How I Built This with Guy Raz - Jo Loves: Jo Malone CBE

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

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.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special. There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place.

Looking to grow your business? Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe. All loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries,

visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the whole. home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place, with all of its personal touches and its amazing location, could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at

Airbnb.ca.com slash host. 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 slash how I built this. 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 18th through May 22nd, 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 Lefleur of M.M. Lefleur, Allie Webb of Drybar and James Reinhardt of Thread Up. We're going to be talking about the 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 a.m. Pacific at Facebook.com slash how I built this. And if you want to learn more about NPR's other virtual events, you can go to NPRPresents.org. 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 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 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, okay, that's it. We need a shop. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

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

Now, if you're not familiar with Joe Malone fragrances, I assure you you have seen a Joe Malone shop in some airport around the world. The logo and the look is really simple, a thin black frame around three words. Joe Malone, London. 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, Joe 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.

Joe's story is almost like one of those magical realism novels. It involves a real magician, her dad, his ten dwarf rabbits, a mysterious countess named Madame Lubati, and a working-class childhood on the outskirts of London. Now, I interviewed Joe before the world went crazy, although let's be honest, it was crazy before, too. and I called her up to see how she's managing right now. You're in London? Yep, I'm in lockdown London. 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. to direct him. And we were literally aching with laughter. Joe, 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? Okay. Anyway, Joe grew up in a council estate or what Americans would call public housing in the 1960s with her mom, dad, and sister. Cho has dyslexia, which went undiagnosed for years, and it made school a real struggle for her. 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 struggled above and beyond. I would literally be thrown out the 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. 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 would 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 can manage perfectly well now. But that's probably because I'm not so anxious about it. What was your parents' marriage like? It was happy and very unhappy, both in the same breath.

They adored each other, and then they hated each other. And 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 do that awful thing of Joe, tell your father his shirts are not going to be ironed. And I would go and I say, Dad, Mum says your shirts not going to be on.

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. 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. What did they fight about? Money. What does every work? 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.

for a lot. So he was an architect. He was a painter. 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. Would he like blow all of his money and like on a poker game? 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 what 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 or 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 realized 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 realize the way he was going about it

made my mom feel really insecure. But I saw that actually, well, 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, often came out the wrong way. 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... 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 10,000.

10 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.

And I knew that we had to sell three paintings every single day. Huh. 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 realized that survival was an important sort of part of living. I guess it was around when you were around age eight. There was sort of an important turning point, 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 Lubbadi? 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 70s when I first met her. And she was this brilliant skincare woman. I think my mom went, first of all, to just be the reception. My mom became so involved and enjoyed very much working with her that she took herself off and got her self-qualified in anatomy, physiiatrics and set to work working as Madame Labarty's partner. And this was like a skincare salon, Madame Labati? Yes. Yeah. It was just off Baker Street in a place called Montague Mansions, which is just around the corner from where Sherlock Holmes was rumoured to have 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 of the time who would look after all the elites. One was Countess Charkey and the other was Countess Labarty and she had her private clinic. This was a point when women didn't run their own businesses and they certainly weren't successful in the way that both of them were. But Madame Labarty, 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 bulgarate 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 chance I had

at going up to Baker Street with my mum I would go she was like my best friend and I would would love her. And I think I got, when I first met her, it was just before dementia started a 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? And I'd say, yes, madam. I was like a 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's 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 can't for 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. Was Madame Lubari like a character or was she really like a countess? Was she English? What was her story? Well, her real name was Doris Hildebaker. 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 20s.

