Fast-forward to the present, here we are locked out of our apartment with exactly 33 minutes to spare, in jeopardy of missing this interview. Julie went into efficiency mode and although claims not to speak Italian somehow managed to call an Italian locksmith, express the urgency of the situation, convince them to arrive in the next 15 minutes, and get us safely back into the apartment and on track for our interview; a minor miracle wouldn’t you agree?

We arrive, only 7 minutes late. Now this would probably be OK if we were meeting Italians, (we have discovered that most Italians are quite casual when it comes to time). However, Sue is English, so therefore I was nervous about our tardiness.

We ring the doorbell. Thunderous noise.

The door opens to a petite blonde woman with an enormously cheeky grin, dressed head to toe in pink and purple Prada, mulberry Prada wedges and a stunning fuschia silk scarf. My nerves evaporate. She is surrounded by a menagerie of misfits, equally grinning – her beloved dogs (seven in total).

Sue: “Oh don’t mind them, they won’t hurt you. I rescued them all from the roadside in Sicily you know. I can’t bare to go to Sicily because of it. There are thousands of homeless dogs there, it’s so sad but I can’t fit anymore in my apartment!”

Sue ushers us into her home, which is really rather grand. It sits right on the river Arno with exquisite views. Antiques and precious things line the sills and bookshelves, beautifully ornate period rugs warm the original terracotta tiled floors and the room in which we settle has a considerable, finely engraved tile fireplace. So many rooms all interconnected and interwoven. As a child I would have loved to explore this apartment, finding secret doors and hiding spots.

We sit down with a cup of tea, two cats wander in, which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

I ask Sue: “You were one of the original founders of Crabtree & Evelyn, a global success story, how did this brand come about?”

Sue: I grew up in the English countryside in the 60s with my parents and two older sisters. I was dying to get to London. My parents went to live in Africa when I was about 15, leaving me at boarding school. When I graduated I went to the South of France for a short time and then came to London when I was about 20.”

Sue tells me that when she arrived in London, she got a job off the back of the Times newspaper. In those days there was a section for sort of strange jobs, called Girl Friday. She found a job at a greetings card company.

Sue: “I didn’t have any qualifications. I couldn’t type but in the ad it said must drive and I could drive. I had to go out and take the order for these cards which were pop art, come back and pack the order, take the invoice and deliver it. It was the 70s and London was extremely wild at the time, I was wild.”

“What kind of things did you get up to?” I ask.

Sue: “Well you know this and that, all sorts of things really”, she cagely confesses with a huge grin.

Sue is engaging and warm. You can’t help but be drawn in. She is humorous, lively and there is a hint of naughtiness in everything she says. She has a wonderful aristocratic English accent but is in no way stuffy. In fact, for all her eccentricity she is refreshingly down-to-earth. Everything she says is infused with a ‘I don’t take myself too seriously’ tone.

Sue: “I drove to a trade fair in Frankfurt, through the snow in my minivan with the cards. I was 21. I had changed the design of the cards. The ones they had didn’t sell so I found some old books that my grandparents had given me, used these as inspiration and got into contact with an artist called Arthur Rackens and we started making different cards.”

Sue: “I met an American man, Cyrus Harvey, who wanted to buy the cards for the American market. He was a wholesaler who also bought glycerin soap from a family firm in Switzerland, along with some other items in France. I said to him: ‘This soap is wonderful but the boxes are dreadful.’ We then started a company called Crabtree & Evelyn. There were 3 of us. Myself, Cy and Peter Windett a designer. We made an English company, but we did it for America. Cy had been an entrepreneur but he wasn’t an average American. He married a French woman and spoke perfect French. He was a Eurofile really. We started this company and it just grew and grew and grew. It was marvellous. We were all in different places. Cy was in America, Peter and I were in England. Cy and I would invent the products and Peter would do the design. I sort of ran the rest of the world and Cy ran America. That’s how we divided it.”

“Why do you think the brand was so successful,” I ask?

Sue: “Well, Cyrus was really no nonsense but not stuffy, such a great entrepreneur with a huge amount of energy. When I used to complain that the sales people got too much he would look at me and say ‘honey these people are making you rich, look after them’. We really did it for America, and then the Americans kept coming to England to look for the original, so we thought we had better open a store. We opened in Church St, Kensington in 1980. That was our first English store.”

