The formidable force behind Joh Bailey’s 40-year empire
The media loves stories about the ubiquitous female board member or the C-suite woman. Koch is a powerhouse of a very different kind. A genuine role model in business, yet outside her thousands of adoring clients few would know her name. The mother of three daughters took a risk on a small business, on a man she barely knew, on herself. She tells me she doesn’t like talking about herself.
“I’m a doer,” she says. “I don’t talk about what I’ve done or what I’m doing.”
Koch has done plenty. She’s the co-founder with Joh Bailey of the chic Joh Bailey hair salons in Sydney. A few weeks ago, Koch and Bailey celebrated 40 years in business together. Bailey was, as usual, front and centre in the media.
And why not? The rockstar hairstylist is a magnificent and natural performer, not just with a hairbrush and a pair of scissors. Over the years, parts of his flamboyant life have featured in the pages of fashion magazines and gossip columns.
The blonde dynamo is the woman behind the counter, behind the man. And that’s the way it has always been. Koch is the business genius behind this Australian success story.
Sydney philanthropist and charity fundraiser Skye Leckie describes meeting Koch 40 years ago as “the most terrifying woman I think I’d ever met in my entire life”. Let’s just say Leckie is no shrinking violet.
In those days, the big famous Sydney salons were run by men. Names such as John Adams and Lloyd Lomas evoked Warren Beatty’s 1975 movie Shampoo.
“There were no females in the game. They didn’t have skin in the game,” Leckie says. “So what she did was very brave.”
It’s impossible to pull Koch and Bailey apart. A story about her is, inevitably, a story about him. And vice versa. But publicly, at least, Bailey has always been the star of the show.
After leaving school, Bailey, from a conservative family in the burbs, discovered a new world. Two buses and two trains from his childhood home, this new world was Double Bay. In the 1980s it was buzzing with glamour and adventure. Beautiful women. Gay men. Money. Real diamonds. Manicures. Businesses booming. Bailey says he was blown away, too, by the Jewish women in the salon, all impeccably dressed, sassy and strong. “They never washed their own hair!” he recalls.
Barely in his 20s, Bailey had worked at both of Double Bay’s big salons. He was sacked from John Adams for using the wrong perm solution on a customer’s hair. He was shown the door from Lloyd Lomas, the coolest salon in town in the 80s, when news spread that he had itchy feet.
That same day, he was scheduled to do the hair of a young Koch, who had been to the salon a couple of times.
Instead, the 23-year-old hairdresser went to her house and unloaded his woes. Koch was 27, Jewish, the child of post-war Polish migrants. Married at 21, first daughter at 23, another daughter at 24, then another daughter 10 years later.
Each threw in $5000, rented a tiny space in what was then the Cherry Lane building, now Pet Barn, on the noisy main road that winds around Sydney’s sparkling harbour on the east, from Watsons Bay, through swanky Double Bay, snaking into the city.
That day, though they didn’t know each other well, Koch displayed her signature decisiveness. They would open their own salon.
“I flew into gear,” Koch tells me. “Neither of us knew what we were doing. Neither of us had any financial nous. No idea.
“But we weren’t scared,” she adds quickly. “He could do hair. I could engage with people.”
Bailey could indeed do hair. He was already known for blow-drying hair into a seamlessly tousled, bouncy, shiny style. Gone were the days of prim little “dos”.
“I wasn’t the only one to recognise this technique that Joh had with his blow-dry,” Koch says, patently more comfortable talking about Bailey than herself.
“Joh revolutionised hairdressing. You would walk out looking naturally fabulous, not looking like you’d been to the hairdresser. Like you were born with this slick straight hair, or bouncy hair, always falling in all the right places.”
One day a glam woman from Yves Saint Laurent came in, she mentioned Bailey to another woman, who mentioned it to another; soon enough, word of mouth spread the news that the man behind the famous “blow” was out on his own.
Fashion editors, stylists, models, TV people were flocking to Joh Bailey. Back then it was just Bailey and Koch, and a young junior, Gina, who would stay for 20 years.
Within five years, Koch and Bailey moved around the corner to the up-market Knox Street. Overnight they were a success, enmeshed in the impossible glamour of the 90s. Overnight came the challenges too.
“We were excellent at bringing in the money, but we were not geared up for how to manage it. We were spending too much, we were financially reckless,” Koch says of those early days. “The accounts were coming in and we couldn’t pay them.”
Koch hired a financial manager but says she soon learned a lesson. “I realised from hardship that you have to run the business, you have to understand the finances, how it all works. It was a very, very sharp lesson for me.”
More strife was around the corner. Their business came to the brink when eight staff up and left to join another salon close by. “Everybody wanted what we had,” Koch says, and “overnight, the salon’s income dropped by half”.
