Jo Malone built her fragrance empire — then lost her sense of smell
The beauty mogul on starting again and why she’s left London for Dubai.
“Cheers, welcome to Dubai,” Jo Malone beams as she holds aloft a glass of chilled rosé. We are at the One&Only The Palm, a hotel on one of Dubai’s artificial islands. For the past four years Malone, 61, and Gary Willcox, 65, her husband and business partner, have lived in the city in a suite at another five-star hotel.
Dubai clearly suits her. Malone’s skin glows and she exudes confidence. “It is probably the happiest I’ve ever been in my life,” she gushes. “I can’t see myself going back to the UK. But you never know in life, do you? I got cancer at the age of 38. I didn’t anticipate that.”
Malone and Willcox arrived in 2021 and had intended to stay at the hotel they now call home for the first month, “but we’ve never left”, she says with a laugh. Her day-to-day life is work, lunch at the hotel, pool, Pilates and evening sessions of Rummikub (a tile-based board game) with “Gaz”, as she calls her husband. Later at her hotel she sweeps me past the beach and the garden, where she seeks inspiration for her fragrances. “I am like the artist in residence. I play around with scents and all the staff can smell me wherever I am.”
Malone has synaesthesia, a neurological condition that means she experiences smells that aren’t actually there when she sees any given object. Her sense of smell is almost as sensitive as a labrador’s, which is partly what propelled her to success with her brand in the first place.
She set up her eponymous luxury perfume, candle and lotion business at her kitchen table in 1990. It soon conquered the middle classes with fragrances such as Nutmeg & Ginger, and Lime, Basil & Mandarin. Having started out as a facialist, she had already built up an impressive roster of clients including Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Noor of Jordan. Malone did facials for Sarah Ferguson at Buckingham Palace, and she and Willcox were guests at Ferguson’s wedding to Prince Andrew in 1986. The duchess “was a great friend. We are still in touch,” she tells me. Of Diana, Malone says, “She was always on time, she always paid her bills,” before adding hastily, “So did the other one, so did the duchess”.
Malone sold her business to Estée Lauder in 1999 for an undisclosed amount but thought to be many millions. Afterwards she stayed on as creative director, designing new scents and curating collections until cutting ties entirely in 2006.
In 2011 she relaunched with Jo Loves, a more experimental lotions and perfumes brand. Still, she was dissatisfied and ambitious – which is what led her to leave London for Dubai. “I never had a gap year and left school at 15. We worked hard all our lives. And I thought, ‘I’m meant for something amazing in this world. There’s something inside me that says there is such a big chapter in your life and you will leave a legacy for millions’, and I haven’t yet achieved that.” Those signature cream and black boxes, emblazoned with her name, are apparently not legacy enough.
Malone says she and Willcox were naive about the sale of the Jo Malone London to Estée Lauder. She lost the rights to use her own name in a competing business, which she says feels like living with “a handcuff”. “I didn’t think of all the implications,” she says. “I was so busy creating, I wasn’t thinking of the business part. And actually when I sold to Lauder I thought I was going to stay working there forever.”
But cancer got in the way. In 2003, three years after giving birth to her son, Josh, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She says she was told, “Get your life in order, you’ve probably got about nine months to a year”.
Willcox was so stunned he collapsed on the doctor’s floor. The pair were all dressed up for a party but headed straight home to their toddler. “I saw Josh and I thought, ‘My god, I’ll never see you grow up’. It was horrendous because I felt I had everything in one hand and then someone had just pulled the rug and said, ‘No, that’s it, your life is over’,” she says shaking her head in disbelief.
Evelyn Lauder, vice-president of the Estée Lauder companies at the time, was the first person Malone called. Lauder later introduced her to a leading American oncologist, Larry Norton. Malone flew out to see him in New York and began a year of gruelling chemotherapy, followed by a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
Elton John’s 2004 White Tie & Tiara Ball at his house in Old Windsor was the moment Malone felt she was going to survive.
“I stood there with all my friends as he played I’m Still Standing and I knew cancer would be a chapter of my life, not the book.”
She and her oncologist remain friends, and earlier this year they met up in Dubai. “He turned up for dinner and he held court,” she says. “My friends were in such awe because this man has found cures for cancer and he cured me.” He shared something she’d never known. “You don’t know how close to death you were,” he told her. “When you came to see me, I was working on a treatment. You were one of 30 women and we knew that if we didn’t change the treatment for those 30 women, you wouldn’t survive.” Norton used a chemotherapy approach that was new, administering drugs at a level specific to the individual patient and the type of cancer involved.
