Jo Fairley, businesswoman

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jo Fairley is a businesswoman and writer. She co-founded the Green & Black’s chocolate company with Craig Sams, her husband, and has launched several other successful ventures since then. Jo did not enjoy school, left at 16 with six O-levels and learned shorthand and typing at a secretarial college. She got a job with a magazine publisher and worked her way up through the features department to become the UK’s youngest magazine editor at the age of 23. Her move into chocolate came when she happened to try a couple of squares of a sample sitting on the desk of her future husband, Craig Sams, a health foods entrepreneur. Jo decided that it was the best she had ever tasted. She bought two tonnes of chocolate for £20,000, using all of the proceeds from the flat she had just sold. She and Craig launched Green & Black’s in 1991 and sold the company to Cadbury’s in 2005. BOOK CHOICE: Edible: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Food Plants by National Geographic LUXURY ITEM: Her own pillow CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: I Wanna Be Like You by Louis Prima Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Sarah Taylor

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.8	Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Disks Podcast.
0:08.4	Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take
0:13.2	with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:16.4	And for right reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
0:21.1	I hope you enjoy listening.
0:30.0	Music Radio Music
0:41.1	My cast away this week is the business woman, Joe Fairley.
0:44.4	As the co-founder of Green and Blacks, she helped make having a conscience call.
0:48.4	The brand was the first organic chocolate and the first fair trade product in the luxury
0:52.6	market.
0:53.6	When it launched in 1991, she was already established as a successful journalist and magazine editor.
0:59.6	So she exchanged sifting through press releases, looking for the next big thing to writing
1:03.9	her own, making sure her chocolate was on everybody's lips literally and metaphorically.
1:09.8	Often described as a serial entrepreneur, her success with Green and Blacks was followed
1:14.0	by a string of best-selling beauty books, a bakery, a health centre and most recently,
1:19.3	a perfume subscription service.
1:21.4	She says, business is a born by putting one foot in front of the other and keeping going
1:25.6	to leave open the door of that shop or launch that website or whatever your venture is.
1:30.6	We started with an order for two tons of chocolate and then built up from there.
1:35.0	You just roll up your sleeves and do it.
1:37.6	Joe Fairley, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
	...

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