Jo Malone CBE (Commander of the British Empire), considers her sense of smell her superpower. Believe it or not, the fragrance icon once lost her ability to smell, but when it came back, it was like one of the X-Men: it had mutated into something far greater and more powerful than it had once been.
“In the UK I’ve had my nose tested with dogs that can smell out diabetes and epilepsy and things like that,” she says. “And it’s a super step up. So I have this incredible sense of smell and I can memorize smell as well very, very powerfully.”
It’s a superpower that served her well when she established her own brand, Jo Loves, in 2011. (She sold her eponymous brand Jo Malone London to Estee Lauder in 1999.) Malone was in the Philippines recently to open the first Jo Loves store in Glorietta 4, and told us the love stories behind her own brand and its fragrances.
“If someone had said to me two years ago, ‘You'd be standing here opening the most beautiful store,’ I'm not sure I would have believed it, but here we are,” Malone said.
Holding her autobiography Jo Malone: My Story, she showed us photos from her childhood, when she modeled in a commercial for baked beans. “I came from a family background where there wasn't a lot of money,” she revealed. My mom was in the beauty industry, and my father was a brilliant artist. He was also a magician and a huge gambler. So my Saturday jobs were going to the market with him and selling his paintings.”
This sparked Jo’s love for the marketplace and being a shopkeeper. “I was also the magician's assistant,” she continues. “My father taught me how to read marked cards in a poker game, so I would stand in a corner of the poker room, letting my father know what everyone had in their hand. And of course my father would always win.”
You can see Malone’s magical background in her consummate showmanship when speaking about her brand and its products. Everything is done with a flourish and flair. “I have a great belief in life that nothing is ever wasted,” she says. “I left school at 15, I have no qualifications, never been to university, but I did have an entrepreneurial heart.”
Malone built her first business when she was just 19 years old. “I made face creams and delicious body lotions for massage. All the products were made in my kitchen on a little stove with a saucepan, plastic jugs, and a typewriter where I would type out the labels. Because I'm dyslexic, you can imagine how everything was spelled. But my business grew and grew and grew.”
It grew so fast and became so successful, in fact, that within five years of opening her first Jo Malone London store, she sold the brand to global giant The Estee Lauder Companies, Inc. “When I signed that deal, I thought I was going to stay forever and ever and ever. But life doesn’t always give you what you deserve or want.”
In the third year of her steering her brand under Estee Lauder, Malone was diagnosed with breast cancer and was given nine months to live. “I had a little boy seven, six years old at the time. And a life as a 38-year-old woman who really didn't want to die.”
So she went to New York and fought for her life. “I was one of the first women to take chemotherapy in a very different way. After one year of chemotherapy, major surgery, losing my hair, losing my confidence, I also lost my sense of smell.”
She didn’t tell anyone that the drugs had taken away her sense of smell, but was lost. “How on earth was I going to head a global brand and not be able to smell? I could have bluffed it, I was good at what I did,” she admits, “but I didn’t want to live my life as a lie or pretending. I wanted to be truthful to myself and the people around me.”
So she left Jo Malone London. “A lot of people think I'm still there, but I’m not,” she declares. “I had a five-year lockout deal, which prevented me from entering the industry or forever using my name again on a beauty product. And the cruelty of this whole thing was, one month into leaving Jo Malone London, I woke up one morning and my sense of smell had come back overnight. But boy, was it different. It was really different and really strange.”
The superpower had kicked in, but it took almost five years before she could act on it. One day Jo was sitting at the kitchen table with her son Josh and husband Gary Willcox, and said she wanted to start again. “I was too young to sit down on my dreams and not fulfill them, and I was too old to change my whole direction,” she says. “And so that evening round a little kitchen table eating some spaghetti, Josh Willcox put his hand in the air and said, ‘I know what you should call your company, Mum. You should call your company Jo Loves, because fragrance loves you, and you love it’. And our company was born that evening just with three people and a whole heap of dreams.”
