May 18, 2020 · 1h 22m · how-i-built-this
Jo Loves: Jo Malone CBE
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of How I Built This, perfumer Jo Malone chronicles her inspiring path from a council estate upbringing to creating global luxury brand Jo Malone London, surviving cancer, and making a triumphant entrepreneurial comeback with Jo Loves.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 27.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 1.7 Guest teaching 1.1 Guest disagreement 0.1 Guy pushing back 0.1
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 34:05 Defying commercial scent formulations
Jo emphatically describes overriding laboratory technicians who told her she was not allowed to add such heavy oil concentrations or name a perfume Lime Basil & Mandarin.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 15:18 Clarifying inherited wealth vs insolvencyGuy probes whether inheriting Madame Lubati's business brought sudden wealth, pushing Jo to set the record straight regarding the clinic's true bankrupt condition.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 32:50 Inverted perfume industry development cycleJo educates Guy on how fragrance houses typically launch perfumes before ancillaries, whereas her lack of early alcohol permits forced her to invent lotions and bath oils first.
Guy holds their own ▶ 40:00 Synthesizing the 90s clean cosmetics movementGuy demonstrates deep industry knowledge by framing Jo Malone's packaging breakthrough within the broader 1990s rise of minimalist indie cosmetic founders like Bobbi Brown, Bliss, and Kiehl's.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How I Built This Resilience Series Announcement | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Guy Raz opens the show with an editorial monologue contextualizing Jo Malone's brand aesthetics alongside other iconic consumer design breakthroughs like Method and Bevel, transitioning briefly to current lockdown check-in banter. | |
| Growing Up with Dyslexia and Market Hustle | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Jo recounts her childhood struggles with undiagnosed dyslexia and helping her magician/artist father hawk paintings on weekend street markets to secure grocery money. | |
| Mentorship and Formulas with Madame Lubati | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Guy prompts Jo on Madame Lubati's salon and checks whether her mother inherited wealth when Lubati died; Jo clarifies Lubati was deeply in debt and they remained working class. | |
| Taking Over the Family Business as a Teenager | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Jo details how her mother's severe nervous breakdown forced her at age 13 to nurse her parent, care for her sister, and single-handedly manufacture and deliver face creams across London. | |
| Independence and Developing an Olfactory Sense | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Jo shares how moving in with the Sewell family introduced her to a warm home life, while her job in a high-end flower shop revealed her extraordinary sensory acuity for floral freshness. | |
| Marriage, Fractured Family Ties, and Inheriting Debt | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Jo explains meeting Gary, returning to aid her mother who suffered a personality-altering stroke, and walking away from familial hostility saddled with tens of thousands of pounds of inherited debt. | |
| Kitchen Alchemy in Chelsea and Growing Demand | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jo describes operating an artisanal skincare studio in her tiny Chelsea flat, producing bespoke batches on the kitchen stove until husband Gary reached breaking point amid scented pizza and lavender bathtubs. | |
| Mid-Roll Tease: Transition to Brick and Mortar | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Jo explains how she inverted standard fragrance industry workflow by creating bath and body products before colognes, and recalls defying contract laboratory conventions by heavily boosting oil concentrations. | |
| Iconic Packaging and Leading the Indie Brand Wave | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy connects Jo Malone's iconic cream-and-black packaging to the broader 1990s indie brand revolution alongside Bobbi Brown and Kiehl's; Jo emphasizes authentic storytelling and founder connection. | |
| Breaking into Bergdorf Goodman and Guerrilla Marketing | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Jo shares Gary's audacious demand for custom branded bags at Bergdorf Goodman and their legendary guerilla marketing stunt of paying people to carry empty Jo Malone shopping bags across Manhattan. | |
| The Estée Lauder Acquisition and Cancer Diagnosis | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Jo reflects on selling to Estée Lauder after building personal trust with Leonard Lauder, followed shortly by a devastating aggressive breast cancer diagnosis at age 37. | |
