Ten years a B Corp, but JoJo Maman Bébé was doing it right long before that
JoJo Maman Bébé marked ten years as a certified B Corp this month with a limited-edition T-shirt, the 'Future for Everyone' Sunshine T-shirt, designed around ideas from its own young customers about what they love most about the planet. Twenty per cent of sales go to Action for Children. It's a lovely way to mark the anniversary, but the anniversary itself isn't really the story. B Corp wasn't the moment JoJo Maman Bébé started doing business the right way, it was the moment an outside body confirmed what the brand had already been doing since 1993. The certificate is the validation. The practice came first.
Last week at Ideas Fest, I heard the brand's founder, Laura Tenison, speak about how she actually built the business, and the origin story is worth knowing properly. She launched JoJo in 1993, aged 26, with £50,000 from selling a previous business, a property agency in Brittany. The idea itself came out of a genuinely sad moment: she was recovering in hospital from a head-on car accident, and got talking to a ward neighbour, terminally ill, who spent her time looking through mail-order catalogues trying and failing to find decent clothes for her own children. That frustration became the entire premise of the business.
She bootstrapped it for close to fifteen years before taking any outside investment, and her advice to entrepreneurs now is blunt: borrow before you sell equity. In her view, debt is nearly always cheaper in the long run than giving away shares to a VC. It is not advice every founder can take, borrowing still means paying it back, but it says something about how deliberately she held onto control of the business for as long as she could, growing it organically to around £71 million in turnover and roughly 99 stores across the UK, Ireland and the US before selling to NEXT Plc and Davidson Kempner PE in 2022, with the brand kept independent and its board intact.
The sourcing side of the story is just as hands-on. She started with a factory in Leicester, then expanded production into India and China, but always visited in person and always built close working relationships with the people running those factories, wanting to know that the people making her clothes were genuinely being looked after before she'd put her name on the label. That instinct, wanting to see it for herself rather than take a supplier's word for it, is a large part of what B Corp certification later formalised. JoJo became the UK's first childrenswear B Corp in 2016, and only the second B Corp-accredited business in Wales, scoring 92.6 on the B Impact assessment against a pass mark of 80 and a median of 50.9. It hasn't stood still since: Global Recycled Standard certification in 2023, Global Organic Textile Standard in 2024, an organic babywear line in 2025, and a shift from an informal in-house donation scheme to a structured trade-in partnership with The Little Loop. Her head of sourcing put the underlying discipline well: 'we will never compromise on product safety, quality, or comfort,' even when rising costs mean phasing initiatives rather than doing everything at once.
Some of the best bits were the small, human ones. She chose store locations families could actually walk to, rather than out-of-town retail parks, long before 'walkable retail' was a phrase anyone used. She was an early internet adopter, and laughed about the fact that her first online customers were mostly men, simply because men were who was mostly online at the time. She talked about designing for end-of-life recycling decades before circularity became fashionable, and about charity work in Mozambique that has run alongside the business for years. And she talked about fun: her example was a children's raincoat designed to make the wearer look like a duck, which is exactly the kind of detail that tells you a brand is designed by someone who actually likes children, not just someone selling to their parents.
Here's the one thing I genuinely can't tell you, and I looked. Nobody seems to know why she called it JoJo Maman Bebe. The clearest answer I could find is that she simply liked the sound of it for a children's wear range, then added 'Maman et Bébé', French for mother and baby, to make the specialism obvious and to reflect the brand's French style influence. Which makes it a little funny that thirty years on, she now tells audiences that the secret to naming a business is picking something 'snappy and easy to spell', then laughs that with hindsight she wouldn't have chosen a name as hard to say as her own. So: does anyone know why JoJo Maman Bebe? If you've worked with Laura, or you just happen to know, I would genuinely love to find out.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Who founded JoJo Maman Bébé, and when?
Laura Tenison founded JoJo Maman Bébé in 1993, aged 26, with £50,000 from selling a previous business. She grew it organically to around £71 million in turnover before selling to NEXT Plc and Davidson Kempner PE in 2022.
When did JoJo Maman Bébé become a B Corp, and what does that mean?
JoJo Maman Bébé was certified in 2016, becoming the UK's first childrenswear B Corp and only the second B Corp-accredited business in Wales. It scored 92.6 on the B Impact assessment, against a pass mark of 80 and a median score of 50.9 for ordinary businesses. B Corp status is reassessed every three years.
What has JoJo Maman Bébé done since becoming a B Corp, rather than just at the point of certification?
It has continued adding sustainability certifications and practices: Global Recycled Standard (2023), Global Organic Textile Standard (2024), an organic babywear line (2025), and a move from an informal donation scheme to a structured trade-in partnership with The Little Loop. Its tenth anniversary was marked with a limited-edition T-shirt designed around ideas from its own young customers, with 20% of sales going to Action for Children.
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