Sue: “I used to live with the designer, Peter, (which was an added complication). I had the ideas and he would translate them. He and I fought like cat and dog. He would do me a rough sketch and I would say ‘yeah yeah just like that’ and then he would get some artist to draw it and I would say, ‘I like the rough sketch better’. Eventually I left him. I still remember when we split up Peter saying to me ‘nothing was ever good enough for you’. I wanted to go and live with someone else, so I did. It didn’t work out of course but life’s like that. So I left them all to it. Also the company had become enormous and it wasn’t any fun anymore. It was the hardest work I ever did. I just felt tired and I thought it had become too corporate. It sort of lost it’s charm. So I sold my shares back to them and they sold it a few years later to Indonesians. That was it.”

Sue tells me that after that she did all sorts of different things. She was tired of being labelled the ‘Crabtree & Evelyn person’. She felt people expected her to be that person and if she wasn’t then she was nothing at all. She didn’t really want to have her own company again. She ran some private projects for JP Rothschild for awhile, and then as she was rather a friend of The Prince of Wales, she helped him with his gardens and shop at Highgrove and worked on the Dutchy brand.

Sue: “The Dutchy brand was for a charity and I ran it very very tightly. No one could be paid because we were a charity and I had it like this. We made huge amounts of profit. Eventually I thought, ‘here I am I have done my bit for charity and now I want to go and live in Italy.’ I have always come to Florence and loved it, and my Aunt used to live here. I had lived in Nottinghill Gate in the same house for 23 years and I thought, ‘enough’. I must try something else now. I rented a very pretty little place with a garden in Florence just while I tried to learn Italian and then a wonderful woman by the name of Princess Georgiana Corsini (part of the very grand Corsini family in Florence), offered me half of her huge palazzo with a 6 acre garden. She said ‘why don’t you come and live with us.’ And at that point I thought OK but I must bring the furniture and my English dogs. So I sold my house in Nottinghill Gate and went to live in the Palazzo Corsini. I stayed there for about 6 years and got to know everybody in Florence. I always think it is rather pathetic of me to live in Florence. I should live in Rome or Naples which I particularly adore but they are both very big cities and if you live there it is like living in London really. Here I have a bike, I have a house at the sea which is nearby and in an odd way in middle age it is quite nice to have lots of friends around; friends who you can walk to for supper. So I made my life here but of course I travel a lot with Oritigia, I am always running around everywhere.”

“You said after leaving Crabtree & Evelyn you didn’t ever want to have another company, so what made you open Ortigia?”, I ask.

Sue: “I was bored. I had nothing to do. I remember the moment when I was sitting in Ortigia, Sicily and just thought OK one more time. I think in life you always think one more time. Everytime I go to sell my car I say 'oh I will just buy an ordinary car, not a fast car anymore because I am too old', but it never seems to happen, I like the fast car.”

Sue: “This time around I’ve come up with all the ideas and designs myself. I spend my life in museums, in junk shops, with books and get inspired. I did ask lots of friends for their advice but at the end of the day I sort of had to do it myself.”

I comment on how beautiful the packaging is.

Sue: “Thank you but I have made lots of mistakes. Some Swiss man used to come to our trade stand and say, ‘I do not understand, there is nothing cohesive about the design, this one has this bit bigger than that one.’ The man who works things up on the computer for me is Italian and he has no way of keeping things consistent. I say, ‘Daniel isn’t that bigger than the last one?’, well of course I don’t see very well, and he says, ‘more or less’. And I say, ‘Daniel think of the man in Switzerland!’ So it’s always a little bit haphazard. Just before you came I said to my team ‘we have to print the lavender hand cream.’ And Giovanna said, ‘which colour are we printing now? It started pale mauve, then it went darker, then we took out the black, then we went to white.’ We’re always on version 15 and no one can remember which was the last. I blame everyone else for changing it! (They are very long suffering.) So that’s how I do it truly.”

I ask Sue, “what’s the most challenging part of running your business?”