“And today every one of those 30 women are alive because of that man,” she says. But there was a side-effect. As a result of the drugs she lost her acute sense of smell – and with it, her identity. Initially, “I told nobody, not even Gary or Larry. I felt very confused. I felt my personality had been ripped out of me. Who was I if I couldn’t smell?”
She returned to London, but the business had evolved in her absence. “I felt really disassociated from it.” She began to think seriously about walking away; Willcox was still UK managing director at the company and “really wasn’t happy”, she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t smell, I don’t feel part of this’. How could I carry on working and going, ‘Smells lovely!’. I couldn’t do that to them [Estée Lauder] or myself.” When she suggested leaving, she could see the relief on Willcox’s face. “I thought, ‘OK, it’s time to go’. My husband came back to me. He wasn’t grey anymore.”
Yet, a month after their exit, her powerful sense of smell returned “full on, overnight. There was this rawness to it, I could smell skin, animal, sickness, water, things that most people would never identify with”. She was filled with remorse. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, what have I done? I’ve left a business that is very lucrative, I’ve left my job’,” with all the restrictions that entailed. “If it had happened a month before I probably wouldn’t have made the call I did.”
During that five-year period she tried to focus on raising Josh, and on her relationship with her husband. She turns serious and lowers her voice. “I knew if I had stayed my marriage probably wouldn’t have survived.” But, lost and aimless, she was overwhelmed with anxiety and suffered a breakdown.
“I was so ashamed to seek help at the beginning because it made me feel weak,” she says, but after a year she started seeing a cognitive behavioural therapist. “She saved my life, without a doubt. She helped me understand who I was as a child and to unravel the hurt in my life.”
Malone grew up in a council house in Barnehurst, southeast London. She came out of a chaotic childhood to become a shopgirl, then a facialist and finally an entrepreneur. Her mother, Eileen, worked as a facialist at a skincare salon. Her father, Andy, was a draughtsman for a local double-glazing firm, a chronic gambler and frequently in and out of work, making money on the side selling his artwork or performing magic at parties. He was also a philanderer.
“My mum was married to a man who loved lots of women and when I think about it all – my god, what she must have gone through.” She was “the most amazing mum until she had a breakdown”. This came when Malone was 15 and was triggered by one of her father’s disappearing acts.
The family was poor and social services frequently knocked at the door. “I would go, ‘Dad’s not home’ – Dad hadn’t been home for 10 days – ‘he’s coming back later’. But we lived within a community on a council estate and it was very East End in many respects. They looked after us, they were all like family. I would call [to a neighbour] and say, ‘Auntie Maureen – social services’. She’d say, ‘Two minutes, darling’ and come running.”
At her secondary school Malone’s dyslexia went undiagnosed. “I was always last in the class for everything,” she says, draining her glass of rosé. But at home she was filled with purpose. “I would help make magic tricks for my father and prepare his canvases, make the cosmetics for my mum, wash the sheets ... do all those things.” She has fond memories of weekends at the beauty salon, where her mother’s boss, Madame Lubatti, inducted her into the world of fragrance and taught her recipes for her skincare products.
Her mother’s breakdown marked the end of her schooling. “I never went back because I was looking after my mum,” she says. By now Lubatti had died and her mother was the go-to beauty therapist in London, selling face creams to clients. Malone kept the business alive by making and selling the creams until her mother recovered. “I knew I had a place in life, I knew I was a hard worker, which I still am, so I knew I’d be OK. I learnt to survive and also raised my younger sister, Tracey, but I didn’t feel ‘Poor me’. I’ve never felt ‘Poor me’. Never, never, never. Because why not? Why not me? And other people go through far worse things in their life.”
The lessons of her hand-to-mouth childhood are ingrained. “I still have this thing that in the fridge you need two meals and should never throw away food. My son has been raised like that. Regardless, if it’s two green beans – chop it up, put it in an omelette,” she says, although with no kitchen in her hotel suite she isn’t cracking too many eggs these days.
At 16, Malone got a job as a florist in London’s Sloane Street. She hadn’t been raised in any religion but in her late teens she threw herself into Christianity. When she was 20 she signed up to a two-year Bible course. “I didn’t have any friends in London and I thought that would be a good place to start,” she says. On the course she didn’t only find God, she also found Willcox, a surveyor from the London suburbs. “I just thought, he’s so gorgeous, lovely and funny, and we fell in love with each other,” she says.
