Jo Malone

An elderly man in the audience raised his hand in the Q& A session with Jo Malone, queen of the perfume world, and asked:
 
“When are you going to do something for men?”
 
“I already do,” she said and challenged him to come on stage.
 
Amid much laughter and cheering from the normally sedate Hay Festival folk he clambered up on to the stage and allowed himself to be sprayed with perfume by Jo Malone, except she was using a new technique which she calls painting the perfume all over the body with a cosmetic brush.
 
 
Now I don’t “do” expensive perfumes, or cosmetics for that matter, but there was something about the Jo Malone story that I found intriguing. It was the fact that her books smelt in the Festival Bookshop.
 
 
A quick flick through her biography revealed an extraordinary woman entrepreneur  - born dyslectic, she left school at 15 with no qualifications, worked in a florist then a café making sandwiches and within ten years had been offered a £1million for her perfume company which began with her making it in her kitchen in a couple of plastic pots.
 
 
Some years later she sold her company for an undisclosed sum to Estee Lauder.
 
Her special gift is that she has an extraordinary sense of smell. She once walked into a New York hotel while doing a promotional tour and she turned around in the foyer and smelt her husband- he was upstairs in the bedroom having flown in earlier to surprise her!
 
Her ability to smell has been put to the test alongside the country’s best sniffer dogs- and she was equal to them.
 

Now she is launching her second global brand of perfume – Jo Loves.