I know how a business is run but that’s not what I enjoy. My husband and I have been business partners for a long time. He does the left brain, analytical stuff and I do the right brain, creative stuff. A year ago I started to work on both sides of the company [Jo Loves] because it was growing at a rapid rate and it made me unhappy. I’ve since made the decision to just immerse myself in the creative side.
Everyone assumes creativity comes naturally to people. It doesn’t with me. I had to work hard at thinking creatively. It’s a strange sort of process I go through. I get inspired, put myself in the footprints of whatever or whoever has inspired me, and then allow my own creativity and imagination to take over.
In a shop in New York recently, I found a range of sunglasses with different coloured lenses, like pink, blue and green. It made me wonder whether something would smell different if you looked at it with coloured glasses on. I brought them home and for the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with them. When it recently snowed heavily I had all the glasses outside in the garden. I sprayed the snow with scent and put the glasses on and smelt it to see what would happen. When I wore the pink rose-coloured glasses, the snow smelt different. Experimenting like that is how I stimulate my creativity.
My father was an artist, and when I was a child I would help him prepare his canvases and wash all his brushes for him. The thing I took from him was a love of art. He was a marine water colourist towards the end of his life, and I would recognise my dad’s seas anywhere in the world. He’d paint a brilliant sea if he’d had a row with my mum because his anger and emotions would pour out on to that canvas, and that’s exactly what I do. I feel things. I feel my fragrances. I can’t draw or paint but I can create fragrances. My nose is like my paintbrush.
Fragrance is a means for me to communicate. There are paintings that have stopped me dead in my tracks throughout my life, like Toulouse-Lautrec’s Ballerina, Monet’s Water Lilies and Klimt’s Woman in Gold. When you look at a painting it’s telling you a story. Scent is a language. I’m talking to you through the sense of smell.
I walk with my dog every morning and on our walk there is a point at which there is this incredible scent. For the last six months I’ve been trying to figure out what it is. It’s like a very green lily of the valley but fresher and slightly earthy. I don’t go out looking for fragrances. What happens is a note will stop me, it might be a single moment and I look up and I will capture everything I see.
Maybe because I’m dyslexic, I like routines. I don’t like to control creativity, but you still need discipline, otherwise you’ll go all over the place. My dad was an artist who liked to live in chaos but I need order.
When I first came back after five years [after leaving Jo Malone to launch Jo Loves] I thought the ability to create would come back naturally. It didn’t – I had to work at it, and that was a good lesson. On a family holiday at that time I was very anxious because I wanted to create a fragrance again and I felt I couldn’t. I’d go for walks on the beach and one morning there was a baby stingray swimming alongside me in the water. I stopped to have a look and it stopped too, and then swam all the way down the beach with me as I walked. I felt such a oneness with the animal. I looked up and captured everything I saw in one note and that became Pomelo, the first fragrance for Jo Loves. That’s that what I feel about creativity. We don’t own it and we don’t have a right to it. It is a two-way relationship. Since that day I’ve never taken it for granted.
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