Success in the UK luxury beauty industry is the result of years of hard work for Joshua Mano Gilbertson, yet in New Zealand he’s relatively unknown. With plans to now spend more time at home in Auckland, he tells Nicola Russell more about his path from flat broke to fortune.
He’s collaborated with Tommy Hilfiger and Paul Smith. His luxury fragrances have the attention of globally renowned perfumers. He’s dined with King Charles and rubs shoulders with London’s elite. Meet Whangārei-born Joshua Mano Gilbertson – he’s getting ready to step out of the shadows.
Handsome, friendly and impeccably dressed, Mano Gilbertson (Ngā Puhi, Tainui and Te Ātiawa o Te Waka-a-Māui) welcomes Viva into his St Marys Bay home like an old friend. After decades splitting his time between London and Aotearoa, the 45-year-old and his partner William are spending increasingly more time in Auckland – to be near their children Tiaki and Kowhai (6 and 4) who live in the city with their mums.
It’s 4pm and Mano Gilbertson is making coffee to cope with the time difference with his London team. He’s not complaining, though. The excitement of having his new, finished perfume line MANO X MNRL (MXM) spread out on his dining room table is palpable.
MXM is the new luxury line from Mano Gilbertson’s group Lab Atelier Brands, releasing in the UK in April, with a New Zealand release yet to be confirmed. It’s the Māori entrepreneur’s second foray into fragrance, after first launching The Lab Co, a prestige home, body and fragrance brand five years ago.
Joshua Mano Gilbertson’s getting ready to launch his new fragrance range, Mano X MNRL. Photo / Dean Purcell
Mano Gilbertson says he discovered the power of smell when he was studying performing arts at Unitec in Auckland, where celebrated theatre director Raymond Hawthorne ONZM was his tutor.
“Raymond one day came up and handed me this bottle and said, ‘Josh, this is your character’.
“My fragrance hoarding probably began there. I love the concept of fragrance … being something that can take you somewhere else.”
His early memories of fragrance – apart from his stepdad’s Brut, come from the glasshouses of his grandfather’s award-winning tomatoes in Waimauku.
Joshua Mano Gilbertson pictured as a baby with his grandfather.
“One of my coolest memories was driving into town to sell them off the back of a truck at Turners and Growers. We’d sit there and he would barter them off, then we’d go to the old Farmers building for pick and mix [lollies] with Grandma.”
That scent has made it into one of his new fragrances in the MXM range – Red Earth Temptáre. His grandparents played an important role in his and his sister’s life and so his family moved to Auckland to be closer to them.
“I had a solid mother. We grew up in Whangārei, in an area called Morningside, but it was tough. Mum was a solo mum. She had been an artist and a teacher and she decided she really wanted to retrain, and so she put herself in university when I was 5 and my sister was 6.
“On my first day, I remember going to Northcote Primary and not wearing shoes to school, and that was a moment … I certainly felt different, but what I quickly realised is kids don’t care. By lunchtime we were all running around as mates. Then my grandma bought me some shoes and told my mother off,” he says, with a laugh.
His mother taught him the power of adaptability and hard work.
“Mum went on to be one of the Auckland City Council’s first female financial leaders,” he says. “I am immensely proud of my mum.”
She also sowed the seeds for his perseverance – when he asked to play computer games as a child, she said he needed to code them first.
“She gave me this book and pulled a computer called a BBC out of a box, and went, ‘there you go’. And I sat there, for a couple of days, inputting zeros and ones.”
Joshua Mano Gilbertson splits his time between homes in London and Auckland’s St Marys Bay, pictured. Photo / Dean Purcell
After Performing Arts School, Mano Gilbertson acted in Xena and Shortland Street. And remember the Anchor Milk ad, where the girl kisses milk off the guy’s lip? That guy was him. But London was in his sights, with an OE planned with friends, and when it came to choosing a place to live, they got creative, choosing their suburb by the Monopoly board.
“We thought, ‘maybe we’re not ready for the dark blue, maybe we’ll be like yellow or red?’ We ended up in the dark brown on the wrong side of Go in Bethnal Green,” he recalls, laughing.
It was an important time for meeting people.
“A lot of my connections came not through traditional networking, they came from East London, when we were all flat broke, 25-year-olds trying to find our way. They were the seeds of great trees and branches now.
“We thought we invented skinny jeans and quiffs,” he remembers. “We ended up in warehouse parties with McQueen and all these now iconic people – Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen. We were all at these crazy things together, doing creative things on the bones of our asses.”
Working as a tech and software founder, his move into fragrance started as a personal passion project and became a multimillion-dollar success story.
“Fifteen years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition,” Mano Gilbertson says. “Eight years ago, a doctor suggested I remove fragrance as a possible inflammatory trigger. That was confronting.”
