Wonder Woman — Jo Fairley

GREEN & BLACK’S CO-FOUNDER, SPEAKER AND LEADING ENTREPRENEUR

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Jo Fairley writes regularly for Telegraph Online, among her media portfolio. Here are some of the articles she's written about women and business and/or entrepreneurialism, appearing under the ‘Wonder Women’ experts section. Simply click on the article title below to read. Others can be sourced at the Telegraph.

Why you should think about women's achievements today (your own included)

Construction needs to ditch its macho image and nail the gender imbalance fast

Women do need to man-up and stop using the word 'just'

High-achieving women have these 6 personality traits. Do you?

Mark Zuckerberg is right - personal goals are great. So what should you be striving for?

My Bizhub: Inspiring Entrepreneurs: an interview with Green & Black’s co-founder Jo Fairley

Digital detox baths: are we finally ready to be cleansed of our tech addiction?

How to have a sense of humour in the office (even when everything's gone wrong)

TWITTER

Josephine Fairley

SWIPE FOR VEGGIES! Once upon a time, craigsams and I bought a beautiful woodland with seven acres of fields attache… https://t.co/EccF22YSy8
about 2 weeks ago
Josephine Fairley

SWIPE FOR VEGGIES! Once upon a time, craigsams and I bought a beautiful woodland with seven acres of fields attache… https://t.co/Mw13lr9cOk
about 2 weeks ago

INSTAGRAM

Well that’s the weekend sorted, @muchadobooks - reading and cooking. I love how serendipitously the tones of my #bookstack are all of one colour palette... Anyway, these should keep me out of trouble (except the Apéritif book which could have the opposite effect...) Last week I tootled over to #muchadobooks and picked up four months of books they’d been putting aside for me. I don’t buy books from Amazon (except in occasional research emergencies when writing an article). I see a book I’d like and order it through Nash & Cate at Much Ado. Maybe they cost a couple of quid more (maybe) but the thought that I’m helping to keep our high streets alive is far more important to me - and that’s leaving aside the work these guys do to support foodbanks with books. Happy Easter weekend, everyone #shoplocal #reading #bookworm

I love #instagram for so many reasons, not least for showing me we sooooooo need a windowcleaner now that (with any luck) the windows won’t be lashed by salt-laced gales for a few months... I also love these (now somewhat tattered) seagull-print towelling curtains. Paula and I wrestled over them in a junk shop here in Hastings the summer before she died. They were a quid. She won. But never got to put them up. So I did get them, in the end, and they make me think of her and smile every time I go in this bathroom, resisting the temptation to dry my hands on them (which I suspect other people do, hence their threadbare state...) #shabbychic

My favourite #muscari paradoxum - like blue velvet and slightly fragrant (though you have to get up close & pretty personal) #inmygarden

When you walk into your husband’s playroom (for Pilates, playing of loud music, dancing, mixing up some extraordinary home-made perfumes, drumming and other boy stuff) and discover a love rival... #scarydoll

Gosh if any of you can get to see this, go, go, go!!!! @amandaacland6720 and I were lucky enough to watch Maggie Smith on Saturday @_bridgetheatre night recounting the memories of Goebels’s secretary at the end of her life - an absolute bloody tour de force that rightly earned her a standing ovation after an hour and thirty-five minute solo performance which she managed somehow without a single sip of water!!! #topnightout (& we loved The Bridge Theatre - first visit and will SO be going back, not least for delicious bar food by @st.john.restaurant )

Having this florist’s shop 20 yards from my front door has given me 10 years of joyous window swooning and flowers for our house and as gifts for friends... This is particularly lovely with standard #gardenias #muscari #auriculas @shimizuflowers

Yesterday I took a day off - A DAY OFF, actual bunking off! - to take @corianderstuttard and my nieces to The Nicest Bookshop in the World a.k.a. @muchadobooks in Alfriston. Being perishing cold Cate & Nash kindly found us a spot to eat our picnic and plied us with the most delicious gluten-free brownies on the planet (I need this recipe - or maybe I don’t!) and the girls spent the book tokens I gave them for Christmas which Much Ado make out of vintage book covers and altogether it was a very lovely outing (and so I didn’t feel totally guilty about bunking off, even though I worked last Saturday, I signed up with my new dentist in Eastbourne on the way home so this was barely out of the way...!) 😍

Border also coming along gorgeously #spring #inmygarden

The first of what will probably be quite a lot of #tulip shots... 🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷#alitexgreenhouse

Every cloud has a silver lining - kinda... Some darned fox (I think it was a fox) dug up ALL my Exotic Emperor tulips - well, snapped them off, digging from worms or somesuch in the pot. As they were broken at the base, they were perfect for a vase on the hall table. Even though I plant hundreds of the things I am actually really reluctant to PICK my tulips... But of course they look gorgeous. Grudging thanks, Mr. Fox. (But don’t do it again.)

A little corner of the garden, waiting for #muscari paradoxum to flower in the white pot. Here’s that red (right) that I was thinking of painting the summerhouse windows (against dark green...)