The following week they invested a million pounds sterling into trademarking Jo Loves around the world “because we knew that if we didn't trademark it, somebody else would.”
The first few years were agony. “Business isn't always easy. Life isn't always easy. We don't always get what we deserve. My first packaging was awful. I was trying to be so different from anything I'd ever been, I forgot who I really was.”
Jo Loves’ first fragrance was Pomelo, the iconic “matriarch” of the line. Malone created her after vacationing in the Turks and Caicos, where she would walk down the beach every day thinking of what to create. “One morning a baby stingray joined me, and she swam by my side as I was walking down. And then right towards the end of the beach she swam off. And that little stingray implanted an idea within me, and Pomelo was that providence.”
Upscale British department store Selfridges were ready for Malone’s comeback, but before they struck a deal, Jo told their head buyer: “If I coat you from head to foot in Pomelo, and by nine o’clock the next morning, if six people haven't asked you what you're wearing, then there’s no deal.”
The next day the buyer told her that way before nine o'clock, 12 people had asked her what she had on, wherever she went. “And so we opened our first Jo Loves store in Selfridges as a pop-up,” Malone relates.
At present Jo Loves has 16 unisex fragrances. Along with Pomelo, other standouts in the citrus category are Jo by Jo Loves, Malone’s signature fragrance and everyday go-to; and With Love from Positano, which encapsulates a vacation she and her family took on Italy’s Amalfi Coast.
Among the florals, No.42 The Flower Shop is the must-sniff, because it captures the scent of the florist where Malone worked as an assistant when she was just 16.
Among the fruity scents, Mango Thai Lime was inspired by a Thai holiday where they served Malone mango with lime and black pepper. (Personally I’m hoping she takes a holiday in the Philippines and will be inspired to create a scent — maybe with our sampaguita, which she told me she hasn’t been able to smell yet but would like to.)
Jo Loves also has spicy scents. Noteworthy is Red Truffle 21, which celebrates the 21st anniversary of when she opened her first Jo Loves fragrance store. Built around a note of truffle, it’s unexpected and unique but very wearable.
One of Jo Loves’ innovations is its tapas bar, where they don’t serve food but scent cocktails designed to give customers a different, more creative perspective on fragrance. “It's based upon three courses and cultures from all over the world,” said Malone, who whipped up a frothy “vodka martini” with Pomelo shower gel mixed with Mango Thai Lime in a cocktail shaker. “You can do this yourself, so you will become part of the creative process,” she says.
Next she put White Rose and Lemon Leaves in a Turkish tagine, which distilled the fragrance into a powerful elixir. “I'm an ambassador for creativity for the United Kingdom,” says Malone, who was given her Commander of the British Empire title by Queen Elizabeth herself. “And I was asked to create the Union Jack in scent form.”
Fortunate to have visited her late majesty’s rose garden in Buckingham Palace, Malone decided to blend white Norma Jean roses with lemon leaves for a slight bitter element and created the fragrance now simmering in the tagine. “It's such a beautiful, delicate fragrance but it's not sticky sweet.”
The third tapas course came from a velouté gun that chefs use to create sauces and mousses in the kitchen. Malone invented a gel that she offers in her Fragrance Paintbrushes, Jo Loves’ most beloved product, which you can paint anywhere on your body (even your hair). She painted The Beauty Edit founder Nicole Limos-Morales, noting that “Nicole was the first person ever to visit us and say, ‘We need Jo Loves here in the Philippines,’ so she’s a very special friend to us.”
Now Malone is working on scent storytelling and other chapters for her tapas bar. “My mind works like that — I love to find games and twist them and turn them — and I’ve just discovered AI and Chatbot. And I find that fascinating, if I put stories into them. And so I'm learning about AI and how it can assist scent.”
Can’t wait to see what Scent Superwoman Jo Malone CBE will invent next.
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The Jo Loves flagship store is located in Glorietta 4, Ayala Center, Makati.