running her own skin care and cosmetics business, which eventually grew to include bath oils, scented candles, and fragrances under the brand Jo Malone London. Jo sold the brand to Estée Lauder in 1999 and then left the business after a life-changing diagnosis. She now has a fragrance company called Jo Loves, where she innovates with new kinds of scents and—in the present crisis—is considering and new ways to present them. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, really quick before we start this brand new episode of How I Built This, you may have heard about our new How I Built This Resilience series, where I've been having video conversations with founders and business leaders about how they're reacting to the current economic crisis. You can see all of those conversations, by the way, at our Facebook page, facebook.com/HowIBuiltThis, or on NPR's YouTube page. Anyway, this week, I'm going to be live with five leaders in the fashion and beauty industry every single day. Starting Monday, May 18 through May 22, I'll be hosting a live video chat with an incredible lineup of guests, including Marcia Kilgore of Beauty Pie and FitFlop, Jen Hyman of Rent the Runway, Sarah LaFleur of MM LaFleur, Ali Webb of Drybar, and James Reinhardt of Thredup. We're going to be talking about the

• 0:45Guy Raz?

  challenges they're confronting and how they're trying to build resilience into their businesses. So join me every day this week at noon Eastern, 9:00 AM Pacific, at facebook.com/HowIBuiltThis. And if you want to learn more about NPR's other virtual events, you can go to nprpresents.org.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  This was a real breaking point. Gary came home. He had a pizza in his hand. And I just said, Gary, there's hundreds of orders coming, and we've got to have them done by the end of the week. And he said, let me just have my supper, and I'll do it. And he sat down to eat his dinner. And of course, I touched everything in the kitchen with fragrance. So his pizza tasted of nutmeg and ginger. And he said, if we carry on, we're going to end a divorce. I looked, and he said, I'm going to go and have a shower, and just, I'll come back in a minute. And I thought, oh, my god, no. Because I'd put all these seashells in the bath, and I was scenting them with lavender, sea lavender oil. And I heard him scream as he went in. And he walked down the hall. And he said, OK, that's it. We need a shop.

• 1:57Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 2:08Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Jo Malone turned her homemade lotions into one of the hottest perfume brands in the world, Jo Malone London.

• 2:26Guy Raz?

  If a tree falls in a forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? This famous philosophical thought experiment can easily be applied to entrepreneurship. The question might go something like this. If you make a great product, but you neglect the design element, will anyone notice it? Well, probably not. I mean, think about how many dish soaps there were when Method debuted in the late 1990s. There's a reason why people bought Method soap. The product was good, but the bottle design was what got you to try it. When Tristan Walker created the Bevel Razor, he wanted the unboxing experience to be as exciting as the iPhone.

• 3:08Guy Raz?

  He even wanted to replicate that whoosh sound when the top part separates from the bottom of the box. Why did swell bottles break out in a marketplace inundated with water bottles? Because Sarah Kaus designed them to stand out. Now, all those things might sound superficial, but in a crowded marketplace, they matter. It's what gets people to hear your tree falling in the forest. And that's kind of what Jo Malone did as well. Now, if you're not familiar with Jo Malone fragrances, I assure you, you have seen a Jo Malone shop in some airport around the world. The logo and the look is really simple. A thin, black frame, around three words. Jo Malone, London.

• 3:51Guy Raz?

  The perfume boxes are cream and wrapped in a single, black bow. That's it. But there's something so elegant about that look that it makes you want to buy it, which is basically how her brand, Jo Malone, took off. But this was after years and years and years of making lotions and creams and selling them out of her small apartment in London. Jo's story is almost like one of those magical realism novels. It involves a real magician, her dad, his 10 dwarf rabbits, a mysterious countess named Madame Lubati, and a working-class childhood on the outskirts of London. Now, I interviewed Jo before the world went crazy, although, let's be honest, it was crazy before, too.

• 4:35Guy Raz?

  And I called her up to see how she's managing right now. You're in London?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yep, I'm in lockdown London.

• 4:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  And my son, of course, we've been living in lockdown together. And actually, you know what, Guy? It's, we laugh every single day as a family. And I was thinking, when would I ever have had this time with my 19-year-old son again? Never. He was doing my highlights last night, coloring my hair. It's awful, but there's some really funny moments in the whole thing as well. He had rubber gloves on and I was sitting there trying to direct him. And we were literally aching with laughter.

• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Jo, let's go ahead and listen to this episode that we recorded a few weeks ago about your life and your story. And then we'll come back at the end and find out about your situation now. Is that okay?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:26Guy Raz?

  Anyway, Jo grew up in a council estate, or what Americans would call public housing, in the 1960s with her mom, dad and sister. Jo has dyslexia, which went undiagnosed for years. And it made school a real struggle for her.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I just couldn't keep up. I couldn't keep the words in my head. The things I was really good at were things like biology, because it's visual. I was very good at history, because I could listen to the stories and I would memorize those. And I was very good at religious studies, believe it or not, because again, they're based on stories. But mathematics, English, languages, I'd struggled above and beyond. I would literally be thrown out of class with the others and I was told I was lazy and stupid. And I knew I was neither one of those things, but I just couldn't follow an exam paper. Multiple choice to me was the worst thing in the world, because I'd put my cross against an answer. And then I'd watch all the sentences and all the letters move around on the page.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And by the end of it, I would probably have answered three or four questions out of 20. And I'd fail. And then I would pick up a book and I would read it. And there'd be no problem at all. And I would think, I'm cured. And then sure enough, it would happen again. And it still happens to me today, not as much as it did when I was a child. I'm, you know, can manage perfectly well now, but that's probably because I'm not so anxious about it.

• 6:50Guy Raz?

  What was your parents' marriage like?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  It was happy and very unhappy, both in the same breath. They adored each other and then they hated each other. And then they adored each other and they hated each other and I was caught in the middle. So I was the adult in a household from a very young age. And listen, I loved my mum and dad desperately. And I know that they did their very best for me, but it made me grow up very, very fast and very quickly. And when they would have an argument, they would, they would do that awful thing of, Joe, tell your father, his shirts are not going to be ironed. And I would go in and say, Dad, mum says your shirts are not going to be ironed. Tell your mother. And they're standing in the same room and I would sit there on the stairs, listening to them fight and argue. And then he'd walk out and she'd walk out and I would just carry on.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I'd go to the fridge, see what was for dinner. But they were loving parents, but they just couldn't live together. They were too volatile.

• 7:47Guy Raz?

  What did they fight about?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Money. What does every, what, what are most people, let's be honest, money. My dad, who was the artist, he had lots of jobs, my father. My father was a brilliant, brilliant man, but did job jump a lot. So he was an architect, he was a painter, he would, he was also a member of the magic circle. So he was a magician. I mean, you name it, he could do it. And he was a huge gambler. So they would row about money, they would row about his gambling.

• 8:17Guy Raz?

  Would he like blow all of his money in like on a poker game?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Would he? And the month after that, yes. And then he'd suddenly have a huge win. I remember him one day coming home and he draws up in this amazing Jaguar. Where it's like, well, you didn't have that this morning, so where's that? Well, that's one on a poker game. And out the back of the car was all these leather coats that he'd obviously taken as payment from someone's factory who didn't have enough money. And my mother said, get rid of the car, get rid of the coats, we don't want them. And so they were driven off up the road. So it was, there was always, there was never a dull moment, that's for sure, in our house. It never made me love my dad less or love my mum less, though. I could see they were both very good people. And I realised about my dad, and it wasn't until I was much older,

• 9:05Speaker 01

  that when he did those things, he was trying to do something nice for us. And he didn't realise the way he was going about it made my mum feel really insecure. But I saw that actually, well, he was trying to, he was trying to tell her he loved her. And, you know, let's get in the car, put on the coat and let's go for a drink. And even as I'm talking about it, it brings a smile to my face, thinking there was so much kindness in my dad. But my goodness, it did often came out the wrong way.

• 9:32Guy Raz?

  And just to clarify, your dad was a, like, I mean, he was obviously an interesting guy. Like, he was, he sold paintings and he was a magician and?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yes, well, as I said, he didn't keep full time jobs for very long. So he was a magician, he'd gone through magician school and he was a brilliant magician. And I would go and be the magician's assistant. So in our little garden in Bexley Heath, we had rabbit hutches with about ten white Neverland dwarf rabbits, which of course I had to look after and I had to look after them in the show because they would appear from hats and hop around and do all sorts of things. So I was the magician's assistant. But he would also do his paintings and when he wasn't in a full time employment, he still had to earn money. So we would do, he and I would do all the markets at the weekend. We would go set up our little market stall and put all the paintings up.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And I knew that we had to sell three paintings every single day. Because I knew if we didn't, we wouldn't eat. So I would, we would set it all up and I would send my father off to go and get breakfast very early. And I would try and get the first sale before he came back and I'd pocket the money. So I'd pocket it so I could give it to my mum because I knew he would put it in his pocket and we wouldn't see it. So I realised that survival was an important, sort of important part of living.