Sue: “Having an Italian company of course. Nothing else could be worse than that! It’s just the bureaucracy. I was coming home from the airport recently and Francesca, my commercial leasor, who deals with things by throwing you the problem (which is quite Italian), and being rather English I sort of throw it right back at her rather abruptly, called me to say that one of our sites we sell to has gone broke. They owed us 9000 euros, to me a complete fortune. We couldn’t even claim back the VAT, which we had paid 21% of, because they hadn’t filed the bankruptcy papers. The owners had done nothing at all, which again is very Italian. I said ‘no, I am not having it. Either they give us back the VAT or they have to file these papers.’ ‘Come on’, I said to Francesca. So then we had to hire a lawyer, pay him 1000 euros. We’re not allowed to go to court on our own you see. This fellow rang Francesca to say that he needed me to drive over to sign something. And I said, “I have a Swiss company. I run my entire Swiss company and I barely ever need to go to Switzerland. Everything works perfectly, while in Italy this man wants me to drive all across Florence to some place called the Via Venezia to sign something.’ So I got on the phone, I was frightfully cross (I had the flu) and I said ‘no no non possible, basta.’

“And he said ‘Signora, the legislation in Italy is very strict you have to do this and that.'"

“I said ‘not interested’. I said, ‘I won’t do it’ and slammed down the phone. Now since I had been so rude to this man I thought I should immediately ring him back and apologise but I managed not to. I waited until the next afternoon and rang him meakly and he said to me ‘I was just trying to ring you Signora, don’t worry I managed to do it all without you’.”

“Anyway, that’s how they are. So it’s very very difficult and you have to be tenacious and retain your sense of humour, but that’s what I love about the Italians also. They are so unconventional, so free-spirited. They don’t abide by the law. It has it’s upside and downside. But it goes both ways.”

I ask Sue about the future.

Sue: “I of course want to grow the brand, but very slowly and this time I am not going to sell. I am going to keep it.” She shrugs. “What would I do with myself if I sold it. I would have to start something all over again.”

Sue’s very dear friend, Ernesto Signorelli, who owns an olive estate and supplies her with Sicilan olive oil for the brand, has just arrived. Together the four of us chat idly, (dogs, cats and all) and then wander up to the terrace to sip Aperol Spritz as the sun sinks over Florence. Ernesto leans over to me and whispers, you know that nobody gets to interview Sue, you are very lucky ladies. I give Julie a knowing look. Yes we are.

Tine grew up in Paris and Luisa in Rome, both half Italian and half French.

Luisa: “I never feel Italian when I am in Italy, yet I never feel French when I am in France.”

But both girls agree that having the mix of the two cultures is a positive; they tell me they are more open-minded than the Italians, and more free-spirited than the French!

Tine was in France until her 17th birthday, and then moved to Rome to finish high school. Luisa and Tine met at a party.

Luisa: “I met this beautiful girl. When you meet beautiful women you can either be really jealous and hate them or be a little more grown up, put that aside and become insanely inseparable friends.”

Tine laughs and nods: “At first there is a little bit of hate, and then it turns into love.”

But it wasn’t until Tine started dating Luisa’s brother that the two girls became really close.

Luisa: “My brother said to me ‘you really have to get to know this girl. She is like you, with the same style. I think you two could be great friends.’ So we started hanging out, and we became close, like sisters. We started to work together just for fun. One day we would be stylists, another day we would be photographers and then painters. We wanted to create.”

Then one day the girls created a clutch bag which just worked, and they started to think they should do something together seriously.

Tine: “For some reason we had a lot of bag ideas. One of our first designs was a bag that works like a blackboard; you can write on it, and then erase it. At the time we were meeting a lot of artists in Rome, it inspired us. We wanted to be them, but we weren’t. We actually did paint and create a bag out of our art, and then the blackboard idea came to us.”

Just one month after starting their business, the girls moved to Paris.

Luisa: “We wasted a lot of time, thinking that what we were doing was really important. We had a scooter and spent so much time researching. We were convinced that we had to do hand stitching. We were obsessed with this, so we spent two months searching for someone to do a particular type of stitching. We felt like we were losing time, but actually when you think about it, you learn a lot when you are losing time.”

