Founder & MD of JoJo Maman Bébé

Telephone calls will invariably double up with replying to emails and spending a day at a conference may be useful for learning new skills and networking, but will always result in some new product and design ideas which are sketched and scribbled as I sit listening to presentations.  

My health and high levels of energy have got me through difficult times. Both my children were born on a Friday and I was back in the office on Monday! I can sleep five hours a night, which means I can work 15 hours a day if necessary – just as well as in the early days of launching the business we couldn’t afford to outsource anything and I had to be the order operator, the designer and model, the marketing person, the complaints person – I’d have different telephones and one chair and would zoom on my wheely chair between the different lines.

My biggest obstacle when I first started was finding suppliers that would make small order runs of good quality clothing at reasonable prices. One day, by complete fluke, in a dusty corner of a Parisian trade fair I came across a group of Columbian exhibitors who had been funded by the EEC to promote trade from Columbia. I showed them the sketches of my collection, told them my budget and they welcomed me with open arms. The next week I was on a flight to Columbia overseeing the production of our woven clothes which were made with some of the loveliest fabrics. I worked with them for the next couple of years, but eventually brought the production back to Europe as that was what I had always intended. 

I started out as a sole trader making and selling clothes and have always been in business of one sort or another. I set up JoJo with the revenue from one of my earlier businesses, a French property agency in France. JoJo then was a tiny start-up compared to our size today – it was a big jump from being self employed and working out of my bedroom.

We now employ around 250 people between the two sites and our new retail stores. We have offices in Wales and a design studio in Clapham Junction so I commute between the two. I really like the combination of city and country. I leave London at 5.30am arriving at our offices two hours later as I hate sitting in traffic. Since I am only there one day a week, or sometimes every other week, I walk around the offices, packing area, goods-in and quality control departments talking to all levels of staff from the warehouse assistants to the cleaners and learn as much from them as I do from the management team.

I’m a very typical entrepreneur in that I’m the youngest in a large family of academics and the only non academic one and so felt I had much more to prove. I started working in pubs and set up small businesses as soon as I could.

My father was a diplomat and as a child I travelled to different countries according to where he was working. He retired when I was eight and the family then moved to Wales. I however, stayed in Belgium to finish the academic year, so by the age of eight I was already used to being very independent and doing my own thing. After that I moved to Wales which was a complete change of lifestyle. Having arrived in a welsh state school after living in Europe for a while, I was thrown into the deep countryside and found that to get on in life I had to be quite imaginative to get by – so I had to re-invent myself and came to be quite diligent. Possibly as a result of my childhood, having changed schools and countries every three years, I’ve found that now in my business, every three years I come up with better ideas, get more excited and eager to move onto the next challenge.

At 10am I go up to my office. I love my Welsh office – although we are on an industrial estate I have a view of the Transporter Bridge and a huge skyline – a luxury I don’t get in London. I tend to do school holidays in Wales and term-time in London as my two boys Ben, 12, and Toby, 8, go to school in London. Juggling the business with two young kids can be a real nightmare sometimes, but I’m determined not to let any area suffer. As well as being a good MD to the company it’s essential for me to be a good mother. In my free time I like to paint and occasionally I’ll buy some big canvasses from Trafalgar Square and my children and I will spend a day painting on them – there’s a sense of complete relief as you get so absorbed in the art work. Last year I took Ben climbing the Atlas Mountains. I love cycling and mountain climbing. We’ve got a great plan to climb Kilimanjaro when my little one’s old enough. Wherever I go I have a mini atlas in my handbag and whenever we have a quiet moment we’ll pull it out and think where we will go next. If you go to the Himalayas, the Atlas Mountains or Mozambique, going somewhere where you are unreachable on the mobile, it is a great sense of relief – I’m quite good at cutting off and not thinking about work all of the time, knowing that I have a great team who have the same aspirations as I do.        

Just before lunch I have a meeting with the directors where we review the targets and achievements over the past month. The directors have mostly grown with the company and have an indepth knowledge of all areas. Hence the pressures and responsibilities are shared between departments. Although I tend to make most of the final decisions, I am constantly working with my team on making decisions. This might be a chat in the corridor or in a pub – I find planning runs more smoothly over a vodka. I like to be kept in the picture and am always aware of how many orders are on the system and if we are running late with despatches. I am also quite happy to deal with disgruntled customers if they want to talk to the MD. I used to burst into tears when someone criticised the company but thankfully it doesn’t happen much anymore.

We are fairly obsessed with figures and we receive daily sales figures for each catalogue in our collection and each of our shops as well as updated P & Ls and cashflow forecasts, balance sheets, buying reports, negative stock reports, backorder reports, website statistics, ACD reports and KPIs, either weekly or monthly. My schoolteachers would be amazed that I can read a balance sheet, but I have learnt through experience and am able to take in relevant information quickly without having to spend all week number crunching.

At 2pm I eat lunch, which consists of a light bite in the staff canteen – all the managers eat there, making better relationships with the staff. Many of us are going through a ‘healthy eating’ obsession at the moment, so rice cakes, salad bags and herbal tea feature heavily.

After lunch I meet with my Financial Controller and Ops Director discussing areas of the company which need more help or where budgets are holding back expansion or customer service levels. Invariably budgets are broken, which tends to eat into our profit margins. Only by securing repeat buyers can we survive and grow.

All internal meetings are shelved if the phone lines or parcel despatch is queuing. The whole point of mail order is to take the orders and ship the goods in record time. We aim to have all orders with our customers within 48 hours, even though we tell them it will take 4 days to allow for delays. To achieve this we cross-train as many of our staff as possible, ensuring that on a busy Monday morning we can have the maximum number of operators on the telephones with the same people back into the warehouse in the afternoon when the lines quieten down.

The rest of the afternoon is spent on brand consolidation working alongside the graphic designers and marketing team – ensuring the brand remains consistent through all our selling media; the website, catalogues and stores. I try to spend time with the clothing design department –for the first few years all the designs were mine and I still approve everything we carry in the collection. I find that the best way to test our clothes is to try them on. Being 5’9” I used to complain to the garment technician that they were too short, however when I was in charge of production our returns rate for the clothes being ‘too long’ was far higher than it is now.

What most interests me is creating a company which will be around for a very long time, and offer our staff the security of employment. We do very much have a ‘job for life’ attitude for employees – it’s a big responsibility employing 250 people and I want to continue to build a fulfilled workforce who can enjoy a work/life balance.

At the end of a long day I return to London after the traffic has died down. Fortunately I quite like my car and I use the time to think and plan and think of where I would like to open our next store or how well JoJo would work internationally. With the launch of retail, which has taken much of my time with my store designs and project planning of the stores, I’ve brought in a new project manager so I’ve freed myself up a little bit to concentrate on international expansion.

One of our greatest challenges has been raising money to build a school in Mozambique in rural Africa working in conjunction with the local community. Once we’ve built it we will hand it over to them so we’re encouraging them to get involved by clearing the ground so it will be ready for us to build the school – our aim for 2008 is to get the school built by June 2008 so that’s going to be a huge challenge. So I expect I will be getting my machete out and leading the way!