SWIPE FOR BLANKIES! 22 years ago I commissioned a beautiful personalised baby blanket from @charlottecotblankets for my darling first (step)granddaughter, Saba Sams (a.k.a. @lolasams ). Thrilled to find out that #charlottecotblankets are still thriving and to be able to order a (blue, this time) blanket for that baby’s baby. A month old today, good at both sleeping and eating (like the rest of the family). Happy Month-Day Sonny Patrick Henley Holt ❤️❤️❤️

SWIPE FOR SPRING! @greatdixterofficial Spring Plant Fair is on again today from 11-4 and if you love gardening and you live within, oh, 50 miles of Northiam in East Sussex, you really should go. Dozens of small and interesting nurseries (I always go to get all my sweet peas because the sweet pea guy’s are soooooo much more abundant than any I’ve ever managed to grow...) And we bought wild garlic to naturalise under the damson tree (ransoms and damsons!) and a horseradish to keep in an old pot which it’ll eventually bust out of, and more. And your entry ticket gets you into the gardens of Great Dixter House itself, which is literally my favourite and most inspiring garden in the world to visit and I pinch myself that it’s just a 20-minute drive from home. It is ablaze with eye-popping spring colour. My season ticket will be well-thumbed this year, I hope. Well done to the plant wizard @fergusmustafasabrigarrett and his team for all their hard work. It is a joy...

And she’s BACK! Twice a year @raretealady and I swap over this gorgeous green statuette of a girl mysteriously holding two balls behind her back, which we bought together because we BOTH wanted her... Now it’s her six-month stay with me. This year the handover took place @johnfriedauk where I was getting a fabulous hair overhaul from Caroline & Josie, kindly dropped off by Emily from @rarecharity . She spent a jolly afternoon looking at the goings-on - but that perfect Bob is in need of no trim...

Thank you @kplunketthogge for a rather fabulous and filling book launch for your wonderful @pavilionbooks book about #thai home cooking. Swipe for pictures of probably the best book launch shoes EVER by @charlotteolympia and a photo of Kay and her beloved sister, who shared a childhood in Thailand. (Sadly didn’t get a shot of her husband @fredhogge in his fetching tropical shirt) Kay is a friend I made through #instagram - because that’s just as good a way to meet nowadays as a party - probably better because you can see that you like just the same things, at a glance... Our first encounter face-to-face was a lunch in my garden for which she arrived like the best guest ever armed with lethal cocktails, and got us all delightfully drunk. I have plans to make Kay’s condensed milk ice cream this weekend, a recipe from this colourful book for which I may never forgive her... Congrats and ❤️ Kay xxx

#nofilter the garden at 7am - very green and VERY perishingly cold (fingers crossed the froths of plum blossom survived the freezing overnight rain)

This story will only really mean something to #hastings folk, but yesterday, getting off the train to catch the Tube at London Bridge, I spotted a cobbler. ‘Ooooooh, a proper cobbler,’ I thought. We have been bereft (in many ways) since our beloved John the Cobbler died last year and I personally have quite a few pairs of shoes in need of TLC, being someone who likes to get my favourite things mended time and again, only loving them more as the years go by. So I went in. ‘A proper cobbler!’ I exclaimed, and got chatting. ‘My cobbler died,’ I explained. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Hastings.’ ‘I knew John the Cobbler,’ the cheery chap replied. ‘I was at his funeral.’ ‘So was I.’ (Well, us and at least 600 other people.) Turns out this man, who had a cobbler’s in Battle, actually tried to take over John’s shop - and how wonderful that would have been. But instead, he’s at London Bridge, and I will be taking several pairs of shoes into him for fixing when I go up to London. His name? John. (James Shoe Care is a chain.) I think only a small ‘c’ for cobbler, though. There could only ever be one John the Cobbler...

So the shed needs some TLC and I am crowdsourcing paint suggestions... Might sound weird but I am currently thinking (for complete change) dark cricket pavilion green with Farrow & Ball Blazer red windows. Too weird?

#nofilter Went for an end-of-day walk yesterday with @craigsams and @theenduringgardener (& her husband Andrew) to celebrate the clocks going forward. (Still light at 7.30!) All agreed we’d never seen gorse flowering so splendidly. Ironically there was a huge outcry a few years back that the gorse had all been cut back between the #firehills and #hastings . It is back and better than ever... #yellow

SWIPE FOR VEGGIES! Once upon a time, @craigsams and I bought a beautiful woodland with seven acres of fields attached, four miles from where we live. We planted an orchard with many different types of fruit, which thrives. We got the whole thing organically-certified by The Soil Association. We’ve had a lot of wonderful family times in the woods themselves. But we never fulfilled our dream of growing veg in the fields. We tried ourselves. Hands-on. Failed. We got together a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project with local people growing their own (& some left over), but it fell apart. Then we heard about something called The Ecological Land Co-op, which matches would-be growers with people who want to see their land used productively. Stephen & Hélène are a young couple who were previously @goldhillorganicfarm and are just so, so brilliant with veg. They tamed the brambles, dug up the couchgrass and now have 90 no-dig beds producing just the tastiest veg imaginable which they supply locally to restaurants, Fairlight Post Office, @hillcoulter and @trinitywholefoods among a growing number of other outlets. It’s so fresh and good it almost GLOWS. (They also now have a few rescue hens.) Yesterday on the warmest, blue-skied day, they celebrated the first birthday of @stonelynkorganics and dozens and dozens of customers and neighbours turned up to hear all about it. This is food as it should be enjoyed: a hop, skip and a jump from #fieldtoplate . Congratulations, Stonelynk Organics! 💚🥦🥕🌽🥒🥬🍏🍐🍎

PODCAST

For the Guardian's Meet the Mentors podcast series Jo gave her tips to milliner Sahar Freemantle on how to make it big. Listen below...

THE STORY

The Story of Green & Black's: How two entrepreneurs turned an ethical idea into a business success

By Craig Sams, Josephine Fairley

Contact Jo Fairley