The girls spent a year in Paris researching and creating the brand. They went to lessons in the evenings: fabric lessons, drawing lessons, photography lessons, every day they learnt something new. During the day they started working on their first collection, and once they had some designs together they found a producer in Italy.

Tine: “A friend of ours recommended a particular producer and so we gave him a call. We went to Milan with our first ‘mess of a bag’, introduced ourselves and said ‘hello we would like to produce this bag with you’. The gentleman was not so sure. Here he was producing a lot of high-end brands and then we come along, so young, we looked like kids. We did end up producing with him, he realised we were serious, and when our bags began to do well the relationship became solid.”

Luisa and Tine are inspired by what’s happening around them, and by the way they feel. Their first collection was influenced by the dirty walls in their neighbourhood. The latest collection by the circus, and carnival life. They like to create a mood. One collection may have a stricter line, a more masculine feel, then another a really girly sensibility, depending on how they are feeling at the time.

“We work instinctively, hence why our collections are so different”, says Luisa.

Tine: “And of course we like to create designs that look great but also have a purpose. Our bags are what you call weekenders, in French you say Baise-en-ville. It’s when you are packing for a night but you don’t quite know if you are coming home or not, if you get what I mean.”

The girls tell me that coming up with the name TL180 was easy. T stands for Tine, L for Luisa and 180 is the measurement for both of their heights. Yes they are both ridiculously tall and ridiculously attractive!

“What’s it like working together?” I ask.

Luisa: “We don’t have defined roles, we both work closely together on everything.”

They are both creatives, and they admit that neither of them are particularly business-minded.

Tine: “We are disorganised. We didn’t even write down the address of where we were meeting you this morning, and then we couldn’t find it, aaagh. We got here though. Luckily we now have a fantastic woman who looks after the business side of things.”

I ask Tine what she loves most about Luisa?

She throws her head back and laughs, “Her brother! No really Luisa has a beautiful sensitivity, she can feel when someone is sad and just gives so much.”

Luisa on Tine: “I love everything about Tine - she is my alter ego, she is a really positive person, she makes me laugh, she always gives a smile. She supports me when I am feeling a bit nervous or unsure.”

The girls tell me they are like sisters, they have so much fun, but fight like cat and dog.
Fascinated, I ask: “So what do you fight about?”

Tine: “Nothing and everything.”

Luisa: “I am the no girl. I always say no before I say yes. But in the end we always work it out and come back to a place of love. The key is to respect the other person and always listen to each other.”

Tine mentions that Luisa is the only person she can work with. When she was at university studying architecture she came to the realisation that she really couldn’t work with anybody. All her collaborations ended up a disaster. But in Luisa she has not only found a kindred spirit but someone that gets her, creatively.

Tine: “When I met Luisa I felt like my life had only just started.”

The girls, despite their squabbling, quite obviously adore each other. They have such a familiarity; they finish each other’s sentences, they second guess each other, something that only happens when two people spend hours and hours and hours together.

I watch Jools laughing with the girls, enjoying their stories, throwing in comments here and there, oblivious to the fact that I have finished my interview and it’s time for her to shoot, and think maybe we should have called our business something like EJ163. At an average height of about 163 between us, it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it! We might not have the height, but there’s just as much respect, love and creativity. Here’s to creative partnerships, all around the world.

Marisa: “Now I know this is going to sound a bit crazy but I will tell you anyway, (after all I wrote about it in my autobiographical book Ma Folie Francaise, so it’s no secret.) It’s just that you either believe in these things or you don’t. Anyway, it was about 12 years ago. I woke up in the middle of the night and felt totally compelled to write. At first I thought I was dreaming. I had this children’s story, this adventure story in my head. I grabbed pen and paper and just started writing ferociously, but it was like someone was dictating to me. I wasn’t even thinking. It was going so fast through my head that I could hardly write quick enough to keep up.”

