Life in Charms with Vanessa Kingori

0:01I'm Anoushka Dukas and I've been designing jewell for 30 years and collecting charms for as long as I can remember. In this podcast, I will be asking a series of extraordinary women to tell me their life story in seven charms. Welcome to my podcast, My Life in Seven Charms. Today's guest on My Life in Seven Charms spent her early childhood on the Caribbean islands of St Kitts and arrived in London aged seven. Her teenage years combined Catholic girls' schools, entrepreneurial ability, and walking for Vivienne Westwood. Confident, smart, and insightful, she was obviously going to shake things up.

0:43Recruited by Condé Nast, she rose meteorically to the top and ended up in charge of all ten of their titles. Alongside Edward Enniffel, she set about creating meaningful and impactful change. Along the way, she had a much longed-for child and at the height of her own success, made a bold career pivot to Google. I'm delighted to welcome Vanessa Kingory to My Life in Seven Charms. That's lovely to have here. So, Vanessa, your first charm, you said an almond or an almond tree. Yes. So I rather love, I love the idea of making almond, actually, because there's something so tactile about it. Yeah. So I've designed it in its shell.

1:27So the nut is in the shell and the shell itself is gold, 18 karat gold, textured exactly as the outside of the shell or the husk perhaps you call it. And then inside is a piece of carved ebony to represent the almond. And where the shell has split open on the edges, there are just some diamonds set on the edges, a bit like the peepod that you just looked at. Yeah, that's beautiful. And then it has a leaf which moves as much as it can, but exactly like a leaf with all the veins. So pretty and clever. but it will be it'll be really because your issue be yeah it's tattooed kind of change and so what is it's armed all about so um part of my childhood was spent in sinkets and one of my favorite my favorite person my grandmother still really is incredible woman and my alone time with her were um these walks in nature there was very purposeful um my grandmother used to make things and sell them at market and one of the things she would do were almond tarts and various other truths okay so we would go on these walks which were quite purposeful but the unintended thing was I got alone time with her and she would um tell me stories and all of these stories were basically just helped me understand my history a little bit more They were usually funny stories or stories about nature based on things we'd see.

3:07And so the almonds were really represented my time with her. A lot of that she would tell me about which was the oldest tree, about the sort of cycle of life and how the trees grew. And her stories would, you know, if you saw sort of an animal run by, she'd tell me about why that animal behaved in that way. and, you know, the pecking order of that and, you know, about various sort of boogeyman stories that were partly made up, partly true about the walking through that forested area. And she was just a really brilliant storyteller. In another life, she probably would have been a writer, I think.

3:49My grandmother was probably the brightest woman I knew, the most well read. But because of her circumstance, she had to leave a much beloved school at 14. Right. And this was in St. Kitts. This was in St. Kitts. Yeah. Yeah. And so she had this life where she had to work incredibly hard and do very manual work. She left school at 14 to pick cotton on what was an old plantation. Her mother was a, came from the family of a slave owner. And her father was a black Kittishim. So she was already in this slightly strange and unusual setting. And I think it really fed her mind about different possibilities.

4:38And then she read lots. So in all of these stories, they were sort of glorious because they were her chance to indulge one of the passions she didn't get to in her everyday life. And for me, it was a chance to kind of have it to myself. Absolutely. I would ask lots and lots of questions and say, one more, one more. We'd open another. And yeah. And did you, did you, I mean, I think, look, if you look forward to your, what you've done and what you've achieved, if you look back, do you think she had a huge influence? It sounds like she did. Yeah. really big because I think for example um I think she would have been a creative of some sort so definitely when dealing with creatives in in the Vogue era and the Condé Nast era I definitely understood their sort of cadence and sensibility and could connect with them even though I was leading the business side yeah I found myself in this really unique position where I could lead on business but bring creatives along with me and I think that was one of her influences I think the other thing was about just community and storytelling I'll come on storytelling a little bit later I suppose but um you know to to particularly moments of change and lots of my career has been about change making even at Google now a lot of that's at change you're okay at GQ at Vogue with the portfolio was always about some sort of transformation whether it be digital or social, disrupting or new business models.

