Jo Malone ran her household and sold skincare alone for a year
Jo Malone · Jo Loves: Jo Malone CBE · May 18, 2020 · at 18:51
Perfumer and entrepreneur Jo Malone recounts taking over her family's skincare business and household responsibilities as a teenager after her mother suffered a nervous breakdown and her father left.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 20.0s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 the flat that my mum worked from, sell all the product, put it in, and then come all the way back, and then cook dinner.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jo Malone
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.…”
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…”
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'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 …”
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.”