• 10:54Guy Raz?

  I guess it was around, when you were around age eight, there was sort of an important turning point and would be in your life and in your mom's life. She met a woman named Madame Lubadi who had a skincare like shop in London and went to work for her. Who was, who was Madame Lubadi?

• 11:13Speaker 01

  She was, oh my god, I loved her. She was such a, she was such an eclectic human being. So she was in her late seventies when I first met her. And she was this brilliant skincare woman. I think my mum went first of all to just be the receptionist. And my mum became so involved and enjoyed very much working with her. That she took herself off and got herself qualified in anatomy, physiatrics and set to work working as Madame Labatte's partner.

• 11:41Guy Raz?

  Hmm. And this was a, like a skincare salon, Madame Labatte?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  It was in Baker, it was just off Baker Street in a place called Montague Mansions, which is just around the corner from where Sherlock Holmes was rumored to have lived and walked. And that's where my mum went to work for her. But it wasn't a shop, it was a very private skincare clinic. So at that time in London, there were two women who were the skin doyens of the time, who would look after all the elites. One was Countess Charkey and the other was Countess Labatte and she had her private clinic. This was a point when women didn't run their own businesses. Um, and they certainly didn't, weren't successful in the way that both of them were. But Madame Labatte, she was very tall, she was like six two, six three. Blood red lipstick, the most amazed, she had the most incredible smell about her.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  It was always like crushed sandalwood and Bulgari, like the finest rose oil you ever smelled. She had blonde cropped pixie hair. She always had a white lab coat on. She had cream fishnet tights, very high shoes. And I would often come in if I went with my mum at the weekends, any, any chance I had at going up to Baker Street with my mum, I would go. She was like my best friend and I would love her. And I think I got, when I first met her, it was just before dementia started kicking, but I could see. I could see signs of it, definitely, because she'd suddenly forget my name, or she'd forget something and she'd look at me and she'd say, Joe, do you remember where I put it?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And I say, yes, madam. I was like her little helper, her little, her eyes. And so by the time I was sort of seven, eight years old, I'd spent a long time with her in the laboratory. And it was this white room and there was all these like big glass, like old fashioned sweetie jars, but in glass. And they would all have herbs in, from roses to sandalwood to slippery elm to camphor crystals to, I mean, you name it, it was there. There was every jar of honey you could possibly, and I would watch her make face creams and make face masks up.

• 13:47Guy Raz?

  Was Madame Lubati like a character or was she really like a countess? Was she English? What was her story?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Well, her real name was Doris Hildebaker. And she, but she did marry a count. And you know something, I don't know whether some of this was dementia kicking in. I hope not, because she was obviously in her young twenties. She was a very sought after young woman. She told me once that she had passed messages backwards and forwards in the top of lids of face creams. And I said, does that mean you were a spy? And she said, no, no, we never used that word, but I suppose some would say. You know, she was, she was a great storyteller and I just, I loved her. My eyes were like dinner plates the whole time. And there was a moment where we walked, I took her out for tea one afternoon.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And she walked down the road and then she suddenly said to me, I don't know where I am. And I knew at that moment, I cry, I remember I cried. And I took her hand, I said, I know where we are. And I took her home and I told my mom. And, and it was at that point that we had to get help, which, and she deteriorated very quickly after that.

• 14:54Guy Raz?

  Um, I guess it was around like nineteen seventy four, Madame Lubati, she, she dies and your mom is her employee and somehow kind of inherits the, the business.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  She wasn't just her employee. She, by that point, they had, they had worked as partners. So my mom had worked within the clinic and was equal. She'd looked after her and helped pay all her debts. My mom was, was very good and very kind to Madame Lubati.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  And I guess we should clarify this, and I guess you will, which is like, you didn't all of a sudden overnight become rich because Madame Lubati apparently was like bankrupt, like she had no money.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Um. We certainly didn't become, I don't think my family were ever rich.

• 15:34Guy Raz?

  So when, when Madame Lubadi died, um, I guess your mom decides to build her own similar type of business, right? And, and, and continue to make face creams. And, and, and so how did that go? How, how, how did her business go?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, very well. She had, she built a really successful business. She would go to people's houses. So she didn't have, obviously Montague Mansions were sold with on Baker Street. And of course, I knew how to make the face creams. I'd been doing it. I know since I was seven, eight years old. So my jobs were to help her. And on a Saturday morning, we would, you know, be in the house in Bexley Heath. And when she'd say to me, I need 50 pots of cleansing cream. Can you make them? And that was, you know, that was my Saturday and I knew how to do it. I wouldn't necessarily measure anything out. It was, I, I did everything with such precision as she had taught me. And I would clean the fridge out and lay all the,

• 16:29Speaker 01

  all the kitchen roll out and I'd, and I'd sterilize all the utensils and I'd boil the water and put the oil. And I would trust my nose to tell me when I had to put the oils in. At that point, it was like a mineral oil and a wax. So you had to wait until it all dissipated in the enamel bucket. Then I'd let it cool down. And the minute it skinned, I knew that was the point at which you poured it into the face pots. And then again, I would, I would sit there and watch them. And then I'd lid them and then they'd go into the fridge and that would be the 50 pots. And they would sell for five pound fifty a pot. So I don't think I was proud of myself, but I was, I knew that I, when I looked at it and we'd sold it, I knew that we could eat.

• 17:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  That was always my motivation.

• 17:10Guy Raz?

  So, all right. So your mom has this business and you are kind of helping her out. And it sounds like she's doing, okay. Um, and you're still a kid. I mean, we should be clear. I mean, you were still a, you know, a little girl. And I guess by the time you reach what we would call high school, you decide that it's not for you, that you basically drop out.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Well, in between that, so my mom was very, very sick. And the thing that really, I think probably, I woke up one day, I could see my, my dad, my dad had disappeared. He'd gone off, we'd run off with someone. And we, I was left and I could see my mum deteriorating slowly and slowly. And one day I came home from school and I found her in a chair rocking herself backwards and forwards. And she wouldn't talk, she wouldn't say anything. So I rushed to go and get a neighbour and she came in and she, she said, Joe, take, take your sister upstairs. I'm gonna call the doctor and I, you know, they, they never said your mum's sick, but she, your mum's having a turn. That's what, that's what she said.

• 18:10Guy Raz?

  Which we would call what?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Well, she was, my mum was having a breakdown. That's what my mum was, and she was, and you know what, when people go through, I mean, we talk about it a lot now about mental illness. It's not about being weak. She was, she just held it together for too long. She was strong for too long and she just couldn't hold it any longer. And then it was all down to me. And I remember social services coming round and they said that my sister and I would have to go into a home. And I managed, I didn't lie, but I certainly didn't tell the truth. I, I just said, no, no, no, there's people around, don't worry, my dad's coming home. And they said, well, where is your father? Oh, he's travelling, he's coming back, everything will be fine. But for, for a year, I managed on my own.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  I made sure that my sister went to school every day, I'd take her and then I'd come back home, nurse my mum, bath my mum, give her a breakfast. Make the face creams up, get on the train with a shopping trolley. I'd go up to the flat that my mum worked from, sell all the products, put it in and then come all the way back and then to cook dinner. And I put food on the table and that's when I left, when I stopped going to school. I couldn't see the point of it. I couldn't see the point of sitting there, feeling stupid, being told I was stupid and lazy. And it's like, I'm running a business, I know how to make money and I know how to make face creams. And that was probably the last day I went to school. And I, I was one of those people that fell through the cracks in the educational system. But for that, I'm really grateful because it made me.

• 19:37Guy Raz?