They married a year after they met in 1985. Nowadays they are more spiritual than religious. “He’s kind, smart, gentle. He can be quite pig-headed. You’ll meet him,” she says excitedly. That evening at the Palm’s restaurant 101, Gaz rocks up late for sundowners. Over dinner he is easy company, happy to sit back and let Malone take centre stage – even though, as she will be the first to tell you, he has been integral to her success. He has worked with her full time since 1993 and they recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. “From the day I married him it has been a happy marriage,” she says. “He was everything I wasn’t and I was everything he wasn’t.”
By the time Malone had met Willcox, her mum had left her father and followed her to London with Tracey. Malone and her mother set up together as facialists. After a stroke and a subsequent breakdown that led to her being admitted to a London psychiatric hospital, her mother grew resentful of her. “Instead of the creative, compassionate mum, I had an angry woman in front of me who looked at me and thought, ‘That’s who I should be’. I can see it so clearly now, but as a young woman it just hurt.”
One day, Malone was in the kitchen of her mother’s flat in London. Her mother started screaming and threw a jar of lotion at her. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I packed my bags and left.” Their relationship never recovered and her dad and Tracey drifted away with her mother – though after the sale of Jo Malone London she paid off their debts. “I’d stepped in many times. I was basically the chequebook for everybody, and sometimes, after a bit, that hurts.”
In her 2019 autobiography, My Story, Malone writes about the sale of the business to Estée Lauder: “I stood atop the highest mountain and realised that I had spent my whole life longing to hear Mum and Dad say how well I had done. Who knows, maybe that is precisely the reason why I was there.” Does she believe her family were secretly proud of her incredible success, despite the animosity? “No,” she says. “Actually, I don’t know. I think my dad was. My sister? Definitely not. And my mum? Definitely not.”
Years ago her father called her, out of the blue, and asked her to come and see him. “I said, ‘I can’t, I’m busy’. I thought, ‘Here we go again’.” But it turned out he was dying “and I never went. That is my one regret”. Was it anger that stopped her? “No, it wasn’t anger at all. I was busy. I was doing lots of things, I was spinning plates. It was, ‘I’ll go next week’.”
Malone starts dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “I don’t think I’ve cried in a very long time, my god,” she says before continuing. “My father walks through my dreams, like four times a week. I love him, he was a good man, a very good man. And I do love my mum, but my mum never walks through my dreams.”
Malone fizzes with pride when she talks about her own child, Josh, 24, an American university graduate who works as a maths teacher at a state school. He and her friends are all that she misses about England, but she’ll see them when she returns to escape the sweltering Dubai summer, when temperatures can reach 48˚C.
She doesn’t miss Britain’s tax rates and healthcare systems. She believes that of course people should pay taxes but they’ve been disincentivised by how it’s spent. “What happens is, you start to become disillusioned. And when you’re working hard, you’re paying your taxes, and then your child gets sick or your mother gets sick, and you take them to the hospital and you’re waiting three days on a trolley.”
But what about Dubai’s flaws, such as its human rights record and attitudes towards homosexuality? “I believe every person has the right to be whoever they want to be, but you think the UK has got everything right, and the US has got everything right?” she flashes back. “Well, honestly, you tell me a place you can go and live where you can tick every box 100 per cent. You have to respect that you are in someone else’s country but, you know, Sheikh Mohammed is just the most wonderful leader.”
Whatever Dubai is offering, it has certainly won her over. “They’re building infrastructure because people are moving here like there’s no tomorrow ... I was ahead of the curve. I didn’t move for all the obvious reasons. It wasn’t about Jo Loves. It was for me as a person. I moved for opportunity.”
Her golden visa entitles her to live in Dubai, which has no personal income or inheritance tax, for up to 10 years – “and beyond, I hope”. Those encouraged to apply for the scheme include doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, artists and musicians. The couple visited Dubai several times before they moved there. They chose the city for its year-round desert heat, short time-zone difference from Europe and its fragrant spices and smells. It was also a good location from where they could expand their business into India and China.
Malone says she plans to announce a new business venture – nothing to do with fragrance – that will launch this year, and she’s teeing up Jo Loves for a sale. She says she’ll stay on to work with the business afterwards. “I’m never going to leave her, because she’s the last child I’m going to have, starting from scratch, in that genre.”
This story is from the June issue of WISH.