6:14And one of the things I realized that I learned from my grandmother is rationality doesn't always move the needle. So it can be a very rational reason for everyone to get on board with something new. But actually, if you can take people on the journey, if you can perhaps more indirectly get them to the end point, it tends to be stickier and you tend to get much more energy and positive energy out of it. And a lot of the times through her stories, almost all of the times she was trying to teach me something. Yeah, I'm sure. Even if it was about, you know, seeing a monkey scurry by and, you know, it would always be sort of lesson-based or trying to get me somewhere.

6:55And I think inadvertently I've taken... That's the most powerful way to learn, those stories. It's not, I mean, it's certainly not my case. But, I mean, it's... Because she obviously did an extraordinary job because I think you and your sister have both been on the Black Parallelist. Yeah. Is that right? Yes. And your mother was incredibly... Yeah, my mum is incredible. So my mum, we were in Stinkets for five years. Right. My mother came to London to set us up with her life here, and she would come back in her 20s. This was in the 20s, in the 70s, on a nurse's salary. She was a midwife. So hang on, she came here and you came or you stayed behind?

7:43We stayed in St. Kitts for five years. With your grandmother? With my grandmother, with my mother visiting every three months, which is kind of unheard of. It's not an easy island to get to. My mother's a very, very determined woman and had a really clear view of sort of what, the sort of life she wanted us to access. I think based on the things my grandmother didn't get to access. And then she was able to be educated to a much higher level, but married very, very young. And I think she had a really clear view for my sister and I that she wanted us to be very cultured. And so she wanted us to grow up in London, but have these great connections back to St.

8:30Kitts in Kenya. Yeah. to have really good education and to have a breadth of choice. Those are the things that she really wanted for us. And so there was this brilliant partnership between my mother and my grandmother in getting my sister and I to have these kind of options that I think they didn't really have in full. Incredibly. But very brave. It was part of the Windrush. Yes. I mean, absolutely. Part of that. Yeah. I mean, it's incredibly brave. But so tell me, so then you came age what to London? Seven. Age seven. Yeah, Adam. So that brings me on to your next charm. Okay. Which I think represents London.

9:15So your next charm I've done as a London bus. Oh, my love. I mean, that's so much about what London is. Yes. I've literally drawn it as a London deck. Gorgeous. Three-dimensional, tiny wheels. All the wheels turn. It's in yellow gold. And along the side where the ad would be, to the top deck windows, it says London. And the bus is all made of little red rubies in pavé. Beautiful. And the door at the back is like an old one. We used to be a route master. We used to be able to get on and off it. That's the sort of one when I first came in the 80s, that's what you would have had with the old Rootmasters.

9:59I love them. So you arrived here age seven. Yes. And you was put straight into school. How does it work? Where did you go to school? So I arrived at age seven, culture shock, unimaginable, you know. Feature. Yeah, because also the way that my grandmother had described England was all sort of from Dickensian novels. you know, all sort of, you know, perhaps more grand settings. And I remember I'd never experienced drizzle before, you know, because it either rains or it doesn't. Yeah, yeah. So things like that were kind of quite interesting. I went straight to school, went to primary school, Catholic primary school.

10:41And I loved school. I thought it was really, there were lots of things that were

10:51challenging because I'd lived in Kenya. Yeah. I'd lived in St. Kitts. I'd never experienced a climate like London. We moved in October. Oh. Just before my birthday. What are they doing to me? And there were just all of these micro things that were super different. and going to school, meeting my peers with just the kind of fast immersion because, you know, in London, you do meet people from sort of all backgrounds. There were other, not that many, but a few sort of immigrant families, Italian immigrants, Irish immigrants, you know, the kind of classic Catholic kind of... And so... And anyone that looked like you Were there any other black children at that time?

11:40Not in my year, actually, no. There was, the year above was, interestingly, another woman from the Caribbean. Her parents were from the Caribbean. And interestingly, she works in my division at Google now. No way. It's crazy. She and her sister, who were both older than me, were kind of anchoring forces because they sort of meant that even though in my year there was no one who looked exactly like me, there were sort of around and about. And actually it's a little bit similar at Google in terms of less now about sort of people who look like me, but more about just having someone you know vaguely from your orbit in a very new space.