  So basically around the time you were sixteen years old, you were independent. I mean, you had to work and earn money to live, to, to survive.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  I was independent, you're absolutely right. The age of sixteen, then when I was legally allowed to leave. So my mum eventually became better.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  And I was, I didn't realise this at the time, but it was gonna happen again. And it happened twice more. But I thought she was better and, you know, that I, I wanted to. I wanted to be a teenager or a child, so I went to live with a family friend in London. With an amazing family called the Soos. And for the first time in my life, I saw what a family should be. We would sit, I, we'd never sat at a table and ate a meal together as a family. At home, whereas here every night you would sit and you would talk about your day. And they, they were just the kindest, loveliest people in the whole world. And I kind of went to live with them. I got a job in Justin de Blanks in a little flower shop.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  I earned twenty nine pounds a week, but it was a really, really, really happy time. And what I noticed, I noticed that I had, that my sense of smell was something that was very extraordinary. I didn't realise to what extent. But I would pick up the flowers and I'd say, I'd smell the bottom of the end of the thing and the top of the tulip. And I'd say, they've been in the fridge for three days, I want the fresh ones. No, no, no, Joe, they're, they're absolutely, no, they have, I don't want those. And eventually they just knew that they couldn't, if I picked up something to smell. I could tell whether it was fresh or it had been sitting in a fridge. And that, that was my first job.

• 21:20Guy Raz?

  And, and I think Justin de Blank was like a high end grocery store, something like that, in, in London at the time?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  He was a brilliant entrepreneur, he wanted to be a shopkeeper. So he opened a bakery, I think, first of all, and then he opened a flower shop. And then he opened a delicatessen, a really high end delicatessen in Elizabeth Street.

• 21:38Guy Raz?

  And I think, I think you worked in that delicatessen too, right? Like, like with Justin de Blank before, uh, before moving on?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. And I left there, I went on to work in another flower shop. And then from there, I went to work with my mum. Um, I went back because she was very poorly again, and so that's when I went to work with her.

• 22:00Guy Raz?

  I guess at, at, at a certain point, Joe, maybe you were eighteen or, or seventeen or, uh, you went to, to, to Bible school.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:09Guy Raz?

  I, I, the reason why I ask about Bible school is because I guess that was where you met the person who would become your partner. Gary, who would become your, your husband.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:18Guy Raz?

  He was, he, he was also a student there?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yes, he was, he was studying, he would have made, we laugh now, he'd have made a great vicar. But he, yeah, he definitely was thinking about it full time and we fell in love with each other and I knew that structure was not for me.

• 22:34Guy Raz?

  So you, you meet Gary and you guys, the two of you got married pretty young. I mean, you, I think you were 20 or 21?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  21, yes.

• 22:43Guy Raz?

  And that was sort of around the time where your, your mom had asked you to come back and help her out. And soon after she has, it sounds like, I think, if I'm right, I mean, she had a stroke, right?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  She, it was like a stroke and it, but there were severe complications with it as well. So the, the woman who was taken into hospital that night never returned for me.

• 23:09Guy Raz?

  She was, it was almost as if her personality had changed?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Completely, yeah, completely. And, and I don't blame her for that, but it was, our relationship from that moment was never the same. She was never the mother that I had remembered. Everything I did was wrong. She completely changed. And of course, the more successful I became in the business, the more she hated me because I was living the life that she wanted to live. And we were a young married couple by the time that she came out of hospital and everything. And it was just like, I just can't live like this.

• 23:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  There was one incident where she, I was upstairs doing someone's face and I came down to the kitchen to pick up a face mask halfway through. And as I walked through, she picked up a part of a face cream and she threw it at me and it landed all the way down my face. And I stood there and it was the, I, it was just the utter humiliation, I think, of, of the whole thing. And I snapped and I said, that's it. And I remember going upstairs, finishing, I finished the day and I finished the woman's face and I wiped my hair and I sobbed and I walked out of that house and thought that if I, if I stay here, I'll die.

• 24:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  And so I made the decision that I was gonna walk away that day and I did. But unbelonged to me, I'd signed something that made me responsible for all of the debt. So as I walked out of that door as a young woman, newly married, thinking, I'm, you know, gonna start again. Little did I know that I was gonna have debt that I would have to pay off for the next goodness knows how many years, and I did.

• 24:42Guy Raz?

  You basically were your mom's business partner, but somehow this business was saddled with thousands of pounds of debt that you now were responsible for.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did what I'd done all my life, which is accept the responsibility, even though it wasn't my fault, and just get on and push through.

• 25:03Guy Raz?

  Wow. So, all right, so it's like 1988 or 89, you're about, I guess, 24. Your mom obviously cannot run a business at that point, and you take on like 30,000 pounds, I guess, roughly $40,000 roughly of debt at the time. So what are you gonna do? Like, how are you gonna make money to start paying this off?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  I went back to the four plastic jugs and the saucepan, which have been my, probably my best friends all my life.

• 25:32Guy Raz?

  You meant, you meant you started to make face lotions and creams?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  I just thought, what can I do? And it was by that point, Guy, it was in my blood. And so I set up and I would carry my massage bed from house to house, and I would do people's faces. And I would go to one house and I'd say, if you've got any sisters, you know, if I can stay here and do three, four treatments, I knew that it was a really good day. And that's how I existed for a good six to eight months. And I started to build a clientele together. They were my word of mouth, you know, they did all the marketing for me, I didn't have to do it. I'd do the faces, I'd come home, I'd get a taxi or Gary would pick me up, then I'd make the face creams and I'd get ready for the next day. And that was our existence.

• 26:18Guy Raz?

  Can I ask you about face creams for a minute? I mean, I'm curious, like, how do you make face creams? Like, what were you buying and mixing together?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Well, cosmetics are either oil into water or water into oil. It's like cooking, it's like making a white sauce or a red sauce. It was in those days anyway, it's a little bit more complex now. But I would take the waxes down or add the oils and boil it all up, strain it through muslin, let it stand for twenty four hours, then go back, add all the essential oils of, at the time, we had a juniper skin tonic, which was the most wonderful, fresh green tonic that you'd put on your skin and your skin would just come alive, it would never dry out. So I would, you know, do all of those things and I suppose, I suppose making juniper is a bit like making vodka or gin. It's all the same sort of pieces in it, it's just different ingredients and different heating points, so.

• 27:10Guy Raz?

  And these are things you, you knew how to do intuitively because your mom had studied how to do it and you just grew up as a kid helping her out, doing it with her, I guess.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Well, I'd watched, I'd watched, but it was also the, all the years of Madame, with Madame Labarty, you know, it was all of those things like the yogurt face mask that I still make today, that I learnt to make that in Baker Street with a yogurt, a honey, a little bit of lemon juice to kind of sour the milk, honey, sandalwood powder, slippery elm powder, olive oil, avocado oil, jojoba oil, I knew how to do it. And I still, you know, it's still within me, I still know and understand how to, it's when you, do you know what, making ten to twelve pots of face cream is easy, it's when you scale it, it's when you get to a hundred pots and five.

• 27:54Guy Raz?

  That's one's hard, yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you have to, you have to alter and of course, health and safety and health and hygiene or whatever, didn't exist in those days. Today, you couldn't stand in your kitchen and be pouring face cream in and put it in your fridge, you wouldn't be able to do that. But way back then, it was perfectly acceptable and perfectly okay.

• 28:13Guy Raz?

  And you, and you did this all out of your apartment where, where you and Gary were living?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yes, we had rented a small apartment in Chelsea and I would transform this little flat into a tiny little exclusive skincare clinic. And we decided that this business, this business was taking fourteen to sixteen hours a day. So perhaps we would live in the. Flat where we were working, but of course there was no bedroom. It was just a one skincare room, one kitchen and a beautiful big sitting room. So we went to Homebase and bought a piece of blue foam and that was our bed for probably about four, five years. And we would roll it out and then we'd hide it.

• 28:50Guy Raz?

  Oh, when people come in for the treatments, right?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  We, so chic and luxury, isn't it? We'd roll it up and it would go into the laundry closet and everything would be transformed and it would look like a little shop in the sitting room with this big bookcase and it would be full of product. And by the end of every day, everything was gone. So the minute the last client went, which was about six thirty, quarter to seven, I'd make myself a big, strong cup of coffee, stand in the kitchen that was just so tight. It was, it was no more than two people standing there. Plastic jugs would come out and I would start and I'd look at my appointment list and who was coming. And I knew that certain women would want six bottles of cream. So I would make a big super duper thing. And by the time Gary came home, hoping for dinner, he would

• 29:35Speaker 01

  be filling the bottles and labelling them. And by about eleven, twelve, we'd roll out a piece of blue foam, lie down, go to sleep, and then the next day we'd wake up again.