Confronting, he says, because he was a “true fragrance junkie”.
“Way before people had fragrance wardrobes, I had them,” he says. “I kept wearing them [despite my condition] because I loved them so much, but I thought ‘one day I’ll be able to figure out how to make a fragrance that’s safe’.”
A discussion with his business partner Tess Richards opened his eyes to the possibilities.
“She said, ‘well, that extends well beyond just your condition, Josh, into people who are concerned about hormones in general, about breast cancer and carcinogens and menopause and IVF’.”
Joshua Mano Gilbertson at home in St Marys Bay, Auckland. Photo / Dean Purcell
A man on a mission, Mano Gilbertson approached British department store Selfridges, who asked him to make a detergent using a clean fragrance.
Mano Gilbertson and Richards were on board. Others were less enthusiastic.
“People thought I was mad when I first started,” Mano Gilbertson recalls. “The VC and private equity guys would look at me, say, Josh, you’ve just had these massive tech businesses and you’re doing, what? Perfume?
“But for me, it was a path back to purpose and creativity … We knew our son Tiaki was arriving and so I wanted to do something that gave a layer of flexibility, to be able to be back here [in New Zealand].”
He approached major fragrance houses, who also said his goal – to remove 100% of known carcinogens, hormone disruptors and endocrine-disrupting chemicals – couldn’t be done. Determined, he went to Grasse to study perfumery.
“I thought, I don’t believe it, and I’m going to go and study it. So I went with Tess and threw myself into the chemistry and craftsmanship of fragrance.”
The Lab Co’s cashmere care kit.
The hard work has paid off.
“The Lab Co. is the first fragrance house to be approved by Breast Cancer UK,” Mano Gilbertson says. “And that is huge, it took years of development with our chemists, with our perfumers, with loads of people, to get to that point.”
Along the way, he’s had some career-defining moments.
“Paul Smith contacted me and said, ‘Josh, I love what you’re doing’. I think he called me the ‘geekiest, coolest fragrance house’ … And so, we collaborated with him on a luxury fragrance detergent to take care of his cashmere products.
“And then Tommy Hilfiger contacted us, and they said ‘we want to hand your products out at Fashion Week in New York’. So our products were in bags on every chair at Fashion Week, and we were tiny then. Instead of handing out perfume, they handed out laundry detergent.”
Traditionally he’s held back from the limelight, letting Richards front the brand, but now with plans to bring Lab closer to home, he’s happier to step forward.
“I hope Lab Atelier Brands can be a really deeply rooted Aotearoa and London house. So I’m really interested in exploring what’s possible there. There’s many steps yet to get to that point … but I think there’s a space to have creativity and teams in both those worlds,” he says.
“I’m really interested in seeing where New Zealand can find its own luxury voice, beyond travel and scenery into new territories, like fragrance.”
He admires the work of local perfumers Abel and Curio Noir and is in conversations with Wellington fragrance maker Nathan Taare.
“He’s a Māori perfumer, self-taught and extremely creative, who I’m speaking with about collaborating on Aotearoa characters in our high-luxury MXM collection,” says Mano Gilbertson. “There are also some other very interesting collaborative conversations here in New Zealand underway – but I can’t reveal those just yet.”
His MXM line already has some high-profile attention.
“We’re working with Dora Baghriche who created ‘Glossier You’ … she’s like a top three [fragrance] rock star,” he says, with excitement.
Mano Gilbertson says he plans to make the products locally available online mid-year and is exploring a creative space in Auckland. He says is in early conversations with partners about stocking MÁNO × MNRL and The Lab Co in New Zealand and Australia, mentioning MECCA and Woolworths as “natural homes” for the products.
“The market is ready, ” he says. “The real question now is which retailers choose to lead the shift.”
Mano X MNRL is the new perfume range from Joshua Mano Gilbertson’s luxury fragrance company The Lab Co.
Life looks different now – with experiences young Josh wouldn’t have imagined. Like isolating while on holiday in Mexico, after a dinner host came down with Covid. That dinner host was King Charles. Dinner was at Buckingham Palace.
His Instagram shows the glamorous side to his life – black-tie events, luxury travel, pictures with celebrities and friends, including Sweden-born model Frida Redknapp and her husband, former professional footballer Jamie.
But despite his success, Josh says his value of “stewardship over hype” is central to his life.
“The really cool thing about Kiwis is we help each other no matter where we are. We’re very iwi-based.
“People often ask how my Māori background shows up in what I build, especially in luxury. I think some people expect a literal answer: motifs, ceremony, aesthetics. But for me, tikanga isn’t performance, it’s an internal operating system. It sits in the values – collaboration over ego, manaakitanga [care], whanaungatanga [connection], stewardship for future generations, and the idea that we are at our best when we build as an iwi, not as individuals.”
More Kiwi creatives and entrepreneurs