12:24Yeah, absolutely. So I had a really lovely time of it at school. There were some incidents that definitely popped out. I remember a young boy calling me a name and having to sort of unpack that, you know, that reference my race. Yeah. And that was the first time I'd sort of experienced anything that was negative. And then one or two other things, but it just didn't. I'm really grateful to my upbringing because I just I just didn't have a sense of anything that anyone else should think about me should really affect how I think about myself. And I think that's such an amazing armor to be able to go forward in life.

13:10because not everyone has. No, I feel really grateful to that. And you really only know that later in life once you've experienced lots of other people and their stories. Yeah, yeah. So when you think of London, I'm sure you don't think of a bus, but what do you kind of think of? What's your favourite bits about London? I love London. It's still my favourite city in the world. And the more I travel and the more I fall in love and I love to travel and I love to go to other cities and other places, The thing I love most about London, it's hard to pick one thing, is how our culture is truly a melting pot in London.

13:53You tend to have a medley of different people in each area. So I grew up in West London. Yeah. And the cultural hub of where I grew up was sort of Lab Grove, Notting Hill. You know, if you think about some of the people that Edward and I know. Yeah. The music scene, fashion scene, all of the creative scenes were kind of bubbling up in those areas, you know, sort of the buffalo scene and Nana Cherry and all these amazing artists. And what I found in areas like Labrack Grove, Notting Hill, Westbourne Park are you have council estates in the middle of areas where you have these huge, big, beautiful houses and you go to the pubs in those areas.

14:34and often you find a complete, I always say you sort of have the Trastafarians and the Rastafarians in the same area. As a culture fuses, you have these medley of foods and they don't tend to be distinct. You have a lot of fusion. And so I think we have something here where creatively there is this mix that is greater than the sum of its parts that lots of other cities don't quite benefit from because they're... Well, you think they stick to their trial? I think so, a little bit more. So Vanessa, your next trial is a little tin can. I know, well, I visualize a tin can exactly as a tin can, as a cylindrical, I've done it in white gold because I imagine it's made of aluminium tin, white gold hinged, so the lid comes off and it becomes a little locket.

15:33And it's got, I've just put your name on the front on a label. And a little gold star. I mean, I love the idea of this can, but I'm slightly fascinated as to why I've got a can. So the can represents my first business, my first venture in entrepreneurship. So when I came to school in England, I came with this, I guess, quite entrepreneurial spirit. Because going back to my grandmother, she was a brilliant saleswoman. You know, half the job was making the thing that people wanted and identifying that and making it. And the other was part of the chat and the, you know, the falling in love and so on.

16:15So I get to primary school and I start to be invited. You know, I'm quite sort of exotic. And so everybody wants to invite me to their various sort of, you know, sleepovers and to their house and to friends things. It was really lovely. And I sort of I had it was quite creative and I had decorated some stationery and everyone said, I love it. Gosh, that's so amazing. Where did you get it? And so as I started to go to people's houses, I would get a sense of their aesthetic. so either from their bedrooms if they were you know fancy enough to have had their bedrooms decorated in anything other than sort of you know posters and so on yeah or the more general vibe of their home and then what I started to do was to make a couple of samples of my stationery which were made of my mother's discarded tin cans and as I've described literally yeah yeah So I would either make sleeves for notebooks, because we all had these sort of standard issue, quite ugly notebooks.

17:22Or I would make the tin cans, which were my most popular item, my best seller. And they were pen pot. Okay, good. I'm glad you said that. But I would decorate them to a theme that I thought suited their personality or the decor of their house or room. And once I gifted a couple of those and everyone wanted them. And so I had this little business where I charged people to give them my mother's discarded tin cans dialed up with a bit of artwork. And it was a great little business until I sort of, you know, ran out of my target market because they all had them. I saturated the market. And you obviously did a very good job because you went on to make Vervo more and more profitable every year, didn't you?

18:09I was proud of that. But again, you know, it all comes from the same place, I think. You know, the idea of beautiful things and falling in love with beautiful things and people being willing to invest in that. It's the same thing. It's not quite the same thing, in essence. My tin cans and bones. We're going to talk about that in a minute. So another charm, you said Kenyan market chess piece. Yeah. I've made it in soapstone because I think that's a Kenyan thing. And his mane is in yellow gold and textured exactly as a horse's mane would be. But sitting on a very typical 3D base of a chest piece.