• 29:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  And then I think the turning point was the third of the fourth Christmas. And he walked in one evening and he had a pizza in his hand. And I just said, Gary, there's hundreds of orders coming and we've got to have them done by the end of the week. And he said, let me just have my supper and I'll do it. And he sat down to eat his dinner. And of course, I touched everything in the kitchen with fragrance. So his pizza tasted of nutmeg and ginger. He went to make himself a cup of tea and everything bubbled up over the coffee cup. And he said, I can't do this anymore. If we carry on, we're going to end a divorce. And I looked and he said, I'm going to go and have a shower and just, I'll come back in a minute. And I thought, oh my God, no. Cause I'd put all these seashells in the bath and I was scenting them with lavender, sea lavender oil. And I heard him

• 30:30Speaker 01

  scream as he went in and I thought, I'm really in trouble. And he, Katie walked out the door and he said, um, okay, we need a shop. And I went, I don't want a shop. And he said, no, that's it. And that night we sat down and he said, I think I should leave my job. And I think we should go into business together. And I will help you. I'll be everything that you're not and enable you to do this. But we can't carry on living like this. And he was right. It was breaking point.

• 31:01Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Jo moved out of the kitchen and into a brick and mortar shop, and how she managed to build buzz even before the doors opened. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 31:21Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1994. Jo and Gary have both decided to go all in on Jo's cosmetics business. They have about a year's worth of cash to start out with, and Gary has insisted that the business needs to get out of their apartment and into a space of its own.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So we walked along Walton Street one day and he'd found three sites. And I looked at them and I went, no, no, I just, I have this, always this thing about gut, that gut feeling. And I looked at them, no. And as he walked down the street, he was at that point not talking to me. And just, he just said, you're just impossible, Jo. And I walked past this one shop and it was a building site. And I felt the shop say, it's me. And he looked and he went, you have got to be joking. And I went, it's that one. And that's where we started.

• 32:13Guy Raz?

  And I guess, was it just obvious you were going to call it Jo Malone? You were going to call that, that's what the name of the shop was going to be?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I didn't, I was Jo Malone. I didn't, I didn't even think about that. And it was, by that point, of course, we had products with Jo Malone London on it. You know, we'd done all the packaging. So yes, it was a, I don't think we even thought about that.

• 32:35Guy Raz?

  It sounds like for most of the early days of your business, you were making face lotions and creams and body oils. But today, of course, I think most people think of Jo Malone as a perfume. So when did that start? When did you start making perfumes?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Completely topsy-turvy. So normally it's a fragrance that comes first and then what we call ancillaries.

• 32:55Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Mine was the other way around. So I was doing, I created a body lotion, first of all. From there, I created a bath oil. And then from the bath oil, I went to the fragrance. Because of course, I wasn't allowed alcohol. So you need alcohol to manufacture a fragrance. And I didn't have that.

• 33:11Guy Raz?

  Why weren't you allowed to have alcohol?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Well, I was living in a in premises. I couldn't have a whole lot of flammable alcohol to make it up. No, it was you couldn't have the amount I needed as well. And you needed, when you make fragrance, you have to let it stand. It's a bit like, it's a bit like wine, or if you put garlic into olive oil and you have to let it sit. And then you have to filter it. It's very technical, but I wasn't allowed to have huge amounts of like forty, fifty kilos of neat alcohol to make fragrance with. So the fragrance was the last thing that came in the line. But by that point, when we had the, one of Gary's first jobs, when he came to work together was to go and find factories. And that man literally drove around England to all the factories. And they said, well,

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Gary, can you give us the formulation and we'll just follow it? And he said, unfortunately, it's in Joe's head. So I had to go with him and I had to stand in the laboratories, which are very frustrating, because they'd pour it in. And I'd smell it and I go, you can't smell it. Well, you can't put any more fragrance than that in. And I went, give me the thing. And I put another like huge dollop in and I go, yep, that's it. That's the level. And they said, you can't put that level in bath oil and you can't do that. And I said, why not? Who says I can't? And I remember someone saying to me, no one's gonna buy a fragrance called lime, basil and mandarin. And I remember looking at them and saying, why not? That's what it is. Why are we pretending to call it something it's not? Well, they were wrong. It did.

• 34:40Guy Raz?

  Joe, how are you coming up with fragrances like lime, basil and mandarin or nutmeg and ginger? Like, how are you coming up with the scents for the perfumes?

• 34:51Speaker 01

  The way I create today is slightly different than when I did in those, in those days. I would just create single notes and then lock them together like music. And I would smell it in my head and then I'd create it in a little little jar, glass jar, and I'd put it into a body lotion or a bath oil. It's often how I would test things first of all. And then test it, see if it worked. And then if it worked, get it formulated, get it bottled, get it out there. And that was my, there was the testing period was done on me. Or Gary. Poor Gary used to have everything slathered all over him to see if it lasted. Because you're not just looking at the smell of something, you're looking, what is it doing thirty seconds? What does it do in a minute? What is it doing in an hour? How does it dry down? What is it? So you're looking at all of those, you know, different elements.

• 35:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And when you talk about notes, right? You're talking, I mean, we think of musical notes, but you're talking about scent notes, right? Like, like, for example, the smell of vanilla or the smell of ginger. Like, that would, each of those things would be one note? Are there multiple notes in each ingredient?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  They're accords. So just think of it just like music or mixing paint on a palette. So what I'm doing is I'm taking, if I look at a jasmine and it's too heady, what I'm looking for is that fine mist that comes from a fountain in the heat in Malaysia in the middle of the afternoon. So I'm taking the jasmine and recreating it. So I'm creating these little, little notes and accords that I'm smelling. And then I run around and I pick, like, crushed green palm leaves. And I'm taking that and then I twist it round the jasmine. So I'm looking for notes that sit together and that make the fragrance kind of bigger and tell a bigger story.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  And then I'm delving into my memory for all the, all the memories that I have of notes from, I don't know, the riding a horse in Montana, the leather of a saddle in a rainstorm, to the smell of broth cooking on a breach in Parakeet, which is the smell of pomelo to me, the skin of a fruit. So it's, it's an art form, but I'm, I'm telling you stories or I'm writing poetry to you. I'm writing music. I'm, I'm just telling you and piecing together those notes and then allowing you to have your own memory with that fragrance.

• 37:08Guy Raz?

  So it just seemed like an obvious extension. You know, you were already making the lotions that, that had fragrances. So why not just, just take the fragrance out and put it in its own bottle?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  People were asking for it. There were people saying that when, where can I buy the fragrance from? So it was a, we knew it was, it was a wantable product and we knew that people wanted it.

• 37:28Guy Raz?

  Even in the early days, when you opened the store, like I, I read that, like, there were lines of people waiting to come in before you even opened up. But what I'm wondering is how did they know about the store? I mean, were you, were you, did you hire a PR firm? Were you getting, were you going pitching newspapers and trying to get articles written about you? How, how did that happen?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  So I had a face client called Deborah Bennett, and Deborah Bennett, she'd been a very dear part of our lives for a long time, and she said, I'll help you. And she did. We did a big party to launch the shop, and we did an amazing piece in British Vogue, The Telegraph, I mean, everybody did. Everybody came out and supported and wrote about the shop. And it just, it just took off like wildfire. But by that point, we had a good 1,500 to 2,000 people that were loyal to the product. And that first Christmas, of course, the minute we hit January, we saw our market literally triple because everyone that had been given a product at Christmas was then coming back, buying it for themselves, and then giving it as a gift. So it was, it was a phenomenal growth pattern that we saw.

• 38:39Guy Raz?

  At that time, 1994, right, when you, when you opened the shop, did you, was the label, like, did it already look the way Jo Malone products look today? Was that the look already at that point?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, pretty much. And it was one of my face clients, she's a lady called Isabel Etichway, and she is one of my best friends to this day. She came and had her face done one day, and I was sitting there, and she said, what would you like to do with the packaging? And she sat on the floor with me with some empty cream and black boxes. And I said, well, I want this here. And it's so funny, when you're successful, people always claim that they were the ones that did it. I've read a lot of things about people who said they did it. They didn't. It was Isabelle Tegwe that did it, and she was the one that put the packaging together. And as we were sitting there, I said, it's still missing something. And she turned around and on the back of the sofa, Gary had left a tie, a black tie

• 39:37Speaker 01

  from an event that we'd been at, and she picked it up and wrapped it around it. And that was the black ribbon. And so it was her, her genius.

• 39:45Guy Raz?

  It was because it's iconic now, right? It's like the Jo Malone box with the little square and the black bow tie.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  She then took it to her graphic designer and they did drawings and whatever. The minute I saw it, it's like, yeah, that's it. And that was, that's what we used.

