A 10-minute walk from our Sydney meeting spot, there’s a store with Jo Malone’s name above the door, filled with fragrances that she created, and it’s the last thing she’s interested in talking about.
The British entrepreneur and former beautician sold that brand name and those formulas, created in her London bathroom, to US fragrance giant Estee Lauder in 1999 for an undisclosed sum.
Jo Loves founder Jo Malone at Chiswick restaurant in Sydney.Credit: Nikki Short
That nearby store may as well be worlds away as Malone steadfastly steers the conversation towards capturing lightning in a 50ml perfume bottle, for the second time.
“You can’t guarantee success because you’ve been successful before,” Malone, 60, says. “I’m happy with what I created then, but I have no wish to return to that.”
Instead, Malone is focused on Jo Loves, a fragrance industry second act that began when her sense of smell returned after the chemotherapy she received for breast cancer and the 2011 expiry of her non-compete clauses.
The clauses were gone – along with the cancer, thankfully – but so was her name.
“I knew I wanted to start again, but what was I going to call myself?” Malone says. “I was Jo, but there was Jo over there that belonged to a powerful company. And they paid a lot of money for it.”
It was a strange situation, but one familiar to a number of other designers and beauty entrepreneurs.
In 2020, Bobbi Brown chose the name Jones Road for her second cult beauty brand, launched at the end of a 25-year non-compete clause with Estee Lauder, which had paid $US74.5 million for her eponymous label.
When Kit Willow was ousted from her label Willow in 2013 by the Apparel Group, which had bought a majority shareholding in the business two years earlier, she settled on Kit X for a sustainably minded return to the fashion racks in 2016.
Jo By Jo Loves, the top-selling fragrance from the British beauty entrepreneur Jo Malone.
Designer Peter Morrisey waited 14 years to regain control of his name after selling a majority share to his friend the late Rene Rivkin in 1997. The business had been passed from Oroton to M Webster Holdings before returning to its namesake.
Malone simply dropped her surname and added some heart. “My son suggested Jo Loves,” she says. “That night we dropped £1 million on securing the global copyright.”
Being front and centre above fragrance names Pink Vetiver, Pomelo and Amber, Lime and Bergamot, was not Malone’s priority. Building another global business one fragrance at a time was the focus. But her name, even if it was only half of it, helped.
“I was so desperate to create fragrance – I didn’t care about my name,” she said. “I didn’t need my name on the bottles. I’ve never needed my name on anything, but I’m happy with my creativity. It’s other people that want my name.”
Proving her point is Jo Loves’ top-selling fragrance, Jo By Jo Loves, a cocktail of grapefruit, orange, lime and spearmint. Her name appears on the bottle three times.
“For me, it’s not about a product, it’s about the creative process,” Malone says. “I look at the fragrances as people. I know their characters, their personalities.”
Malone in 2001 with her former business at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills in the US.Credit: Getty Images
“Golden Gardenia can be really tricky. Some things don’t like to work with her. Jo by Jo Loves is easy. She’ll walk in, she’ll talk to anyone, she’ll do anything you ask her to do.”
More difficult than Jo By Jo Loves’ personality was getting the business side of Jo Loves started.
“The first two years were tough. The packaging was wrong, the distribution was wrong, everything was wrong. Apart from one thing – I got the fragrance right.”
After five years, the business began to make a profit, with seven Jo Loves stores globally, including Sydney’s Strand Arcade, and is available in 96 other stores.
Just don’t expect Malone to let go of her second business name should another beauty giant open their chequebook.
“Where is the magic of life if all I did was walk in the same footsteps again?”
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