If there’s one thing they teach you in business school is that you DO NOT startup a company in a mature, highly competitive sector with extremely powerful and entrenched superpowers ruling the market. But in 2010, Joanna Jensen did exactly this.
With little money nor relevant experience, she had the audacity to create a skincare brand for babies & children with sensitive skin or eczema which was catalysed by her frustration with what she considered were subpar products in the market. In the process she would be taking on multinational behemoths including Johnson’s Baby and Unilever.
Remarkably, Joanna’s startup, Childs Farm, rewrote the business school textbooks and became the no 1 brand in the UK only 9 years later which is an extraordinary achievement. Even Elon Musk needed 10 years to get Tesla to market leadership in electric vehicles.
Joanna’s earlier background actually offers little foreshadowing about her eventual blitzkrieg to the top of British retail. She started as an interior designer and then somehow made a pivot into investment banking in the 90s, one of the most sought-after careers of the time. She then enjoyed a 15-year period as a high flyer between Hong Kong & the UK. It would be the birth of her children in 2006 & 08 that would eventually lead to her breaking an entirely new path for herself, her family and millions of children & parents around the world.
Joanna returns to Manchester to talk about her incredible entrepreneurial journey, lessons she can share and her unconventional recommendations for making the UK the best country in the world for entrepreneurs.