• 40:00Guy Raz?

  You know, it's interesting, Jo, because we've done other cosmetics brands on the show, like Bobbi Brown and Bliss. And it's interesting because there was, this seems like it was a turning point in the industry, you know, in the US and in the UK. Like, this was a time when people started to notice these very kind of clean products, you know, these, and like Kiehl's is an example of that, right? Like, you walked into Kiehl's in the 90s and it looked like a pharmacy. And it sounds like what, a similar thing was happening with Jo Malone. Like, you had a very clear aesthetic that people seemed to kind of be attracted to.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I think, I think we were very much the pioneers of the indie brands that are today. All of us, in all of our own businesses, had that turning point. But it was, it wasn't just about what the aesthetic was, it was what was in the bottle. It was a storytelling, authentic, real heartbeat of a person behind a brand. So all of those people you mentioned, Bobbi Brown, Marcia Kilgore of Bliss. And all of us were, it didn't matter where we were coming from, whether it be color, hair, skin, fragrance, we were all really doing the same thing. And people were identifying with them. So suddenly, it wasn't, it was about.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Buying into a lifestyle and I think a lot of the indie brands, we were the pioneers that carved out that marketplace for us because at that time they were the poor cousin. Today, they're certainly not. They're the, they're the brands where everybody, you know, the big guys want to buy them because they can see that we had created things that they, with all their money and all their teams and all their budgets could not create.

• 41:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  And we were still very much connected with our brands and you could feel the personality of the founder within that brand. And I think that was a huge part of the success of it.

• 41:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, this is the, you know, this story of, of what was, what's been called disruption, right? Which is like, two people like you and Gary could, could hang out in your kitchen and make this iconic brand, but huge multinationals couldn't actually do that because they, they weren't as nimble, right? They, they couldn't, they couldn't move as quickly because they had huge enormous businesses.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  It's just they had lots of teams and by the time you have an idea and it gets through to, I mean, listen, I've sat on both sides of the fence, so I understand both of them. I think the agility of a young indie brand or, you know, these young entrepreneurial brands and the way that they have an idea and they spin it and they turn it and they twist it and they move with it and they, they're listening to the voice of the people and they're listening to their own inner creative voice. And it's that relationship that brings the product to market faster and quicker.

• 42:47Guy Raz?

  This is so, so like you, I mean, I think you opened the store in ninety four. Within like six months, you hit your five year revenue goal and fifteen months in, you hit a million dollars in sales. This is not, I mean, this is still kind of a time when entrepreneurs like yourself were not going to like private equity and outside investors. It wasn't like today, you, you might have done that at this point, right? You would have had investors coming in and at that point you were, your revenue was, was fueling the business, right? Your cash flow is allowing you to. To develop more products and to expand, I guess. Is that sort of how it worked?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Well, kind of in the beginning it did, yeah. Because there was, I mean, we hit our first million on Christmas Eve, which is, that always just makes me feel so good. So it was, it was Christmas Eve and we'd shut the shop. And as I did the takings on the till, we were three hundred and forty-two pounds, I think it was, shorts of our first million. So I looked at Gary and I said, "Open the door, we can't shut the, we can't shut the shop." And so we opened the door and it was all men. It was all men who were so glad we'd opened the door. And they were, it was like three thirty in the afternoon. We opened the door and they all came rolling in and we could see it adding up. And within ten minutes, we'd done it.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  But the guy that took us over the million was, he said, "I want the cheapest thing you've got so I can put it in our stocking." And it was an eight ninety-five shower gel. I shall never, ever forget it. And as I wrapped it, I handed it back to him and gave him a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. And I said, "Merry Christmas." And he looked and he said, "You're never going to make a great businesswoman by doing that to everybody." He had no idea, but it was him that took us over the million. That's why.

• 44:31Guy Raz?

  So you hit the million and even though you were doing a million dollars in sales, I imagine that neither of you were personally getting rich because you had to buy product. You had to make product. You had to use the cash flow to hire staff and to put it right back into the business, right?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you, if you want a business to grow, you've got to invest back into it. So there was, and by that point, we were growing. So we couldn't, we couldn't just buy fifty plastic bottles at a time. We were buying two to three thousand plastic bottles at a time.

• 45:03Guy Raz?

  And, and at this point, you still had one shop on Walton Street. And at this point, did you start to think?

• 45:12Guy Raz?

  We should open more shops or were you focused on just that that one shop on Wall Street?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  We were being hounded. When I say hounded, we had every buyer, every agency, every single person saying to Gary, we want this product from New York to LA to, I mean, you name it, they wanted us.

• 45:32Guy Raz?

  They wanted you to open your own shops or they just wanted to import your products and sell it at their shops?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  No, they wanted to import the product. So what happened was Dawn Mello, who's one of the the great iconic shopkeepers of our of time. And at that time, she was heading a department store in New York City, which is the number one Bergdorf Goodman. And by that point, we had a lot of a New York, LA consumer base that were buying from London. So there was obviously a, you know, a demand and a hunger for it. And she said, we'll give you a little bit of space. And Gary turned around and said, if you want Jo Malone, you have to build us a shop. And of course, we were these two tiny, we had no money, we had no budget. And she, I remember her looking at him. She was so wonderful. And she went,

• 46:21Speaker 01

  okay, you come to New York City and we'll talk about it. And that's what we did. So we went to New York and we had this tiny little rotunda that she said, you can have that space and that's it. And she said, anything else? And he said, yes, I want to use my own packaging. Well, that they nearly all flipped and they all nearly walked out of the the meeting room at that point. And I was ready to go, oh, Gary, just, you know, we'll use Bergdorf Goodman bags. And he said, no, we're going to use Jo Malone bags. We have to. And they eventually yielded and let us let us use our own packaging.

• 46:53Guy Raz?

  So you basically walked out of Bergdorf Goodman, holding a Jo Malone bag, not a Bergdorf Goodman bag?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep.

• 46:59Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  And I mean, let me tell you, that was. That was all him. That was not me. I was ready to yield on that one. And of course, he had been thinking strategically. So on our run up to opening in Bergdorf Goodman, you know, the, the rule of thumb is there's no point taking any brand or any product to any part of the world, no matter how brilliant it is, if no one knows it's there. So you have to create this buzz and you have to create the voice and you have to create the wantability. So we'd got back to the hotel, went up to the hotel room and he started to unpack this box with all these bags in. And I said, what are you doing? And he said, I'm making bags up. And he started to make Jo Malone bags up and put the black ribbon

• 47:44Speaker 01

  on the outside. I said, there's nothing in them. And he said, no one else knows that. We employed people to walk around New York City, holding 10 empty Jo Malone bags for the month and the six weeks run up to opening in Bergdorf Goodman. And by the time we did, everybody had seen these Jo Malone bags, which had nothing in them. And everybody thought that it was a much more successful brand than it was, but it was converted in empty bags. We called it Walking the Dogs and we still do it today.

• 48:17Guy Raz?

  Just have people carrying empty Jo Malone bags down the street.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yep. And it worked. It was genius.

• 48:24Guy Raz?

  I have to imagine that you were constantly getting pinged by people who were, who wanted to franchise this business, who were saying, hey, we want to invest, we want to open up Jo Malone shops all over the US. And how are you dealing with that? I mean, was that, first of all, was that happening?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Um, yes. I mean, yes, it was, it was happening, but it didn't feel right. I was, I knew I was looking for three things. I was looking for people with deep pockets. I was looking for the financial bit, but I needed someone to teach us about distribution because we could see that distribution was a key and it was probably one of the things we were lacking. But more importantly, I needed somebody that really loved what we did and what they did.

• 49:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So here's a question. 1999, you have this hugely successful brand. You've got lines out the door, you're at Bergdorf Goodman and you sell to Estee Lauder. I mean, why, why did you decide to do that?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Because I found all three and I knew I had. So those three things, you know, you can often, you can find money, you can find distribution, but it was that last part about heart. It was, do they love me and this business and and do I love who they are? That was a really important part to me and I couldn't find that last missing piece until I met Mr. Loder. And when I sat with Leonard Loder, he reminded me of myself. For me, he was a great entrepreneurial spirit who loved the beauty industry and who'd walked beside his mum. So there was lots of similarities. And when we were negotiating, it was I was going to stay for the rest of my life. So it was I needed

• 50:01Speaker 01

  something that I knew was going to be for the rest of my life. I I wanted to stay and I wanted to continue to be Joe. And the day that we agreed it and signed was probably one of the happiest days of my life.