“My grandmother (on my mother’s side) was a very avant-garde English woman, married to a cinematographer. She loved to sing, dance and act and she always encouraged me to be creative. I loved her dearly but she died when I was only a little girl. All of a sudden I felt like it was her voice in my head and she was telling me a story, the story I was to write. I sat and wrote nearly all the night. Then all of a sudden in the wee hours of the morning the voice stopped and so did I, literally on a word in the middle of a sentence. I wanted to keep going but nothing came to me and I thought ‘OK this is where I take over isn’t it. I’ve got it, you’ve kick started me and now you want me to do this.’ So I made a promise to myself to keep writing. From the next day on I just couldn’t stop. I wrote a trilogy of children’s books, really crazy stuff about computer hacking wombats. If I had consciously sat down to write, never in a million years would I have thought to write a children’s story for a start and one so infused with such imagination. I said to my mother ‘that’s Gran, she helped me get started’."

When Marisa finally did stop writing not only did she have a trilogy of children’s books, but she also had a delightful memoir about her experience of packing up her belongings and moving to France with her then husband to restore a medieval B&B in Treignac; a tale full of humour, romance and discovery; a tale that was published in 2008.

I ask Marisa: “How does it feel to be a published author?”

Marisa: “Well amazing of course, but also insanely scary at the same time. As an autobiographical writer the biggest challenge is getting over the hurdle of knowing that what you write in the privacy of your own home will potentially be read by thousands and thousands of people. When you write about yourself, or your life, or your own experiences you want to be honest, and I know that’s what people want but still, each time I write something that is revealing about myself it is a challenge.”

I discover that Marisa is not just a writer, but she is a poet and lyricist, having recently worked with renowned Italian writer and musician Andrea Cutri on the lyrics for an Opera called Eternal, the English version of Andrea’s Eterno Divenire – a tragic love story from the 19th century about English poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Andrea Cutri is a big deal in Europe. Andrea has opened concerts, even as a young teenager, for people like Eric Clapton and Peter Gabriel. He has written songs for Patty Pravo, a famous Italian pop singer and is incredibly well-known in Italy as a guitarist and song writer. I am fascinated to know how this collaboration came about.

Marisa: “I have always had a connection to Italy. My dad was from Southern Italy and somehow I feel like he has always guided me back there.”

“Four years ago, I decided that I was going to go to Italy to write the story of my Dad, and by total coincidence, at the same time I made friends on Facebook with a Sardinian person. One thing lead to another and as I was going to Italy anyway, my new friend invited me to visit them in Sardinia. I thought, ‘why not?’ So I caught a plane to Sardinia, to meet this Facebook friend (who is now my best friend) and I ended up having an amazing trip. I met so many other wonderful people. Not long after my trip, one of my new Sardinian friends contacted to say ‘Are you on Skype? I really want to chat to you’. I thought, ‘here we go, not another Italian wanting to chat me up, Italian Men!!!!’ But he insisted that he wanted to chat to me about my writing. So we had a Skype and he ends up being this incredible musician, very well-known in Italy, but also a physicist who writes his music via numbers. He mentions that he has been following my Facebook page. While I was living in Bruges, I wrote a lot of poetry. I was posting my poetry, more than anything for my mum back in Australia, but a lot of people started following me. He said to me, ‘I love your poetry and I am looking for someone like you. I have written this modern opera in Italian but it is an English story and I want someone who is really sensitive to write the lyrics in English for me. There is just so much love and passion and romance in your words.’”

Marisa was flattered but insisted that she is not a lyricist.

Andrea: “Yes but you are a poet and you have a depth of feeling and that’s far more important. I have had people try to translate the songs but when they are done, they have lost all their soul.”

Marisa who has always had a love of music decided to give it a go. The universe once again drew her back to Sardinia.

Marisa tells me, the weirdest thing of all happened on her first day when she arrived at Andrea’s house, which he shares with his mum and dad in a town called Cabras on the west coast.

Marisa: “I am talking to Andrea’s mum and dad and they asked me where I came from and I said, ‘well my dad was from Calabria, a tiny little town called Messignadi.’ Andrea’s father has a look of excitement on his face ‘I too was born in Messignadi.’

Marisa: “I couldn’t believe it, I just looked up to the sky and said ‘you’ve done it again Dad, you and Gran did this. I know now what I was always meant to do, I was always meant to write... thank you for looking out for me, thank you for showing me the way.”