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, did 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 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. 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 man. 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 it was at that point that we had to get her. help, and she deteriorated very quickly after that. I guess it was around like 1974, Madame Lubati, she dies. And your mom is her employee and somehow kind of inherits the business. She wasn't just her employee. By that point, 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 very good and very kind to Madame Labati. 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. We certainly didn't become, I don't think my family were ever rich. So when Madame Lubati died, I guess your mom decides to build her own similar type of business, right, and continue to make face creams. And so how did that go? How did her business go? Well, I mean very well. 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 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 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 did everything with such precision as she had taught me. And I would clean the fridge out and lay all the kitchen roll out. 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's skinned, I knew that was the point at which you poured it into the face pots. And then again, 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 £5.50 a pot. So I don't think I was proud of myself. But I was, I knew that when I looked at it and we'd sold it, I knew that we could eat. That was always my motivation.

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. And you're still a kid. I mean, we should be clear. I mean, you were still 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.

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 dad had disappeared. He'd gone off, he'd run off with someone. and 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 said Joe take

take your sister upstairs I'm going to call the doctor and I you know that they never said your mum's sick but your mum's having a turn that's what she said which we would call

what well she was My mum was having a breakdown. That's what my mum 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 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 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 traveling, who's coming back? Everything will be fine. But 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 mom, 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 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 have made face creams and that was probably the last day I went to school and 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

so basically around the time you were 16 years old you were independent. I mean, you had to work and earn money to live, to survive. I was independent. You're absolutely right. The age of 16, then when I was legally allowed to leave. So my mom eventually became better.

And I was, I didn't realize this at the time, but it was going to happen again. And it happened twice more. But I thought she was better and, you know, that 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 Souls. And for the first time in my life, I saw what a family should be. We would sit, we'd never sat at a table and at a meal together as a family at home, whereas here every night you would sit and you would talk about your day and 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

of blanks in a little flower shop. I earned £29 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 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, they've been in the fridge for three days. I want the fresh ones.

No, no, no, no, Joe, 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 was my first job. And I think Justin DeBlanc was like a high-end grocery store, something like that in London at the time. 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. And I think you worked in that delicatessen too, right, like with Justin A Blank before moving on. 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 mom.

I went back because she was very poorly again. And so that's when I went to work with her. I guess at a certain point, Joe, maybe you were 18 or 17 or you went to Bible. school. Yeah. The reason why I asked about Bible school was because I guess that was where you met the person who would become your partner, Gary, who would become your husband. Yeah, still is. He was also a student there. Yes, he was studying. He would have made, we laugh now, he'd have made a great vicar. But 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. So you meet Gary and you guys,

The two of you got married pretty young. I mean, you, I think you were 20 or 21. 21, yes. And that was sort of around the time where 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? It was like a stroke, but there were severe complications with it as well. So the woman who was taken into hospital that night never returned for me. It was almost as if her personality had changed.

Completely. Yeah, completely. 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. There was one incident where 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 just the utter humiliation, I think. 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 and so I made the decision that I was going to walk away that day and I did but on belong 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 going to start again, little did I know that I was going to have debt,

that I would have to pay off for the next goodness knows how many years. And I did. 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. 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. 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, of debt at the time. So what are you going to do? Like, how are you going to make money to start paying this off? I went back to the four plastic jugs and the saucepan, which have been my Probably my best friends all my life. You meant you started to make face lotions and creams? 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 16. eight months and I started to build a clean-on-tail 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 get ready for the next day. Huh. And that was our existence. 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?

Well, cosmetics are either oil into water or water into oil. It's like cooking. It's like cooking. It's 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 24 hours, then go back, add all the essential oils. 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 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. And these are things 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. I'd watched.

I'd watch. But it was also all the years with Madame Labarte. It was all of those things like the yogurt face mask that I still make today that I'm, I learned 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 or her herbal. And you know, it's still within me. I still know and understand how to. It's when you, 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 100 pots and 5. That's when it's hard. Yeah, because 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. And you did this all out of your apartment where you and Gary were living?