• 50:14Guy Raz?

  So you are now, Joe Malone is now owned by Estee Lauder and you are, you know, essentially an employee of Estee Lauder. You've become the creative director of of your brand, Joe Malone, and you're still running it. And it it sounds like it didn't feel a whole lot different. And and I guess within two years or three years of of that happening, you are diagnosed with breast cancer.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:40Guy Raz?

  Which I'm I'm sure came as a shock. You were just thirty seven, thirty eight years old when when you got that diagnosis?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I was. I was in New York City. I remember it vividly. I'd only just had Josh, my son. He was sort of two, I think, eighteen months two. And I was so tired all the time. And I'd never felt that. I'd never felt sick or I'd never felt weary. And I was in the Four Seasons in New York City in the hotel one morning, and I found something just on my kind of chest bone. I went back home, went to see the doctor. And that night, I, as I sat when they'd they'd done all the tests, and I looked at the nurse's face and I looked at the doctor's face, and I knew it was really bad news. I just could feel it. And he looked at me and he said, I'm, you

• 51:29Speaker 01

  know, I'm terribly sorry to tell you, but it looks like you have a very aggressive form of breast cancer. And

• 51:38Speaker 01

  We think that you need to get your life in order. They were, he was basically telling me I didn't have long to live. And I just, I watched poor Gary just collapse on the floor. And I was, it was a weird, it was such a weird moment because I was dressed to go to this big party in London called the Serpentine Party. And I remember fiddling with my earrings in my pocket, thinking, okay, well, I'll just get through this and then I'll go to the party and I'll, and then I suddenly realized that someone had given me a death sentence. And it started to sink in and then, then all I could think about was Josh and Gary. That's the only, I didn't care about any of the rest of it. But my son and my, and I just remember thinking, God, I'll never see him grow up. I'll never see him go to school. I'll never see him go to uni.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  I'll never see him get married. You know, it was always awful, awful, downing thoughts. And then I went home, Gary was just in pieces, complete pieces and trying to be strong. And I sat on the end of my bed and I remember thinking, Jo, you've never listened to a word anyone has ever told you in your life. Why on earth are you going to listen now?

• 52:47Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Jo Malone's battle with cancer leads her to walk away from the brand with her name for good. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 53:10Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2002 and Jo has just received the news of her cancer diagnosis. And almost immediately, the Lauter family connects Jo with a specialist in New York to start her treatment.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  So we all moved out and we ran the business from New York City and Gary would commute backwards and forwards. Josh was tiny, so he was very easy to maneuver around. But I was, I was really suffer, I just suffered so badly through it. But I kept telling myself that, Grin and Beric, Jo, Grin and Beric, you can come through this. And I had, I mean Larry Norton just was the most incredible, incredible doctor.

• 53:49Guy Raz?

  This is your doctor, Sloane Kettering, yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's one of those people in my life that without him, I wouldn't be sitting talking to you today. And so I did, uh, I did one mastectomy, then we got through all of the chemo, then I had to do chemo all over again. And then on that last bit, when I thought it was all over, they found something else in the other breast, so I had to go through it all again. I can't tell you why I was, the, the chemo had really taken over by that point. And then one day Larry walked in and said, it's gone.

• 54:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  It's, it's time to go home, go back and live your life. And I said, will it come back? And he said, I don't know, but you have to go back and live your life. And, and my life was back in my hands again, and I knew that I had to do something remarkable with it.

• 54:34Guy Raz?

  Which, I mean, I think for anybody who goes through an experience like that, where you are so close to death, it puts your life into perspective and you, um.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Sure does.

• 54:48Guy Raz?

  And you came to a, a conclusion, I think 99% of people would come to, including myself, which is work and that part of me isn't important. It's my family, it's taking advantage of life and living it to its fullest. And you decide that you've got to leave work. You want to leave because, for obvious reasons. I mean, I think, right? Because you, you, you went through this experience.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  I think, well, I'd, the chemo had taken my sense of smell. I hadn't told anyone that.

• 55:20Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  And I couldn't smell properly.

• 55:22Guy Raz?

  And that was your superpower, your sense, your sense of smell?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  It was, and I hadn't told anyone that, um, at all. I was too scared to even admit it to myself. And I was standing in, um, in the shop in Madison Avenue, and I just didn't feel as though I belonged anymore. I'd, I, I was so concerned for everybody involved. I didn't want to do anything wrong with the Lauder Corporation and the Lauders because they'd saved my life.

• 55:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  I didn't want to see one person lose their job because that was their lives. But I knew I couldn't stay as the person I was. So I went to Leonard and, um, I explained to him and he, they all tried to change my mind and said, please think again, think again. And I was so determined, Guy, to, to, to walk away.

• 56:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  So I flew back to London. And as I got nearer to that day of leaving, I knew I'd made the biggest mistake of my life.

• 56:18Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Because I started to realize that. It wasn't a job, it was my best friend.

• 56:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it was your, it was you, your identity.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  It was everything. It was about the creativity. And I realized that I would never create fragrance again, and I would never do all the things that I loved. And, and everybody was running and getting everything ready and Gary was doing all the forms. And, and I wanted to scream and say, please, can we just stop? And I know if I had, it would have done. I know Leonard would have made it stop. And I said to him, can I be the last person to turn the lock in the key on that last day? And he said, yes, you can. And I sobbed and sobbed as I put the bottles on the shelf for the last time. And I realized who on earth was I ever gonna be again? Who, what, what had I done?

• 57:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  What had I done? But I still couldn't smell and I'd signed a five-year lockout.

• 57:13Guy Raz?

  A non-compete.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  A non-compete for five years.

• 57:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  And I suddenly felt this big, heavy noose coming tighter and tighter around my neck. And then a month into it all being over, I woke up one morning and I could smell. And I could smell like I'd never smelled before. And of course, that, that's when I started to really suffer from anxiety.

• 57:37Guy Raz?

  This is an important point because I think a lot of people hear stories on our show, um, like yours, right? Where people sell their businesses, whether it's Bobby Brown or Kate Spade or Marcia Kilgore. And, you know, they, they might think, well, now she's got it made, you know? She's sold this company, she's financially secure for life and she can go and, um, you know, travel and do whatever she wants. Um, but people forget that businesses not, aren't about money. They're about your identity, they're who you are, they're the things that you, that animate us, right? It was those late nights in the apartment in Chelsea, um, eating pizzas and making lotions and getting clients.

• 58:20Guy Raz?

  And it was, it was all those things that made your life, gave your, your life meaning up until that point.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you're right. I'd laughed with the business, I'd cried with it, I built it, I'd seen it. You know, all the emotions that you have with a human being, I'd had with a business. I know that sounds weird, but that's, and I was suddenly, I was suddenly walking away from. My best friend. It was didn't have two arms and two legs, but it had a heartbeat and it had creativity. And it had a conversation and it taught me things. And when I walked away, I couldn't even walk past the shop. I could feel myself getting choked up and I felt resentful. I felt angry. I felt hurt. I was. What I now know, I was going through the five steps of grief.

• 59:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  I was grieving for something, but you know, and people listening to this will will say, well, come on, Jay, you know, you had enough money in the bank. But all I wanted to do was make a face cream and sell it. And I'd I'd signed five years of shackles. And and it was it was the most miserable five years of my life.

• 59:24Guy Raz?

  So how did you, I think you call it your wilderness years, or it's been it's been called that. What did you, how did you navigate those five years? What did you do?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I went, I helped other people with their businesses. I sat on boards and all I wanted to do was was to come back. All I wanted to do was create.

• 59:43Guy Raz?

  Fragrance and.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. But of course I was living this smiley mask and crying every single night and just thinking. And I kept, I had my first anxiety attack and I thought I was having a heart attack. And often anxiety is connected with energy. And when your adrenaline starts to come back, and I realized that's what was happening to me, my body was starting to tell me, come on, you know. I get ready to run again. It's time to do something.

• 1:00:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  And I made a television show, actually for the BBC called High Street Dreams. I formulated it and sold the idea to the BBC and we made that. And I was, I was standing in a garden with a pair of Wellington boots on, and I was filling bottles of chili sauce with this family.

• 1:00:28Guy Raz?

  And you were doing this, this show for aspiring entrepreneurs on the BBC and and.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:33Guy Raz?