| Mid-Roll Tease: Stepping Away from the Brand | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | After intensive treatment, Jo experienced chemotherapy-induced anosmia and resigned from Estée Lauder, only to regain her sense of smell weeks into a strict five-year non-compete. | |
| The Wilderness Years and Reigniting Passion | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Jo discusses grieving the loss of her brand identity during five wilderness years, until mentoring artisanal entrepreneurs while bottling chili sauce on a BBC program reignited her creative spark. | |
| Launching Jo Loves and Overcoming Early Failure | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Jo recalls the rocky launch of Jo Loves, enduring two years of dismal sales and design missteps until Gary bought the lease on the historic delicatessen where she first trained as a shopkeeper. | |
| The Fragrance Tapas Bar and Marriage Dynamics | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Jo describes inventing the fragrance tapas bar concept for experiential scent exploration and discusses the collaborative dynamic and deep trust anchoring her 36-year marriage and business partnership. | |
| Global Vision and the Fragrance Paintbrush Innovation | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Jo recounts overcoming internal skepticism to invent the fragrance paintbrush, an innovative gel delivery mechanism that became a global viral success. | |
| Royal Recognition, Life Perspective, and Defining Success | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Reflecting on receiving her CBE from Prince Philip, Jo evaluates the interplay of hard work, resilience, and serendipity throughout her improbable trajectory from a council estate. | |
| Pandemic Realities, Safety, and Enduring Resilience | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | In a post-interview quarantine update, Jo discusses adapting Jo Loves for contactless safety and draws on her chemo isolation experience to emphasize endurance and empathy during lockdown. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Jo Malone: Father was an architect, painter, and Magic Circle magician
“He was an architect, he was a painter, he would, he was also a member of the magic circle, so he was a magician.”
Jo Malone: Weekend market stall needed three painting sales daily for food
“I knew that we had to sell three paintings every single day, because I knew if we didn't, we wouldn't eat.”
Jo Malone ran her household and sold skincare alone for a year
“For a year, I managed on my own. 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 th…”
Jo Malone discovered her extraordinary sense of smell working at a florist
“What I noticed that I had, that my sense of smell was something that was very extraordinary. I didn't realize 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, the…”
Jo Malone accidentally assumed full liability for her mother's business debt
“But alone to me, I signed something that made me responsible for all 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 of…”
Small-batch skincare is easy, but scaling production is significantly harder
“Do you know what making 10 to 12 pots of face cream is easy? It's when you scale it. It's when you get to a hundred pots and five.”
Industry skeptics incorrectly predicted Lime Basil and Mandarin fragrance would fail
“And I remember someone saying to me, no one's going to 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.”
Jo Malone London sales tripled post-Christmas due to viral gift-giving
“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 a phenomenal…”
Jo Malone's signature black ribbon originated from her husband's discarded tie
“It was Isabella Tedjwi 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 her A tie, a black tie from an event …”
Beauty conglomerates acquire indie brands because massive budgets cannot replicate founder authenticity
“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.…”
Product quality is pointless in new markets without proactive advance buzz
“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.”
Jo Malone hired people to carry empty branded bags around NYC
“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 tho…”
Jo Malone required capital, distribution expertise, and passion from her acquirer
“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 …”
Chemotherapy temporarily destroyed Jo Malone's legendary sense of smell
“The chemo had taken my sense of smell. I hadn't told anyone that, and I couldn't smell properly.”
Jo Malone endured a miserable five-year non-compete after leaving her namesake brand
“I'd signed five years of shackles, and it was the most miserable five years of my life.”
Jo Malone remains legally barred from using her name in beauty products
“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, in beauty or whatever. But I was allowed to use Jo.”
Jo Malone's second fragrance company bled money with zero sales initially
“Every single day I sat and I regretted building this business. Because it was bleeding money, number one, and I had no sales, number two.”