My brain surgery inspired me to make feel-good frocks
At her lowest ebb, Jo, a mother of two, came up with the idea for her wildly successful label Scamp & Dude
AS SHE prepared herself to undergo brain surgery, Jo TutchenerSharp grappled with the unimaginable fear that her young sons would grow up without a mother.
Yet her darkest days also provided her biggest inspiration, because Jo’s illness — and her recovery — sparked the idea for Scamp & Dude, her phenomenally successful clothing brand.
not wanting her boys, then aged three and one, to see her with 20 staples on her shaved head, looking like ‘Frankenstein’ as she recuperated from a tenhour operation to remove a potentially fatal cavernoma (a cluster of abnormal blood vessels), she wished there was a snuggly toy she could have given them with a pocket to hold a picture of her close to their hearts instead.
‘I thought, these things aren’t available, so why don’t I create them? Then I can comfort kids who have to be away from their parents,’ says Jo, 46, from Cookham, Berkshire.
The former PR company owner’s neardeath experience had also left her desperate to give back, so she thought: ‘even better, for every one sold, I could donate one to a child who loses a parent or is seriously ill themselves. That became my get well goal.’
Two months after leaving hospital, she registered Scamp & Dude — named as a nod to her sons Sonny, now ten, and Jude, seven. and that november, her Superhero Sleep Buddies, along with a childrenswear line and two women’s sweatshirts, all bearing Scamp & Dude’s trademark logo, a Superhero Has My Back, went on sale.
Five years later, her company is a predominantly womenswear label, boasting distinctive leopard and lightning bolt prints that have spawned countless copycats. Celebrity fans include Billie Piper and emma Bunton, and Jo says she has a cult following so large there is an 8,700 strong private Facebook group where Scamp & Dude fans ‘make friends with each other’, and a new store is set to open in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, next month, where these friendships can develop.
‘It’s going to be a place where our community can come together,’ says Jo. ‘The fact they get so excited when they see other people in Scamp & Dude is bonkers but utterly lovely. They’re planning these shopping trips together.’
not bad for a woman who promised her parents this was going to be only a ‘small business’ as she regained her health. Jo laughs: ‘They remind me of that now!’
In october 2015, Jo was in the process of selling her beauty PR company and setting up a skincare brand when she started suffering excruciating headaches. The following month, after developing a facial spasm, Jo’s GP referred her to hospital
SCANS showed she had a cavernoma that had haemorrhaged and would need to be removed — ‘because if it haemorrhaged again, it would probably have killed me’. Jo, who is married to Rob, 43, asked that the operation be delayed until January 2016, so if she didn’t survive the risky surgery, she could spend one last Christmas with her family.
‘I had all that time thinking this might be the end,’ she says. ‘You do look back over your life and I was really bothered that I hadn’t made a difference. That I hadn’t done enough good.’
So she swapped her skincare brand plan for Scamp & Dude, whose lightning bolt logo — or ‘ superpower button’ — is intended to give children strength when they feel vulnerable, and which has so far donated over 5,000 Sleep Buddies and 6,500 scarves to women with cancer and families of a child with cancer.
Jo says that after the operation she had this massive fire in her belly and didn’t see any barriers. Then, in what she describes as a ‘fate’ moment, she was contacted by the London department store Liberty about the skincare line they’d heard she hoped to launch.
When Jo told them she’d switched to childrenswear, Liberty agreed to stock her Scamp & Dude line. It immediately sold well, in part because of her PR background that bolstered media support, but also, she says, because her business had ‘meaning’.
The women’s sweatshirts proved particularly popular, so Jo added more, along with women’s T-shirts and dresses.
For the first six months, she ran every aspect of the business herself. ‘It got to the stage where all I was doing was fulfilling orders until 2am’ — but she now has a staff of 31 all-female employees. They mostly work remotely, with flexible four-day weeks so they can spend time with their children — a decision driven by Jo missing out on seeing her boys when she worked long hours in PR.
‘I don’t want anyone to have those regrets,’ she says. ‘I never say “Where are you?” I trust them to get the job done.’
For her own part, Jo tries not to look at her phone between school pick-up and bedtime but stresses she’s not ‘holier than thou’ about it. ‘There are times I’m on an absolute deadline and have to go “Here’s your dinner, kids, I’ve got a bit more work to do.” It’s impossible to have a business like this and not be like that.’
Both boys have helped Jo test her designs — Sonny even created a print for his mum last year — while Rob, who has an events business, is the driving force behind next month’s shop opening.
‘The only man in the business is my husband,’ says Jo, who adds of her work: ‘Because I love it, my kids love it and my husband loves it. I don’t feel it’s encroaching on my life, and it doesn’t feel like it’s taking me away from them because we’re all involved.’
She and Rob, who have been
Life-changing: Jo with one of her distinctive designs
married for nearly 11 years, share the childcare: ‘I always said I didn’t want a nanny. We make it work between us. Without him, I don’t think I could have done all this.’
Social media has been integral to Scamp & Dude’s success — the label is mostly sold online — with Jo describing Instagram as ‘your shop front. It’s how you build a community’. Indeed, her online followers gave her the strength to contend with retailers who copied her designs, including one she successfully took legal action against in 2018.
‘I hate fighting but integrity is big for me,’ says Jo, who gave the proceeds from the win to charity, along with their unsold copycat clothes.’
JO EXPLAINS that many small brands don’t fight because they don’t think they can afford it. ‘I got to the point where I thought “I cannot bankrupt my business”, but you read comments (on social media) saying “don’t stop”. We had amazing support.’
Being a small brand means she can make snap decisions. after Deborah James, aka Bowel Babe and a fan of Scamp & Dude, revealed she was receiving end of life care in May, Jo told Deborah to choose an item from the label to raise money for her bowel cancer fund. The handbag Deborah chose sold out in 24 hours, raising £7,500.
When war started in Ukraine, Jo turned one of her T-shirts into a charity item. It sold out overnight and she donated the £5,000 profits to humanitarian aid charity Choose Love.
Jo says aspirational business owners should have passion and purpose, as well as a good product. ‘The purpose doesn’t have to be charitable, but it has to be purposeful to you.’ They also need to ‘live and breathe’ their brand, she warns: ‘You’re going to have to be obsessed, and if you’re not, don’t even start.’