OUR JOJO VALUES

The most useful thing a person can do in this world is to create ethical employment in a business environment which respects everything we hold important: Our people and our planet.

Our mission is to be the leading global mother and baby brand, offering high quality products at reasonable prices and putting people and the planet above profit. This is to be done within the confines of growing a commercially viable business for longevity, whilst respecting the needs of our customers, our teams and our suppliers.

It is possible to look at the world through this mantra, making decisions which do not always relate back to improvements in the bottom line profit. This is not a marketing ploy; it’s who we are. This is the ethos under which the business was launched, and how it continues to be run today. We have proved you can do well, whilst doing good.

JoJo launched as a one person kitchen table start-up. In the UK we have grown to be the leading boutique mother and baby brand with more than 700 employees. As we continue to grow and venture into new markets we don’t want to lose sight of our founding principles and small company values. We know this is a challenge, but it’s one we are prepared to fight for.

Our philanthropic projects and CSR extend into many areas:

One of our proudest moments was being nominated for a Working with Disability Award. Sammy-Jo one of our long-term employees who happens to have Down’s syndrome, put us forward for the Best Employer Award. She’s the one who deserves to be a winner for being such a great, loyal and hardworking member of the team. We are all different, that’s what makes the world interesting.

At JoJo we employ all sorts of people, from all over the world and a wonderful variety of characters. In fact I would say that entrepreneurs are definitely amongst the most eccentric people in society, so ethos of acceptance has to filter down from Laura our MD herself.

We believe that education and training are great ways to empower our teams. All staff in the JoJo family are offered the opportunity to undertake further vocational or academic education whilst working. We currently have a director who has just finished an Honors Degree course in Business and Psychology on a part-time basis, paid for by the company and numerous other team members taking diplomas and achieving qualifications in all areas, from retail to accountancy.

In the UK and Ireland, our retail teams are brought to head office for the first week of their training, which is followed up by a further period of in depth education in all aspects of the company ethos, operations and departments. Training includes subjects as diverse as potty training and nursing bra measuring to social media and computer science.

By working long term with our key suppliers across the world, we allow them to invest in their infrastructure and staff training, safe in the knowledge that the JoJo orders will continue as long as they maintain our high standards. Some of our factories have grown with us from tiny start-ups to employing hundreds of tailors. Some of our factories have been supplying us for nearly 20 years and we have built up close relationships with those individuals across the world. Our loyalty to suppliers is repaid time and time again in their loyalty to us. By working closely with our suppliers we do our best to be sure they run their businesses in an ethical manner and pass our stringent factory audits.

Our environmental initiative started long before the term was even part of common parlance. We have always worked under the ethos of “waste not want not”. In the early days of the company recycling and free-cycling were needed due to our being an undercapitalised start-up.

Today our initiatives are a little more sophisticated but with the same end gain; to preserve our planet for our children and theirs. As well as the usual ways to reduce our carbon footprint such as using sea freight in place of air, and introducing low energy lighting in our stores, we have some really exciting bigger initiatives.

Amazingly in the past we have been accused of using ‘ugly’ babies in our marketing campaigns. At the time we were upset by this snipe since the models they referred to were the children of our founder Laura, of friends, our teams and family. This criticism shocked us and made us more determined than ever to ensure that the models we use in our marketing campaigns were just every day, regular children (not super model babies).

To this day we continue to use the children of our customers, friends and teams. Laura’s boys are huge teenagers now, better suited to helping out in the warehouse than as models, but the tradition continues and our sweet little models come in all shapes and sizes, but we always try to make sure they look adorable. Every baby is beautiful to his or her parents and every JoJo

Our primary philanthropic venture is our house charity Nema Foundation, which works to reduce child poverty in rural Africa. We got involved because we wanted to be sure of how our donations to charity were well spent and did not trust the efficiency of some charities. We know that by having a house charity our donations go a lot further. For full details of the great work we do in Mozambique take a look at the Our Charity section of our website. In addition to working with Nema, we will always do our best to help support grass roots fundraising, especially in the mother and baby field. We are happy to consider requests for tombola or raffle prizes, although we are not generally able to give monetary donations.

We are also keen to help with local education projects and have supported First Story, a UK charity by funding a writer in residence at an inner city school, thereby promoting literacy and self-expression through the written word.

When the Nepal earthquake struck in April 2015, we could not help but get involved when one of our customers told us about the little school she helped to build and support through her charity Laxmi. Sam contacted us and promised to personally go out to oversee the spending of our donation by rebuilding her school which had been so badly damaged.

Our annual From a Mother to Another campaign aims to help vulnerable families both in the UK & Ireland and Syrian refugees living in Lebanon. We sort, pack and ship unwanted or outgrown children’s clothing donated by our customers to families in need, while at the same time working to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill. JoJo MD Laura Tenison personally visits the Syrian refugee camps to ensure that the most vulnerable children are getting warm clothes and shoes to wear. Please read our blog to keep up to date with the latest From a Mother to Another news.