  And one of the aspiring entrepreneurs was a a family that was making like a hot sauce, right? Like a chili sauce.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  That's exactly. I was filling these bottles and I could feel the liquid and screwing and I just felt this, come on, just try one more time. So I made it, made my my mind up that day, standing in that garden, that I would try one more time and see if I could do it.

• 1:00:55Guy Raz?

  While you were kind of helping them out, you all of a sudden had flashbacks to the excitement of filling bottles up with stuff?

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just took me. Just took me back, I think. It was this, it was just filling bottles. It was that whole simplicity in that simple act, but it reminded me of who I'd been, who I was, and who I really wanted to be again.

• 1:01:21Guy Raz?

  Once that five-year period, that sort of non-compete period ended, you were free to start a new business. But presumably, you couldn't use your name. And this is, I mean, this happens with like famous name is cookies. Like Wally Amos couldn't, he couldn't use his name. And Bobby Brown can't use her name for a business in quite the same way. So presumably, you could not use Jo Malone for the next business that you wanted to start.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  I couldn't use Jo Malone. I couldn't, I still can't. I'm able to use it as the person and as my voice, but I'm not able to use it in any other capacity in beauty or whatever. But I was allowed to use Jo. So that was, I was, felt like I was kind of halfway there. But I had to make sure that the consumer wasn't confused. So, one night at dinner, I was sitting with my son Josh and Gary, and we were sitting, having dinner. And we were looking at all kinds of names. And he'd obviously been listening to this in the background. And he just looked at me and he went, Mom, why don't you just call it Jo Loves? Because you really love fragrance, and fragrance really loves you. And it was just so profound, you know, out of the mouths of an eight-year-old or 10-year-old,

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  I think he was at that time. So we, we went back to the lawyers, and it went backwards and forwards. And before we did anything, and we showed anyone, or anyone saw anything, we took it back to the legal team at Lauder and showed them. And said, this is what we want to do.

• 1:02:49Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you launched this new company, a fragrance company called Jo Loves in, I guess, 2011. And, I mean, obviously, you were established, you were known. But, I mean, did it still feel, I mean, I don't know, were you nervous? Were you like, were you kind of?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  I was beyond nervous. I felt I was standing on the stage in my underwear, because the world had seen me on a global stage and assumed I was still there. Nobody knew I'd left. And when we first set out with Joe Loves, we ran straight into doing a pop up in Selfridges. And we moved in there overnight. And four o'clock in the morning, we were there with all the builders and I was watching it and I hated what I saw. I hated it. I just could feel it inside and I thought, why have you done this? Why have you, why have you put yourself in this position, Joe, you idiot?

• 1:03:37Guy Raz?

  What did you hate? What, what?

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  I hated the way it looked.

• 1:03:40Guy Raz?

  You hated the colors?

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  It was, if you look at some of the images in the beginning, it was all this red and black and it's harsh and it's. It's almost like a teenager that's dyed her hair red and comes into dinner screaming. That was, that was the only way I can describe it. That's what it felt like that I'd done.

• 1:03:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  The packaging was all over the place. The, the team weren't, I mean, it was, it was such a mess when I think about it. And I thought, you've got to open tomorrow morning and you're going to have to face it and you're going to have to work through this. Cause if you really want to do this, you're going to have to eat a little bit of humble pie and you're, you're going to look a bit of a fool for a minute. So we opened the next morning and we just couldn't get traction in this business. And it didn't matter what we tried and what we did, we could not, we just couldn't get those sales. And for two years, I struggled.

• 1:04:32Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I regret. So every single day I sat and I regretted building this business. Cause it was bleeding money, number one. And I had no sales, number two.

• 1:04:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  And nobody knew I was there. It was, it was ludicrous when I think about why I ran. Like I sprinted into, onto that arena, thinking that I had, thinking I had the right to go back in where I'd left. That was, that was the biggest lesson for me. And it got to a point, I was coming up to my birthday. And Gary comes in one morning and he hands me this little box and he says, happy birthday. And I looked and I opened it, it was a key and I just thought, what's he done? Anyway, we jumped in the car, we drove down. And he says, happy birthday. Go be a shopkeeper again, because you were an absolute nightmare.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  And I opened the door and I said, you've no idea where we are. And he said, yes, I do. And I said, no, no, no, you don't. He said, yes, I do. You've come full circle. And I said, yes. It was the shop where Justin de Blank taught me to be a shopkeeper.

• 1:05:41Guy Raz?

  It was a flower shop that you worked at as a young woman.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  It was the delicatessen.

• 1:05:46Guy Raz?

  The delicatessen.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  It was the deli. And it was where I fell in love with shopkeeping. I put the key in the door and I couldn't believe, I just couldn't believe that I was back home. Um, we spent a year, year doing the shop, creating it. And the day we opened the door, the same, the queue was there as I came, as I pulled up on that first day, it was, it was happening again.

• 1:06:09Guy Raz?

  Wow. So it really took you opening that shop up to get people to know, to know about the brand because it, it, it, it's

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:19Guy Raz?

  Because I guess you were doing pop ups and you were, you were sort of selling it at different, you know, cosmetic stores and, but really the shop was your best advertisement.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Well, it always, it's your home, isn't it? You know, if you invite someone for dinner and you sit on the outside pavement and you eat fish and chips, you know, it, it, if you invite someone home to your brand, it's got to have four walls. You've got to feel, you've got to feel the warmth of that brand. And it was a huge responsibility because of course, if a pop up doesn't work, you move on. If you sign that lease, you've got to make it work. So I had that nervousness. I had that fear because I'd had two years of feeling an absolute failure. I think having those four walls and as I walked through, I said to Gary, um, we, we've got to do it differently. I, I can't, I don't want to, I didn't want to walk in the same footsteps as I'd done before. I didn't,

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  I'd grown up. I was a different person. My, my life felt very different and my creativity was much rawer, much braver than it had been, you know, twenty five, thirty years previous. And he said, what does that mean? And he looked at, I mean, Gary sometimes looks at me and I can see him thinking, oh, here we go. She's off. And I said, I want to create a brasserie and he Went, no, that's it, that's it. And I said, no, no, no, listen, he said, no, I'm no, it hasn't got a food license. We're not doing a brasserie as a pub next door. And I said, no, I want to create a brasserie for your nose. I could see it all in my head. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And that's exactly what we did. We created a brasserie for your nose.

• 1:07:48Guy Raz?

  And you can go in, just to describe how it works. You go in and you get a bunch of different like things to smell?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Yes, you sit as though you're just about to eat. You have a menu, you have, and it's known as a tapas bar for your nose. And your tray comes up with a, um, a tagine and your bath cologne, though, is in the tagine. You have chopsticks, um, with cotton wool. So you think you're about to eat dim sum, but in fact, everything is about the sense of smell. Your body lotions, uh, appear from volute guns and we paint you with hot paintbrushes all over your body. Everything is about twisting and turning the experience and causing your sense of smell to be the predominant sense. And it's still with us today. It's very much part of our storytelling. And when we go around the world, we take a portable tapas bar with us and we entertain with, with our fragrance.

• 1:08:38Guy Raz?

  How, how much? I mean, a lot of, a lot of times when, you know, you meet people, I'm sure this happened to you and Gary, where people would say, how could you work with your partner? How could you work with your, your spouse? But I've done a lot of interviews with partners, with married couples who built successful businesses and in some cases divorced and continued to run the business. But it sounds like in your case, like the partnership between you and Gary was really the kind of the secret of what made this work, that both of you brought different skillsets and you both respected each other's strengths and weaknesses, and that was really what enabled you to be successful.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  We haven't always respected each other's, you know, opinions. We've, we've had some really humbling. Actually, where businesses concern though, he and I, I would say 99.9% of the time are always on the same page. We come at it from a very different perspective, but we always meet at that point where we agree. I look at him and things that come out of his head and his mouth are so smart and things that I could never possibly do. There's a, we're. Best friends.

• 1:09:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  We trust.

• 1:09:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  If we stood back to back, we know that each other would look after each other. But you, yeah, sometimes it's hard, you know, sometimes I remember in the very beginning, I would talk all weekend about, about work. And he would say, okay, you've got five things this weekend, then once you've done your five things, you have to stop. Well, nine thirty Saturday morning, I'd used up my five things because I'd already spoken about it. And I used to get so frustrated because I had to wait until Monday. And then we realized that that just didn't work, but work to us is not a job or business or our career. It is part of our lives. It's been part of our marriage. It's been part of our family. It's part of our relationship. And I think we both actually, it's like a drug. I think we both love it.