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 was taking 14 to 16 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 one skincare room one kitchen

and a beautiful big sitting room so we went to home base and bought a piece of blue foam and that was our bed for probably about four or five years and we would roll it out and then we'd hired it Oh when people come in for the treatments right so chic and luxury isn't it we'd roll it up and it would go into the law 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 630 quarters 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 in 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 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 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 I thought I'm really in trouble and he came walk down the hall 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 that 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. When we come back in just a moment, how Joe 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. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1994. Joe and Gary have both decided to go all in on. Joe'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. 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 had this, always this thing about gut, that gut feeling, and I looked to 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, and I walked past this one shop and it was a building site and I felt the shop say it's me and he literally went, you have got to be joking and I went it's that one and that's where we started. And I guess was it just obvious?

You were going to call it, Joe Malone? You were going to call that. That's what the name of the shop was going to be. Yeah, I mean I didn't, I was Joe Malone. I didn't even think about that and it was by that point, of course, we have products with Joe 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. 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 Joe Malone as a perfume. So when did that start? When did you start making perfumes? Completely topsy-turvy. So normally it's a fragrance that comes first and then what we call ancillaries. Right. 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. Why weren't you allowed to have alcohol?

Well, I was living in premises. I couldn't have a whole lot of flammable alcohol to make it off. No, it wasn't safe to make. 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 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 40, 50 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, 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'd 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'd put another, like, huge dollop in. And I go, yep, that's it.

That's the level. And they said, you can't buy that level in Barthol 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 going to buy a fragrance called Lyme, Basil, and Mandarin. And I remember look 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.

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? The way I create today is slightly different than when I did 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 jar, glass jar, and I'd put it into a body lotion or a bath foil. 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, 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. And 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. 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, for example, the smell of vanilla or the smell of ginger.

Like, each of those things would be one note. Or are there multiple notes in each ingredient? They're a chords. 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 out and recreating it. So I'm creating these 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 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 and a rainstorm to the smell of broth cooking on a breach in parakee which is the smell of pomelo to me the skin of a fruit so it's it's an art for me but I'm telling you stories or I'm writing poetry to you. I'm writing music. I'm just telling you and piecing together those notes and then allowing you to have your own memory with that fragrance. So it just seemed like an obvious extension. You know, you were already making the lotions that had fragrances. So why not just take the fragrance out and put it in its own bottle? People were asking for it. There were people saying that 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. Even in the early days when you opened the store, like 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 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? 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 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 a phenomenal growth pattern that we saw. At that time, 1994, right, when you open the shop, did you, was the label, like, did it already look the way Joe Malone products look today? Was that the look already at that point? Yes, yeah, pretty much. And it was one of my face clients.

She's a lady called Isabel Etijee. 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 Tedgewee 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 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.

It's iconic now, right? It's like the Joe Malone box with the little square and the... black bow tie. She then took it to her graphic designer and they did drawings and whatever. In the minute I saw it, it's like, yeah, that's it. And that was, that's what we used. You know, it's interesting, Joe, because we've done other cosmetics brands on the show like Bobby Brown and Bliss and it's interesting because 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 keels is an example of that, right?

Like, you walked into keels in the 90s and it looked like a pharmacy. And it sounds like a similar thing was happening with Joe Malone. Like you had a very clear aesthetic that people seemed to kind of be attracted to. 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 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 will are identifying with them so suddenly 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 brands where everybody, you know, the big guys want to buy them because they can see that we had created things that 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.

Yeah, I mean, this is the story of what's been called disruption, right? Which is like two people like you and Gary could hang out in your kitchen and make this iconic brand. But huge multinationals couldn't actually do that because they weren't as nimble, right? They couldn't move as quickly because they had huge enormous businesses. 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're listening to the voice of the people and they're listening to their own inner created voice. And it's that relationship that brings the product to market faster and quicker. This is so like you, I mean, I think you open the store in 94.

Within like six months, you hit your five-year revenue goal. And 15 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 might have done that at this point, right? You would have had investors coming in. And at that point, your revenue was fueling the business, right? Your cash flow was allowing you to develop, you know, more products and to expand, I guess. Is that sort of how it worked?