Koch’s brilliance comes from owning mistakes. She says staff could see that she and Joh were flying high, the money flowing in, working hard, to be sure, but also having a lot of fun, dazzling fashion shows and parties, mixing with big-name clients.
“You can’t neglect your staff,” Koch says. “They felt they were the major contributors to our success and perhaps we didn’t value them in the way we should have.”
Another lesson learnt. Still, managing staff – especially young staff – can be a challenge, Koch says. On her way to the salon one Saturday morning years ago, she walked past a young trainee hairdresser asleep on a park bench near the salon. He hadn’t made it home after a big night out and didn’t look in any state to be working. “Get up, get to work,” Koch said. He did.
Joh received the same sharp instruction some mornings in those halcyon days. “There were days back then when I had one client, two, three, four, five, waiting for Joh,” Koch says. “I’d ring him and say, ‘Where are you, where are you?’ He’d say he’d been dancing all night or whatever it was, ‘let me sleep’. I’d say, ‘You have to come in, you have to.’ And he did.”
Bailey adds his own story from those even earlier days in their tiny first salon. Koch would call in and say she was going out to lunch, going do this or that, something at school, maybe. “And I’d say, ‘You’re not going anywhere,” Bailey recalls.
“They are the yin and yang of each other,” says Leckie, who has watched their partnership flourish over decades.
The breadwinner in her marriage, Koch was never the big party girl, even after her marriage broke down. Not like Bailey who loved partying until the early hours – often with Leckie, travelling in limos to famous Sydney nightclubs like Rogues.
“There were times when I’m sure Marilyn didn’t appreciate me,” Leckie says, laughing.
But Koch and Bailey are more alike than not, both glamorous yet authentic, hardworking, warm and very funny.
“We beat to the same drum,” Koch says of their 40-year business relationship, surely one of the country’s most enduring small business success stories. Their triumphs – and failures – tell a story about modern Australia, a country built on the back of hardworking businesses navigating ever-increasing regulation, staffing challenges, economic slowdowns.
There have been scandals, too, and a business flop when 19 stores were rolled out in Myers. But plenty more triumphs, including a who’s who of celebrities, socialites and musicians, local and overseas, from Kylie Minogue to first lady Annita Keating for her Vogue cover to Paris Hilton and Princess Diana, mega weddings, every major fashion show. Joh Bailey was the official hairstylist at the 2000 Olympics, too.
Koch can be seen most days sitting behind the front counter of the flagship Knox Street salon conducting the orchestra of clients, upcoming appointments, hairdressers, apprentices, deliveries and demands.
Bailey’s chair is closest to where Koch sits. They don’t make five-year plans, no meetings between them. They work more like an Italian family, says Bailey. Shouting and disagreements? Sure. Loyalty. In spades.
Many of their staff have been working with them for most of their adult lives: Maria, 40 years; Diane, 33 years; Amy 29 years; Claudia, their in-house manicurist, 27 years; Chris, 24 years; Jasmin and Mel, each 23 years; Yo Yo, 17 years; Maggie, 16 years. That tells you a lot about the place.
To get a real grip on Koch, Bailey is key.
The afternoon he and I speak, he’s dressed in black. Perfectly tailored trousers, black T-shirt; Bailey could have jumped off the page of an Armani ad as he talks about his relationship with Koch and why she is his “rock”.
In the 90s Bailey had a very public relationship with the ‘It’ boy of the Australian fashion world, Peter Morrissey. Here was Australia’s first celebrity gay couple, Morrissey doing his raunchy fashion, Bailey sprinkling his magic, styling hair for legions of famous faces and the models at the nation’s biggest fashion shows.
The heyday of Bailey’s fame was a hectic stretch of highs and lows. A-list parties, some drugs, but more alcohol, a public and messy break-up with Morrissey, a stint in rehab, a drunken scene at a Bali wedding that was splashed over the Australian papers.
Who did he turn to when life got tough outside the salon?
“Marilyn. Always Marilyn. And to this day. She’s the most loyal person in the world to me.”
Their relationship has lasted longer than many marriages. To understand why they remain a force of nature, we come back to the force behind those heels.
Many years ago, Bailey was sitting in a prison cell. It’s 1am. He calls Koch, distressed and drunk, says he has been arrested.
He had been to one of Sydney’s most glamorous annual events, the Black & White charity ball, in full dress-up that night. He’d be cancelled today if we mentioned the get-up, so let’s simply mention the dreadlocks. Bailey crashed a newish BMW that Koch had owned and given him.
What did the scariest woman that Leckie has ever met say to her drunken 25-year-old business partner? “Well, how dare they, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Soon after, he could hear the efficient clip-clop, clip-clop of high heels on the hard floors of Darlinghurst police station. The heels presaging her steely attitude to any crisis – and Bailey was released.
