Coutts Woman

From rock star wife, to organic life

When Jo Wood’s husband dismissed her idea to transform her hobby creating organic bath oils into a small business, the wife of the Rolling Stone thought ‘I’ll show him!’

‘Ronnie said ‘You’ll never get that together’ and he really didn’t think I could, which just made me more determined,’ recalls Wood, whose range of organic bath and body care products is called Jo Wood Organics.

By her own admission, Wood has been ‘completely obsessed with organic food since 1991’ after being wrongly diagnosed with Chrohn’s Disease, but she was always frustrated in her search for organic beauty products.

‘They were always mother nature or too scientific looking,’ explains Woods. ‘So I found an old recipe book and started fiddling about, mixing seven drops of this with two drops of that, in a spare bathroom that I made into a special lab.’

Her celebrity friends loved the bath oils she produced, but it was Wood’s son Jamie who suggested she ‘do this thing properly, but I had started to think that I needed a hobby now that the children had grown up.’ 

Wood approached a friend in the beauty business who suggested she needed a cosmetologist and introduced her to Dr Colette Haydon. ‘We went to her lab, I put on my white coat and we came up with a couple of scents that I really liked,’ recalls Wood. A perfumery transformed the scents into a more sophisticated, refined aroma ‘with a middle note’, says Wood.

The packaging was more problematic. Wood had an idea in her mind, but the first designer failed to produce it. Others thought the initial packaging was fine, but Wood brought in a second designer.

‘People were saying ‘you can’t change your mind now’, but I had to be true to myself,’ she explains. ‘And the new designer understood what I wanted immediately. Each bottle is an Art Deco design, yet reminiscent of Biba.’

Simply developing the scents’ formulae and getting the packaging right took two years. ‘I thought I would have it out in six months,’ admits Wood. ‘I have learned patience, but it was wonderful when we could see light at the end of the tunnel.’

Armed with a few sample bottles, Wood went to see the beauty department buyer at Harvey Nichols. ‘I thought I have to take it to someone, let’s take it to Harvey Nicks. When he said he would love to stock the product, I nearly died. It was such a wonderful day. I was screaming outside the shop on Knightsbridge.’ It is now stocked in all Harvey Nichols branches, New York’s Bergdoff Goodman, nine Neiman Marcus stores and other shops around the world.

She is particularly proud that Jo Wood Organics was funded by a bank loan, from Coutts, rather than her husband’s money.

Wood admits that her celebrity credentials opened doors for her, but adds: ‘Some people didn’t take me seriously. They thought I was a rock wife. But I worked really hard at it the whole time. It is my baby. I couldn’t put my name to something I wasn’t involved with.’

Initially, Wood admits she was overwhelmed in business meetings and too shy to express opinions. ‘Now I go in and crack jokes,’ she says. ‘Every day, wherever I am in the world, I have updates on how things are going with the company. When I was on tour last month they sent me samples of candles for our Christmas range to try out.’

Wood concedes that the products, with bath oil retailing at £65, will never be mainstream. ‘I think the company will remain small scale, and anyway I would hate a big company to come in and take it over and substitute my organic ingredients.’

She is particularly proud that Jo Wood Organics was funded by a bank loan, from Coutts, rather than her husband’s money. ‘Ronnie is very proud of me,’ Wood laughs. ‘And he always uses my range – they are the only beauty products we take on tour – but he puts it on by the handful. I have to tell him that it’s not necessary!’