19:02And on the horse's eye, I'll just have a little black diamond, I think, in his eye. But tell me about this, these markets. I mean, I love a market. I love the market, my goodness. Yeah, I cannot pass a market. Yeah, I know what you mean. It's, you know, I think you either get it or you don't. And if you ever travel with someone who doesn't like a market, it's so frustrating. We've got to sell C in an hour. I know, I'm going to be gone. I mean, an hour, you'd be lucky. So my sister and I were born in Kenya, but I always think it's quite different to travel there without family, without wider family.

19:40And it was the first time I sort of experienced Kenya not through my family's eyes and not through the eyes of the way that sort of Africa and I guess is sort of explained to you when you don't live there. And one of the core sort of awakening moments was going to this market. And the chess piece was this beautiful soapstone. Yeah, chess piece that was, you know, laid out. But there was a lady selling up front and then, you know, a man in the back who was actually finishing carving the next set. And that's kind of always quite luring, you know. It's not shipped off from somewhere. And we got talking to her and she was sort of explaining a little bit about, you know, the lifestyle and the things that they're excited about and the opportunities that they thought that this moment in time and what happened in America might bring to them and the self-starter nature.

20:50And I just felt compelled to buy this chess set. I'm terrible at chess. So you've got the whole set. I've got the whole set. I think I've played one and lost painfully to my sister. I still have it and love it now because it represents, for me, a moment of deeper connection with a place I thought I knew. My family are there. My family have a really nice life in Kenya. But I identified more deeply with the other thing was how educated everyone was. You know, they were super smart. and just... Which is not really what you expect in the market. In the market necessarily. And so in Kenya, there's this really interesting thing and it's something that keeps coming up at Google, for example, which is the people are educated to such a high standard versus the number of employment sort of possibilities that people have to make their own way.

21:52And these people are making their own way. The other way that that shows up is, for example, Google have an office there and they've really strategically decided to set up there because Kenya is called the digital savannah because there are so many brilliant coders and tech entrepreneurs there that it's just a really valuable place for them to set up. But somehow the thread of that moment in the market to where I am now just makes just helps everything make more sense. I saw that cleverness in a place I didn't really expect to see it at that level. And it's really nice. I want to take a quick moment to say thank you to our sponsor, Rome.

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23:20Now, the next one, you just said birth of your son, Charles. I think you had difficulty having him. Yes. And so I kind of want to celebrate motherhood, femininity. So you can see, so what I've designed is a woman body, naked body, but heavily pregnant. So beautiful. I love this one. And I just see it in gold. Very, very simple, very smooth and highly polished. And I've just added a little pearl coming from your legs just to represent, you know, that's my job. Yeah, yeah. I love that. It's so beautiful. yeah sculptural yes it's very sculptural but you had it was difficult for you to have it to have yeah I think it's really interesting because you know often my conversations or my career I had no idea what I wanted to be when I was growing people always you know when I'm having these creative things people always say you know what did you want to be and how no idea even when I was going to university, the only thing I ever knew I really wanted to be was a mother.

24:40And so it's quite interesting that that came to me quite late. I was 39. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. When I had him. And I had, you know, like lots of women, a bit of a journey because

24:56I'd had something called fibroids. Right. which got in the way and took a long time to get diagnosed and to get removed and so on and so I'd had miscarriages and things like that. Getting pregnant was really scary because the whole time I was wanting to be really joyful and I had this really powerful sense of this is it. I didn't really want to let myself get too complacent and so I gave myself all of these different benchmarks and all of these things kind of busy and I was quite busy as well because So you're at Vogue. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, I'm trying to get my head around trying to deal with all of this lost.

25:35Yeah. And yet a very successful go-getting career. It's like, how's that? Do you know, I think somehow it balanced things out because I was too busy to be completely obsessed and worried. Yeah. Which was quite helpful distraction. production but equally I think we were in this new era and I was part of driving the new conversation around what does a more inclusive space in media fashion luxury look like and I tell this story a lot because I think it's really important so I was coming into the building and a woman I'd worked with lots and lots in my previous role at GQ saw me and said oh gosh I heard you're pregnant congratulations what a disaster disastrous timing and I was sort of quite taken aback quite punchy and she's so I know you know sometimes people speak with her fully thinking it's you know wow did you think that would say it yeah um and and I think What she meant was, I was the first woman to run Vogue in its hundred plus years.