Behind this couple is a wicked sense of humour. When there is a brief gap between his customers, Koch and Bailey can often be seen next to one another at the front counter. They’re giggling, whispering to each other about something that has happened, like a couple of naughty teenagers.
There has been plenty to talk about. A physical fight between a couple of female clients. A can of Coke thrown over a woman’s perfect Joh blow-dry. Police were called.
One older woman who came in once a week for a “do” – no tousle for her – had died with rollers in her hair, sitting under one of those hideously big domes-on-a-stick hair dryers from the 80s. No one had a clue until the dryer was lifted and her head flopped forward. An ambulance was called. That happened when Bailey was in another salon, but the stories all run into each other.
They laugh when they separately tell me a story about Bailey, when he was 23, armed with a new driver’s licence and a new VW Beetle. When the car broke down, the boy whose father had told him to do a trade when he left James Ruse High School – carpenter, brickie, even mechanic perhaps – had no clue what to do.
Somehow, Bailey managed to pop the bonnet.
“I took one look inside and thought God! What do I do?” he tells me. “l left the car in the middle of the road, walked to a phone booth and rang Marilyn.
“I said, ‘Now Marilyn, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but it’s my car, it’s the engine – it’s missing.’ ”
Bailey had run out of petrol. The engine was in the boot.
Today Koch manages more than 50 people, manicurists, make-up artists, brow lash and laser girls, manicurists, extra receptionists – and of course, the main event, the hair stylists. The hub of the business has always been in Double Bay’s Knox Street, a classy salon where Koch and Bailey’s different styles merge perfectly.
There’s a young, hipper place called Joh around the corner, which is classic Koch business strategy. When Covid massacred foot traffic at their other big salon in nearby Westfield Bondi Junction, Koch asked the owners, French property giant Unibail-Rodamco, for a discount on the rent, which had always been tied to the level of foot traffic. They refused.
Koch packed up the salon, returning the place to its original condition, pulling out sinks and tables, at great cost. A different hairdressing business moved in, had to refit the place, and went bust six months later.
“What a waste,” says Koch, feeling the pain of a fellow small business owner.
The Joh Bailey team at Bondi Junction had always worked to their own style and rhythm. Most didn’t want to work at Knox Street. Koch was patient, keeping as many on as she could, and when a place came up around the corner from the prized Double Bay store, it became the Joh salon. The vibe is different, hipper. Many of the Bondi Junction team regrouped there, enticing a younger generation of Joh Bailey clients.
During school formals season, which has just passed, the girls from nearby swish private schools fill both salons on a Friday afternoon. It’s a frenzy of brushes and blow-dryers and hair spray, chatter and anticipation. The next generation of customers is being primed in the Joh Bailey style.
This week there’s a new range of sassy hair products. The classy shampoo bottle slides out of a crested white capsule, with this blurb on the back: “colour-safe shampoo that washes away build-up, yesterday’s drama and anything unworthy of a proper blow dry”.
Washing away dramas has been an important part of the Koch-Bailey success story. In Bali for a wedding in 2017 between two staff members, Bailey got into an argument with the groom. The groom’s mother asked Bailey to leave. He did, of course.
Bailey was mortified. He rang Koch. He apologised to the bride. But the episode was leaked to the gossip columns, and a more salacious tale was born.
A twist came later. The husband and wife divorced some years later. Koch and Bailey ended up buying the salon the husband had set up in Double Bay, and the Joh salon was born.
Plenty of women today start a small business. Koch was an early starter and today she is a role model for the risks, the rewards, the lessons learnt and the adventures had along the way. She loves her clients, her staff. “Every single one, including the cleaners who come in at night, add value to our business. And I treat them accordingly. I can’t always facilitate all their needs, some can be demanding, some are entitled, but today I’ve learnt what I can and can’t do.
“It’s a whole different world today, and I don’t sweat the small stuff any more.”
Despite plenty of challenges, Koch says the Joh Bailey salons have never been more successful – with no thanks to today’s business environment. Koch says her business is drowning in complex regulations, working out awards and sky-high energy prices. Just imagine what a business could do in a business-friendly Australia.
Riding high then, what is her greatest reward?
She doesn’t hesitate. Her three daughters: Tahli, Michelle and Stephanie. “Every day they remind me that every bit of hard work and financial stress was worth it.”
She knows they are proud of her. “And I am equally proud of them. They have the strongest work ethic. They are each successful in their own right. They all have the ability to be financially independent. And that I see as my job done.”
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Most women slip off their heels when sitting down on a sofa for a chat. Marilyn Koch is one of a kind. She slips the hellish heels on, tossing the sneakers into a tote by her side. She has agreed to talk about her business, her life. To anyone who knows Koch, the high heels help define her. How high? Three-inch. There are no half measures with this formidable woman.