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 £342, 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 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 it was like 3.30 in the afternoon. We opened the door and they all came rolling in and we could see it for adding up.

And within 10 minutes we'd done it. 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 her stocking. And it was an 895 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 Don Perrienne champagne. And I said, Merry Christmas. And he looked and he said, you're never going to make a great business man by doing that to everybody.

He had no idea, but it was him that took us over. Put you over the million. That's why. 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 a 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? Yeah. 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 50 plastic bottles a time. We were buying two to three thousand plastic bottles at a time. And at this point, you still had one shop on Walton Street. And at this Did you start to think we should open more shops or were you focused on just that one shop on Mall Street? 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 L.A. to, I mean, you name it. They wanted us. They wanted you to open your own shops or they just wanted to import your products and sell it at their shops? No, they wanted to import the product. So what happened was Dawn Mello, who's one of the great iconic shopkeepers of our time. And at that time, she was

heading a department store in New York City, which is the number one, Bergdorf-Gubman. And by that point, we had a lot of a New York, L.A. 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 Tehran and said, if you want Jome Alain, you have to build us a shop. And of course, we were these two tiny, we had no money, we had no budget. And 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 all 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 use our own packaging. So you basically walked out of Bergdorf-Goodman holding a Joe Malone bag, not a Bergdorf-Gidman bag. Yep, yeah. Wow. And, I mean, let me tell you, 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, Goebbner, you know, 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 Joe Malone bags up and put the black ribbon 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 Joe Malone bag. for the month and the six weeks run up to opening in Bergdorf-Gubman. And by the time we did, everybody had seen these Joe 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 call it Walking the Dogs, and we still do it today.

Just have people carrying empty Joe Malone bags down the street. Yep. And it worked. It was genius. I have to imagine that you were constantly getting pinged by people who wanted to franchise this business, who were saying, hey, we want to invest, we want to open up Joe Malone shops all over the U.S., and how are you dealing with that? I mean, first of all, was that happening?

Yes. I mean, yes, it was happening, but it didn't feel right. 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. 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 did you decide to do that? Because I found all three and I knew ahead. 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 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. Lauder. And when I sat with Leonard Lauder, 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 I needed something that I knew was going to be for the rest of my life. 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. So you are now, Joe Malone is now owned by Estee Lauder and you are essentially an employee of Estee Lauder. You become the creative director.

of your brand, Joe Malone, and you're still running it, and it sounds like it didn't feel a whole whole lot different. And I guess within two years or three years of that happening, you are diagnosed with breast cancer, which I'm sure came as a shock. You were just 37, 38 years old when you got that diagnosis? 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, 18 months, too. 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 done all the tests, and I looked at the nurse's face 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 know, I'm terribly sorry to tell you, but it looks like you have a very aggressive form of breast cancer and 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, my, 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 then I suddenly realized that someone had given me a death sentence. And it started to sink in, and 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 husband and I just remember thinking, God, I'll never see him grow up.

I'll never see him go to school. I never seen him got a uni. I'll never see him get married. You know, there 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 in the end of my bed. I remember thinking, Joe, you've never listened to a word anyone has ever told you in your life. Why on earth are you going to listen now? When we come back in just a moment, how Joe 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. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2002 and Joe has just received the news of her cancer diagnosis. And almost immediately, the Lodder family connects Joe with a specialist in New York to start her treatment. So we all moved out and we ran the business from New York City and Gary would commute back some forwards. Josh was tiny. So he was very easy to maneuver around. But I was really suffered.

I just suffered so badly through it. But I kept telling myself that Grinembert, which I had Grin and Barry Norton just was the most incredible, incredible doctor. This is your doctor. Sloan Kettering, yeah. 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 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 I was, the chemo had really taken over by that point. And then one day Larry walked in and said it's gone. Wow. It's time to go home, go back and live your life.

And I said, well, it come back and he said, I don't know. But you have to go back and live your life. And my life was back in my hands again. and I knew that I had to do something remarkable with it. 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... Sure does.

