British scent icon Jo Malone CBE talks to Richard Alvin about the launch of Jo Vodka, a new era of liberation, and a love of flying that has carried her from a Grasse flower market to a skydive over the desert.
There are people who build a single great thing and spend a lifetime protecting it. Jo Malone CBE is not one of them. Having created two of the most recognisable fragrance houses in the world, then walked away from both, she now spends her days in Dubai, paper scent strips in hand, building something nobody expected: a super-premium vodka.
“For the first time in my life, I feel incredibly liberated,” she says. It is a striking thing to hear from a woman whose name has been a luxury byword for three decades. But liberation is the thread that runs through everything she is doing now, in the laboratory, on the runway, and at the open door of an aircraft 13,000 feet above the ground.
A nose tested against detection dogs
Malone is refreshingly unbothered by her own legend. She is not, she insists, a trained nose. “I have a natural ability. In fact, I have had my nose tested against medical detection dogs and I am on a par.” Severely dyslexic, she describes smell as the compass that has governed her emotions and steered her through a world that did not always make room for the way her mind works. She also has synaesthesia, so she sees colour when she smells.
The love affair began, fittingly for a woman who now lives out of a suitcase, on a trip. “I fell in love with fragrance when eating steak frites with rosé wine in the middle of a flower market in Grasse, France. I am still in love with it today.” She talks about ingredients the way other people talk about old friends, of how you can make “the orchestra of orange blossom just sing forever.”
That instrument has been taken from her twice. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003 and underwent chemotherapy, she lost her sense of smell entirely for around six months, until one day it simply returned. During the pandemic the opposite happened. With the world’s everyday smells switched off, no bakery, no coffee shop, her nose became almost painfully acute. “My home became my laboratory, and I worked my nose every day for about two to three hours. I created some of the best things during that time because it was like looking down the lens of a telescope.”
Why Jo Malone launched Jo Vodka
Which brings us to the vodka, and to the question everyone asks. Why spirits, and why now? “Smell and flavour are not that different,” she says. “One is on your palate, and the other is through your nose and memory.” The idea came from her friend Fran, one of the partners in the venture, but the leap was hers to make. “Everyone knows me for the sense of smell, but could I bring the spirit of Jo, my entrepreneurial creativity, into those other five senses? It has literally exploded my world.”
She approached the liquid exactly as she would a fragrance, which made for an entertaining first meeting with master distiller Joanne Moore, one of the first female gin master distillers in the world. “During the first tasting session I got out my paper strips, dipped them in the liquid and smelt them. She said, no, we taste. And I said, no, we smell. We both looked at vodka with different eyes.” The result of that gentle stand-off is a range built nose-first, where, as Malone puts it, “the two senses had fused into this third identity.” As The Drinks Business reported, the trilogy was developed over a year with the team behind G&J Distillers, whose distilling heritage stretches back to 1761.
The three expressions are, she says, three parts of her own character. “101, The Purist is uncomplicated and clean with a dry finish. 102, The Bohemian is about being barefoot on the beach, with citrus notes of bergamot, pomelo, bay leaf and yuzu. 103, The Artist recalls the King’s Road in Chelsea where I lived as a 16-year-old, from punk rock through to beautiful roses.” There are, she promises, three more to come. As Decanter noted on launch, 101, The Purist forms the base for the entire range.
The golden ticket: airlines and hotels
For a business travel readership, the most compelling part of the Jo Vodka story is where it is heading next, and Malone does not pretend otherwise. Asked about collaborations with airlines and hotels, she calls it “the golden ticket, without a doubt. Everybody is already on the phone asking what we can do together. So, yes, you will see it on airlines and hotels probably by the end of the year.” The brand is already stocked across more than 100 airport duty frees worldwide, a distribution footprint most new spirits would take years to build.
It is a smart read of the market. Premium cabins have quietly become one of the most competitive battlegrounds in luxury, where the right bottle on the trolley signals as much as the seat itself. Emirates, the airline Malone flies most, recently expanded its onboard spirits and beer menu with ten new premium selections, a reminder of how seriously carriers now take what passengers sip at altitude. A Jo Vodka pour, served somewhere over the Gulf, would slot neatly into that story. As Forbes observed, the project is less about chasing the spirits market than about turning memory into taste.
Dubai, disruption and the cure for fear
The move that reshaped Malone’s life was not professional but personal. Four years ago, in the grip of severe anxiety, she relocated to Dubai. “I would have a panic attack walking out the door, and I thought, I have got to break this cycle and stop being frightened of being frightened.” The pandemic had already taught her that a business could be run from anywhere. Dubai showed her a different way of living. She and her husband Gary, she says, “have stripped our lives right down to what makes us happy, which is working, creating and enjoying travelling. I don’t think I could ever live in one place again. Now, I almost love the disruption.”
That reframing of disruption, from threat to fuel, produced the best travel story she tells. “One day, I said to Gary, tomorrow morning, why don’t we skydive?” She did it almost as a dare to herself. “It was almost as if I had confronted something in myself. Sometimes we are so frightened of the thing that will liberate us. And once you stop fighting, you realise you are missing out on life.” For a woman who once could not leave the house without panic, leaping from a plane over the desert is a statement of intent.
Jo Malone on flying, wifi and the perfect business class seat
Get Malone onto the subject of flying and she lights up. “I love every single minute of it, it is an adventure. I will look out the window and dream, writing thoughts down in my notebook. Or I will watch a film.” She travels Emirates most often, and when she flies with Gary she favours “the two business class seats in the middle, it is like a little studio.” The privacy and theatre of a modern premium cabin clearly appeal, the same instinct that draws luxury houses to partner with carriers on everything from amenity kits to, perhaps soon, vodka. It is no accident that Emirates’ latest Bulgari amenity kits for First and Business Class trade on exactly the kind of sensory luxury Malone has spent a lifetime perfecting. She is just as happy, she insists, on a short hop. “I have also just travelled with easyJet to Greece, and it was a lovely experience.”
Her equanimity about the indignities of travel is bracing. A lost bag is “a pain, but it is a tiny part of the bigger picture.” A delay is “just life, isn’t it?” Her one true loathing is mundane. “The only thing I hate is when they turn the heating up. I like to be really cold.”
Then there is the confession that surprises. Asked whether she is for or against in-flight wifi, she laughs it off. “This is going to shock you, but I don’t have an email because I cannot turn a computer on, so I don’t care about wifi. I switch off on a plane.” In an industry obsessed with connectivity, here is one of its most successful entrepreneurs who treats the cabin as a sanctuary precisely because she cannot be reached. Her travel kit is just as pared back: a lip gloss and an old cashmere jumper with kimono sleeves that doubles as a sleeping bag. Her dream destination is India, “the colours and smells, from saffron to rose petals and sandalwood.” Next on the itinerary is a cooking course in Tuscany.
Exclusivity in the sky is now fiercely contested, as Travelling for Business explored in its analysis of which airlines really win on first class in 2026, and it is precisely this rarefied end of travel that a brand like Jo Vodka is built to court.
What else could i do?
She is, for now, content to stay in the vodka’s world. “I am learning at the speed of light, so I am happy in that space.” But she is not done. “I am never going to give up creating fragrances, but I think to myself, what else could I do? That is always the question in my head. That is where the journey starts.”
It is a fitting place to leave her: not at a destination, but at the start of another departure. Jo Malone has spent her life proving that the things that frighten us are often the things that set us free. These days she just happens to be doing it at altitude.
Jo Vodka is available at jovodka.com and across more than 100 airport duty frees worldwide.