• 1:10:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Joe, you had been through the process of starting a business and a successful brand and then selling it. And, and watching that brand grow, right? All the resources that Estee Lauder had to, to really scale that brand. Joe Malone is at shops all around the world and it's ubiquitous. With, with your brand now with Joe Loves, what, I mean, do you have those kinds of ambitions? Do you see it as, as a, as a global brand one day? Or are, are you kind of happy with where, where it is now and, and sort of?

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  I absolutely saw it as a global brand. I'm passionate about what I do. And it's not about just creating fragrance. I had this crazy idea that once in my life, I wanted to completely challenge and change the way the world did something in fragrance. I never, didn't know what it would be, but I was determined I was going to find it. And a couple of years ago, it was sitting right by the side of me and it was in the form of a paintbrush. And I created a fragrance paintbrush where you can paint your body.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  And this little fragrance paintbrush, when I first presented it to my marketing guys at the time, they all looked at me and said, oh, it'll never work. It's such a gimmick. And I was so humiliated in that meeting and I was so angry and I thought, I'll show you it works. So I put the prototype together. I went to the factories myself and I created everything within it. Do you know what? That paintbrush has been like a golden ticket because that is the point in brands today. You have to find that part in your imagination and that part that connects with the consumer and the world that says, we are going to do it differently. And that paintbrush now is going around. That's the thing that is

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  converting China. That is, that is the one single product because they've never seen it before.

• 1:12:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  And suddenly this younger generation are like, it's art for your body. I can paint my body with fragrance. So I think Joe Loves is, is all about this springboard of creativity. It allows me to, to go jump with all my crazy imaginative ideas. And trust me, there's hundreds of them still there. And I run at this business and I jump. And I use her as like a, like a laboratory to say, what if?

• 1:12:46Guy Raz?

  I'm looking at it right now on the internet. And just to describe it, it's like, it's another way to apply perfume, right? It's, I guess it's like a sort of a gel formula with the fragrance in it. And you can just paint it on your body. And instead of spraying yourself with perfume, it's just another way to apply perfume. And people are super into it.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  They all say, I want to be a scent artist. So they pick it up. And of course, they're able to use two or three different, you know, painting different parts of their band to layer it on. Or it's the creativity and it's being able to engage with fragrance and a whole, with a whole different perspective.

• 1:13:22Guy Raz?

  Joe, I'm looking at a photograph of you kneeling before Prince Philip when you received your CBE. You are a commander of the British Empire, which is obviously an honorary, but I mean, not just a big deal for, for anyone, but I mean, given your life story, right? Like you grew up in a council flat, like. You know, you had a really difficult childhood. You guys had no money. I mean, you were from a really working class background. You built this super high end luxury brand called Joe Malone. And then a second one now called Joe Loves.

• 1:14:03Guy Raz?

  And just considering like where you came from and how you started, right? Do you just sometimes, I don't know, and Gary too, right? Like, do you just sometimes sit back and just say, this is nuts? Like, this is totally crazy?

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Every day. Every day I get up and I think I wasn't meant to be here. I really, I think, as I, when I was younger, I was so impatient to get to the next step. And as I've got older and realized, actually, you've got to take time and enjoy them. When something good happens or something bad happens, just take that time out. Don't be such a hurry to get to the next step and the next thing because you miss the moment. You miss the part that you've learned or the part that you've enjoyed or the part that you've worked for. I took my son to university last year, so a little choke there as well. And I never dreamed I would see that day.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  That day when I was diagnosed with cancer, I never thought I would see him go to school, let alone go to university. And I cried a lot during those times. But I realized that life is, you have to treasure the moment. Memories and moments are so, they're Solomon's riches. They're the things that we should be really holding on to in our lives. And whether it be building a business or, you know, transforming a school or watching your son go to university or whatever it is, or staying married for 36 years, treasure it. You know what? Treasure those moments because they are what make us.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  And that tenacity and that strength and that resilience is a valued part of a human being.

• 1:15:45Guy Raz?

  How, how much? When you think about all of the things that got you to this point, right? And I think it's fair to say you've had a pretty successful life. Do you attribute your success to how hard you worked and your intelligence? Or do you think more of it had to do with just being lucky?

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  A little bit of everything, I think. I think a little bit of all of those things. I think hard work, people who work hard are some of the most successful I've ever met. Um, I'm afraid nothing happens without hard work and determination and that resilience. My intellect, my intelligence, um, I started out with very little and I wouldn't consider myself an intellectual in any way, but I can hold my own in most conversations. And in any conversation, you can learn something from somebody else. Um, and I do believe in a higher power. I believe that I was, I was given a second chance at life to do something remarkable. And I'm determined to fulfill that.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  And, and luck, I've been, there's too many times in my life, I've been at the right place, at the right time and exactly the right moment for that to be coincidence. And I think as I've got to this part of my life now, I'm a little bit more, a little easier on myself, should I say, than I have been, I think, all the way through. I'm not so, I'm not so hard, yeah, I'm not so hard on myself, but I feel I've earned a lot of money, but it's time now to do something with it. We've learned from it, we can enjoy it, but, but what are we gonna do?

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:17:24Guy Raz?

  Hello, Jo, it's Guy Raz here.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Hi, Guy, how are you?

• 1:17:28Guy Raz?

  Oh, man, what a question these days.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Yep, that's for sure.

• 1:17:34Guy Raz?

  So, as you briefly heard at the beginning of the episode, I spoke to Jo just a few days ago to find out how her business is doing, given the crisis, and how she's thinking about what it might look like once we get through this moment. So much of what you do depends on human to human connections, right?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Guy Raz?

  The Tapas-inspired fragrance bar and, and just you being with people and, and talking through personal care. How are you starting to think about what that could look like without the face-to-face interaction?

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Um. I miss that human to human touch, because I am a very much a people person. But we have already looked into having masks and visors. Uh. We're not taking anything away, by the way, from the frontline. We absolutely wouldn't be doing that.

• 1:18:22Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  But when those doors open, I want my team and my consumer to be safe.

• 1:18:27Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  And I won't open those doors until I'm absolutely sure that everyone will be safe. Even if it means staying in lockdown for a little bit longer, that's what we'll do. We've had to rethink how we do tap us from home, take away tap us. So it will be something that you take with you versus something that's done in store. There will be no more sort of touchy feely counters, I don't think, not for a very long time, and maybe never again. It's gonna be a challenge for, not just for the beauty industry, but I think every industry is gonna change now. And this will be with us a long time, the effects that it has had on the consumer. There's always gonna be that, am I safe?

• 1:19:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  So people need to believe that difficult times come, but they pass. And I I was talking the other day and I was I was remembering that I've already done lockdown, of course. I had to do lockdown in the middle of chemo because I was so poorly. I had to go out with masks on and gloves and I wasn't able to see anyone for fear of infection. So I'm starting to remember all the things I thought during that lockdown. And I never doubted for a second that it would be over, and I never doubted for a second I'd beat it. And I have the same mentality right now.

• 1:19:39Guy Raz?

  Jo, you have dealt with like insane adversity. And here you are again. I mean, do you do you think in a way that those experiences helped to prepare you to kind of at least handle this one as best you can?

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  I don't think I'm any different than a lot of people that have gone through tough times. I mean, a lot of people fight cancer, a lot of people go through difficult times. I think that for me, the fact the whole world is going through this, it's, we've all got to get it through it together. It's kind of easier than if it was ju- in a weird way than if it was just your country. But um. I think it's OK to cry tears, you know. I think it's OK to feel scared. And right at this moment, the thing that I would love to banish in this world for the next month is judgmental people. Judging one another is really not helpful at this moment in time. We need an attitude of unity in order to beat this virus.

• 1:20:39Guy Raz?

  That's Jo Malone. She's the founder of Jo Malone London and Jo Loves. By the way, one of Jo's many fragrances is called Number 42, named after the flower shop on Elizabeth Street, where she worked alongside Justin de Blank back in the early 1980s.

• 1:20:58Guy Raz?

  And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to support How I Built This, please subscribe to our podcast and tell everyone you know about it. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at HowIBuiltThis or at Guy Raz. Our show was produced this week by J.C. Howard, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Sarah Sarason, Julia Carney, Candace Lim, Neve Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

• 1:21:35Guy Raz?

  This is NPR.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  I listen to Bullseye because Jesse always has really good questions.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  What did John Malkovich wear when he was 20?

• 1:21:49Speaker 04

  Duh. I don't know how to describe it.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  Bullseye, interviews with creators you love and creators you need to know from MaximumFun.org and NPR.