From Investment Banker to #1 Skincare Brand, with Joanna Jensen

It started with two children and a bath

Joanna built the brand around a problem she actually had. She told me most brands founded by women start that way, and put a number on it: 98% of them are created because there is a need the founder cannot find something for. That reframed the whole thing for me. It isn’t a business idea in the way I had been imagining one. It is a problem you have personally that nobody has bothered to solve.

She also said it can start from a hobby or a part-time job, which is the bit I wrote down.

Two numbers that do not sit together

65% of consumer spend is currently in the hands of women. Venture capital, which is money invested in businesses, sends about 1.8% of itself to female founders.

Joanna put those two next to each other and left them there. I have thought about the pairing a lot since. The people doing the buying are not the people getting the funding.

Get it done by the end of the day

This is her principle and it came out of her grandparents’ antiques business. If someone asks you to get it done by the end of the week, you get it done by the end of the day. It sounds like the sort of thing people say until you realise she has run a company on it.

Her answer to what success means was being intellectually curious and always learning, which is not what I expected from somebody who built a market leader.

Something I didn’t expect from making this podcast is how willing people are.

I’ve asked founders running hundred million pound businesses for an hour of their time, and most of them said yes to someone still at school with a microphone. Not all of them. But more than I thought.

The worst that happens is nobody replies.