And you came to 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 went through this experience.

I think, well, the chemo had taken my sense of smell. I hadn't told anyone that. And I couldn't smell properly. And that was your superpower, your sense of smell. It was. And I hadn't told anyone that. at all. I was too scared to even admit it to myself. And I was standing in the shop in Madison Avenue and I just didn't feel as though I belonged anymore. I was so concerned for everybody involved. I didn't want to do

anything wrong with the Lord of Corporation and the Lorders because they'd save my life. Yeah. 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 I explained to him and they all tried to change my mind and said please think again, think again and I was so determined guy to walk away 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 why? Because I started to realize that it wasn't a job, it was my best friend Yeah, it was your, it was you, your identity It was everything It was about the creativity

And I realised that I would never Create Fragrance again And I would never do all the things that I loved And everybody was running and getting everything ready And Gary was doing all the forms 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 I put the bottles on the shelf for the last time. And I realized who an earth was I ever going to be again?

What had I done? What had I done? But I still couldn't smell. And I'd signed a five-year lockout. A non-compete. A non-compete for five years. Yeah. 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 smell before. And of course, that's when I started to really suffer from anxiety. This is an important point because I think a lot of people hear stories on our show like yours, right, where people sell their businesses, whether it's Bobby Brown or Kate Spade or Marcia Kilgore. And, you know, 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, you know, travel and do whatever she wants. But people forget that businesses 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 eating pizzas and making lotions and getting clients. And it was all those things that made your life, gave your life meaning up until that point.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd laughed with the business. I'd cried with it. I'd built it. I'd seen it. 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. What I now know, I was going through the five steps of grief. Yeah.

I was grieving for something. But, you know, and people listening to this 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 signed five years of shackles. And it was the most miserable five years in my life. So how did you, I think, you call it your wilderness years, or it's been called that. What did you, how did you navigate

those five years? What did you do? 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. 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 lot. 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 get ready to run again it's time to do something yeah 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 willington boots on and I was filling bottles of chili sauce with this family. And you were doing this show for aspiring entrepreneurs on the BBC. And one of the aspiring entrepreneurs was a family that was making like a hot sauce, right? Like a chili sauce. 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 mind up that day standing in that garden that I would try one more time and see if I could do it. while you were kind of helping them out, you all of a sudden had flashbacks to the excitement of filling bottles up with stuff. Yeah. It just took me, just took me back, I think. It was this, it was just filling bottles. It was that whole simplicity and that simple acts, but it reminded me of who I'd been, who I was, and who I really wanted to be again. 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 Amos 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 Joe Malone for the next business that you wanted to start. I couldn't use Joe Malone. 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 Joe. So that was, I 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, Mum, why don't you just call it Joe 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, I think he was at that time. So 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. Wow. So you launched this new company, a fragrance company called Joe 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,

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 Love's, 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, I'd done this? Why have you, why have you

put yourself in this position, Joe, you idiot? What did you hate? I, what? I don't... I hated the way it looked. You hated the colors? 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 almost like a teenager that's dyed her hair red

and comes into dinner screaming. That was the only way I can destroy it. That's what it felt like that I'd done. The packaging was all over the place. The team weren't trying. I mean, it was such a mess when I think about it. And I thought you got to open tomorrow morning and you're going to have to face it and you're going to have to work through this. Because if you really want to do this, you're going to have to eat a little bit of humble pie and you're going to look a bit of a fall 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. Really? Yeah, I regret. So 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. Yeah. 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, 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. And I opened the door and I said, you'd 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. It was a flower shop that you worked at as a young woman. It was the delicatessen. 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 it.