26:53And she sort of said, you know, it's going to be very hard for anyone else to go in because there'll be fear about, well, within a year they'll be pregnant, you know. And I felt this sort of weight I was feeling that weight of responsibility in the role anyway because I was the first person of colour but I was also the first woman and all of those things and that just for a moment made it so much heavier because I thought I don't want to pull the ladder up the main point is to extend opportunity not sort of you know exactly and after a while of sort of you know having a slightly hormonal cry. And thinking about it, I thought, no, actually, this is a normal part of life.

27:39It's a normal part of women if they choose life cycle. And we're still making this mistake of thinking of career is one thing and our personal lives, whether it be motherhood or what have you, is we they're part of a whole and so I really made a conscious effort to be very open and vocal about being pregnant having my son and all of those things but also really partnering with the right people and so that pregnancy was um so important to me because it was fulfilling a lifelong dream. But I also, you know, they say in Caribbean culture, when you give birth to your first child, you give birth twice.

28:36You give birth to the baby and you give birth to a mother because before then you've never been a mother. A new version of yourself is born. And that new version of myself was to not only be the best mother I could be, but to also try to make it a little bit more easier for women to be considered into these spaces, but also for women to have both without thinking when my career will come crashing down. So your Vogue charm, I've literally done it as a magazine. It's a locket. It's not a book. It's definitely a magazine. So it's quite thin. It's very polished as it's because polished yellow gold.

29:23Vogue engraved on the front and probably a date could work out what the date was. But inside, you could put a picture, a photograph maybe of Charles or whatever. But it's just a very simple locket. I love it. I love lockets because the fact you can tell them, they're just... Charles' favourite thing of mine is a locket that my mother gave to me because he just finds it fascinating. it's just a pretty classic kind of oval market but it has a picture of him in it which of course all know he's loved that so we've been pointing at that um i mean i i think your your first year you increase revenue digital revenue by 95 percent yeah i mean that is utterly extraordinary being pregnant doing i mean it is absolutely extraordinary and that and every year better and better.

30:21So what your secret is? What is it? We are so used to trying to make what worked before work again. And I think that's the key. I'm always trying to break things and it's really annoying for people. But I'm always thinking about what if. So I know that worked before, but what if we're to extend it? What if we're not to do that anymore? And so I'm always, I think I've really benefited in my life from having the outsider's lens. You know, this thing of moving around when I was young. The benefit in silver lining was I always slightly had the outsider's lens. I've seen it now at Google. I'm this girl from fashion and luxury who's ended in this tech space.

31:04I don't know what people are saying half the time, but I do know what they want to get to. And I'm the one who says, but have you thought about connecting these two dots? And has anyone spoken to and should we? and that's what I did in the Vogue business was just think about well this is really valuable things like we were you know to give me an example events is a huge example so when I started at Vogue everybody was slightly sort of down at heel and a bit sad about magazines are in decline and you know all of this and I thought gosh you know this is fabulous you've got this amazing platform that is still in growth, in print.

31:43We haven't tapped into digital, so that's a huge opportunity, huge. We haven't embraced social because there's this huge fear. And there's a really chic, elegant way. There was this sort of thought of it would be a bit sort of tacky. And the number one thing was I remember my first meeting with Edward, thinking this is an orbit everyone would want to be in. edward was coming over from new york edward and i were i received my mbe i was listed for my mbe on the same list he was listed on his obe before we started working together which of course he took to be this huge sign your mbe was services for services to media right and so he was over for his OBE.

32:35He was living in New York. We were not working together yet. And it was the time of the Fashion Awards, which just happened. Just happened, yeah. And he said, look, I'm in town for a bit. I know you're really busy. Let's try and have a coffee. And I said, I would love that. And I'd been wanting to spend time with him, apropos nothing. And he said, I think the best way is if we just meet at the Fashion Awards, we just pop out. I said, yeah, fine. So we're messaging and I'm in the Albert Hall walking to meet him. He said, let's meet in the hallway. And I'm walking down this hallway and this man is coming towards me, flanked by these two supermodels in long gowns, giggling and chatting, you know, old friends.