Who is Jo Malone? Is she 30 or 60? Does she hail from Chelmsford or Chelsea? Is she even a real person or a made up name?
Everyone has their own perception of who the person behind this most exclusive, most iconic of beauty brands might be. Enter a Jo Malone shop and you’ll encounter a world of white, calm, minimalist chic. A place full of luxury lotions and potions, fragrances and candles, each of which may set you back a small fortune, but which ultimately feel priceless. How does that equate to the person behind it?
We’re about to find out this month when Jo – a 47-year-old mother-of-one - finally steps into the media limelight with a primetime TV programme. High Street Dreams is a four-part series that sees her help eight budding entrepreneurs attempt to turn their tabletop businesses into high street successes within just eight weeks. Jo helps by mentoring and guiding them through the world of branding and PR, and helping them pitch to major retailers.
Renowned as a private individual, taking part in something so mainstream surprised even Jo herself. "If you told me this a year ago, I’d have gone ‘Forget it, I’m not going to do that’," she laughs. "But I love that taste of fear in your mouth, love the challenge of learning something new and I love it when you build something that’s successful."
"I've never felt I can’t do anything in my life. But i remember the first few moments of filming, I though 'oh my god, I can’t do this. I really can't do this.'"
The TV series grew from a conversation she had with a producer friend last year. Discussing the British economic crisis, she felt the country needed to return to its entrepreneurial roots and help create new businesses in order to bounce back from the recession.
Unbeknownst to Jo, the friend approached the BBC with the idea. Within months, the series was commissioned, a top production team was lined up and filming was about to start. That’s when reality hit. With no previous experience in television, no understanding of how it worked, Jo began back-peddling. "I’ve never felt I can’t do anything in my life. But I remember the first few moments of filming, I thought ‘Oh my god, I can’t do this. I really can’t do this’."
A couple of things were at play. A self-confessed control freak, the unstructured world of TV was unlike anything she’d ever encountered. "I was like a fish out of water," she insists. Then there was her dyslexia. Before filming started, she had been handed a script brief.
"I just couldn’t do it," she says, "so I planned my runaway." The first thing she did was tell the producer ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve made a huge mistake and you’ve made a huge mistake in choosing me’. Promptly ripping up the script brief, the producer told her ‘We commissioned you, we commissioned Jo Malone, so just be yourself’. "And from that minute," she smiles, "I was."
But who exactly is Jo Malone? By her own admission, she’s ‘a council estate girl come from nothing’. Hailing from Bexleyheath in Kent, she originally left school to become a florist before following her mother into the beauty business, becoming a facialist, and later taking over her 12 clients when she fell ill in the early 1980s.
By 1983, encouraged by her surveyor husband, Gary, Jo rented a small premises in Chelsea to set up her Facial Clinic, while developing her creams on the side. Word spread about her wondrous personal touch and incredible creams, and soon 2,000 clients were lining up around the block.
