The Exchanges

Q So when, when Madame Lubati 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 did, how, how did her business go?

A 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, you 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 Bixley Heath, and 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, all the kitchen roll out, and I, 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 50 a pot. So, I don't think I was proud of myself, but I was, I knew that …

AI assessment note: “Well, I mean, very well. She had, she built a really successful business.”

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

A 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 30, 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 be filling the bottles and labeling them, And by about 11, 12, we'd roll out a piece of blue foam, lie down, go to sleep, and then the next day we'd wake up again. Wow. 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 come in, 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, which With fragrance. So he's pizza tasted of nutmeg and…

AI assessment note: “everything would be transformed, and it would look like a little shop in the sitting room”

Q when you opened the store, like, I, I read that, uh, like, there were lines of people Waiting to come in before you even opened up. But what I'm wondering is how do 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 did that happen?

A 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, uh, 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 1500 to 2000 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.

AI assessment note: “we did an amazing piece in British Vogue, uh, the Telegraph.”

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

A 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. Well, 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, 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.

AI assessment note: “Would he? And the month after that, yes. And then he'd suddenly have”

Q And this was a, like a skincare salon, Madame Labati? Yes. Yeah.

A It was in Baker, it was just off Baker Street in a place called, um, Montague Mansions, which is just around the corner from where Sherlock Holmes was rumored to have, um, lived and walked, and that's where my mom 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 at the time who would look after all the elites. One was Countess Charkey, and the other was Countess Labati, 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 Lubarti, 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, it was always like crushed sandalwood and bulgaria, like the finest rose oil you ever smelled. She had blonde hair, 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 to kick in, but I could see I could see signs of it, definitely, because she'd suddenly forget my n…

AI assessment note: “it wasn't a shop, it was a very private skincare clinic.”

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

A 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 kids. We had no money. We had no budget. And she, I remember her looking at him. She was so wonderful. And she went, 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 nearly walked out of 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 Joe Malone bags. We have to. And they eventually yielded and let us, let us use our own packaging.

AI assessment note: “No, they wanted to import the product.”

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

A Uh, yes, yeah, pretty much, and it was one of my face clients. She's a lady called Isabel Atetui, 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 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 that we'd been at, and she picked it up and wrapped it round it, and that was the black ribbon, and so it was her, her genius, and...

AI assessment note: “Uh, yes, yeah, pretty much”

Q Like, this was a time when people started to notice these very kind of clean products, you know, these, and Kiehl's is an example of that, right? Like, you walked into Kiehl's in the nineties and it looked like a pharmacy, and it sounds like What a similar thing was happening with Joe Malone, like you had a very clear aesthetic that people seemed to kind of be attracted to.

A I think, I think we were very much the, 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 heartbeats of a person behind a brand. So all of those people you mentioned, Bobby 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 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. 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.

AI assessment note: “it wasn't just about what the aesthetic was, it was what was in the bottle.”

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

A 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 weren't, get it formulated, get it bottled, get it out there. And that was my, there was no, 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 does it do in 30 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.

AI assessment note: “I would just create single notes and then lock them together like music”

Q 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?

A 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 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. 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, 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 converting China. That is, that is the one single product because they've never seen it before. And suddenly this younger generation are like, it's art for your body. I can paint my body with f…

AI assessment note: “I absolutely saw it as a global brand.”

Q 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 was allowing you to To develop, you know, more products and to expand, I guess. Is that sort of how it worked?

A Well, kind of, in the beginning it did, yeah, because there was, um, I mean, we hit our first million on Christmas Eve, which is, um, 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 342 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, 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 30 in the afternoon. We opened the door, and they all came rolling in, and we could see it sort of adding up, and within 10 minutes we'd done it. But the guy that took us over the million was, um, he said, I want the cheapest thing you've got so I can put it in her stocking. And it was an eight 95 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 businessman by doing that to everybody. He had no idea, but it was him that took us over the million. That's why.

AI assessment note: “Well, kind of, in the beginning it did, yeah”

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

A Well, um, 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, the waxes down or add the oils and boil it all up, strain it through muslin, let it stand for 24 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, and it's just different ingredients and different heating points, so.

AI assessment note: “I would take the, the waxes down or add the oils and boil it all up”

Q How, how much, um, when, when you think about all of the things that got you to this point, right, and, 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, your intelligence, or do you think more of it had to do with just being lucky?

A 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, 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 at 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, 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 going to do? Hello.

AI assessment note: “A little bit of everything, I think. I think a little bit of all of those things.”

Q Yeah, and, 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, the smell of vanilla, or the smell of Ginger, like that would, each of those things would be one note, or are there multiple notes in each ingredient?

A There are chords, so it, just think of it just like music, or, or mixing paint on a palette. So what we're, 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 The jasmine note and recreating it, so I'm creating these little, little notes and accords that I'm smelling, and then I run round 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, 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, in Parakey, which is the smell of pomelo to me, the skin of a, 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, um, I'm, I'm just telling you and piecing together those notes, and then allowing you to have your own memory with that fragrance.

AI assessment note: “There are chords, so it, just think of it just like music”