I just couldn't believe that I was back home. We spent a year doing the shop, creating it. And the day we opened the door, the same, the cue was there as I came, as I pulled up on that first day. It was happening again. Wow. So it really took you opening that shop up to get people to know about the brand because I guess you were doing.

pop-ups and you were sort of selling it at different, you know, cosmetic stores and, but really the shop was your best advertisement. Well, it always is 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, 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, we've got to do it differently. 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, I'd grown up. I was a different person. My my life felt very different and my creativity was much raw and much braver than it had been, you know, five, 30 years previous. And he said, what does that mean? And he looked at it. 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, no, it hasn't got a food license. We're not doing a brasserie. There's 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. And you can go in, just to describe how. how it works. You go in and you get a bunch of different things to smell. Yes. So 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 tajine. And your bath cologne, though, is in the tajine. You have

chopsticks 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 appear from valutei guns. And we paint you with hot paint brushes 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 our fragrance. 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 spouse? But I've done a lot. I've done a lot. I'm sure. I'm sure this happened to you and Gary, you know, you know, 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 skill sets and you both respected each other's strengths and weaknesses. And that was really what enabled you to be successful. We haven't always respected each other's opinions. We've had some really humding. Actually, where businesses are concerned, 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. We're best friends. We trust. If we stood back to back, we know that each other would look after each other. But sometimes it's hard.

You know, sometimes I remember in the very beginning, I would talk all weekend 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, 9.30 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. Yeah. Joe, you had been through the process of starting a business and a successful brand and then selling it and watching that brand grow, right? All the resources that Estee Lauder had to really scale that brand.

Joe Malone is at shops all around the world. and it's ubiquitous. With your brand now, with Joe Loves, what? I mean, do you have those kinds of ambitions? Do you see it as a global brand one day? Or are you kind of happy with where it is now and sort of? 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. 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 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 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 fragrance.

So I think Joe Loves is all about this springboard of creativity. It allows me 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 laboratory to say, say what if? I'm looking at it right now on the internet. 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. They always 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. 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 honorarium. But, I mean, not just a big deal 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 time. But I realize 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

and that tenacity and that strength and that resilience is a valued part of a human being. 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? 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. I'm afraid

nothing happens without hard work and determination and that resilience. My intellect, my intelligence, 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. and I do believe in a higher power. I believe that I was given a second chance at life to do something remarkable. And I'm determined to fulfill that. 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, 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 what are we going to do? Hello, Joe. It's Guy Raz here. Hi, Guy. How are you? Oh, man. What a question these days. Yeah, that's for sure.

So, as you briefly heard at the beginning of the, episode. I spoke to Joe 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? The tapas-inspired fragrance bar and just you being with people and talking through personal care, how are you starting to think about what that could look like without the face-to-face interaction? action. I miss that human to human touch, because I am very much a people person, but we have already looked into having masks and visors. We're not taking anything away, by the way,

from the front line. We absolutely wouldn't be doing that. But when those doors open, I want my team and my consumer to be safe. 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, takeaway 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 going to be a challenge for, not just for the beauty industry, but I think every industry is going to change now. And this will be with us a long time

in the effects that it has had on the consumer. There's always going to be that, am I safe? Yeah. Yeah. So people need to believe that difficult times come, but they pass. And I was talking the other day and 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 beat it. And I have the same mentality right now. Joe, you have dealt with like insane adversity. In here you are again. I mean, 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? 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 I'm

For me, that fact the whole world is going through this, we've all got to get it through it together. It's kind of easier than if it was in a weird way than if it was just your country. But I think it's okay to cry tears, you know. I think it's okay 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. That's Joe Malone. She's the founder of Joe Malone, London, and Joe Loves. By the way, one of Joe's many fragrances is called Number 42, named after the flower shop on Elizabeth Street, where she worked alongside Justin DeBlank back in the early 1980s. 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 HIBT at NPR.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. Our show was produced this week by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rumpteen Arableu. Thanks also to Sarah Sarasen, Julia Carney, Candice Limbott, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR. I listen to Bullseye because Jesse always has really good questions.

What did John Malkovich wear when he was 20? I don't know how to describe it. Bullseye. Interviews with creators you love and creators you need to know. From maximum fun.org and NPR.