Jo Malone created one of the world's most sought after luxury fragrance brands eponymous with her name. In 1999, Jo sold her beauty business to Estée Lauder Companies and remained Creative Director until her complete departure in 2006.
Two years later in 2008, Jo was honoured with an MBE for her services to the beauty industry.
Aware that her passion for fragrance never left her, it was falling in love with cooking that inspired Jo to play with food, flavours and colours that she had never used before. Being back in her kitchen, blending ingredients by hand and excited by the process, Jo soon realised that her instincts were prompting her to create fragrance and she found herself asking “could I do it again?”
Possessing an inherent entrepreneurial flair, a head full of ideas and the desire to build another business, Jo decided to follow her instincts and return to the beauty industry. In November 2011, five years after leaving the Jo Malone brand, she launched her new brand JO LOVES to global expectation.
Today, the JO LOVES collection includes eight fragrances and two innovative layered scented candles. In October 2013, Jo launched her first JO LOVES store in Belgravia’s Elizabeth Street bringing beautifully blended products to life, experienced within an innovative and entertaining retail environment. Coincidentally it is the same store where 16 year old Jo had her first job as a florist!
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Highlights
Designing fragrance is who I am. It makes my heart beat
I had gone to the flower market in the morning, been told off about something and tipped a bucket of water over the manageress and was fired
If I find that every door is being closed in front of me, you know what? I'll climb over the wall, I'll dig a tunnel, I'll find the back door.
I've got Pink Vetiver, Queen Orange with Corander, Fresh Pomelo, Mango with Thai Lime…
…from a very young age I had that survival instinct and I knew that if I didn't sell a painting, or I didn't sell a face cream, we wouldn't eat.
Having dyslexia caused me to look at life very differently, but you can put me with a whole bunch of academics and I will often get to the destination faster than they will, because my mind is wired to find solutions.
People don't see all my failures; all the grazed knees and all the sorry moments when I go home and cry into my soup.
Let your feet leave the floor. You know what?They'll always come back down at some point.
Trust me, my CV doesn't look good. I have no qualifications, I have no work experience. But I have built a global brand.
I love packaging. I mean, it's the seducer
I thought I'd arrived. You know, I'd get on a plane – I'd be sitting in that nice little front part of the plane; I'd go and stay in hotels and be upgraded into beautiful rooms…and it was when I was diagnosed with breast cancer that my life changed.