From foster home to billionaire: the man who made a fortune from shampoo and tequila

John Paul DeJoria is as giddy as a schoolboy as he beckons me to the far end of the ornate first-floor library at Taymouth Castle.
“You’ve gotta see this, it’s so cool,” the 80-year-old says as he opens a false wooden door behind which sits a small alcove and bay window. The sun is beaming in and the heather is about to turn deep purple: it’s a picture postcard day in Perthshire.
“Queen Victoria used to hide in here, read her book, and listen out for her subjects talking about her,” DeJoria explains, eyes alive with excitement.
It seems a tall tale, but who’s to say it’s not true? After all, Taymouth Castle, whose roots can be traced back to the 16th century, played host to Queen Victoria on several occasions, one of which was her honeymoon with Prince Albert in 1842.
With hair swept back into a trademark ponytail, and dressed in black except for a pair of grey On trainers, DeJoria might not be a household name in Britain, but that is far from the case across the Pond. In the States, the Californian — worth an estimated $3 billion — is the very epitome of the American dream.
The son of a Greek immigrant mother, DeJoria was twice made homeless as he bounced from sales job to sales job: peddling anything from encyclopaedias to insurance, door-to-door. It was not until he was in his forties that DeJoria finally tasted success: first by being the business brains behind hair salon brand Paul Mitchell in the 1980s; and then a decade later with Patrón tequila, which he sold to Bacardi in a deal worth $5.1 billion in 2018.
Nowadays, DeJoria is known as well for his philanthropy as he is for his business exploits. He supports more than 160 charities through his JP’s Peace, Love & Happiness Foundation. When one of his causes needs a boost, he can call on friends such as Hollywood actors George Clooney or Dan Aykroyd; or popstars such as Cher or The Who frontman Roger Daltrey.
“My motto is success, unshared, is failure,” he says. Sharing does extend to Taymouth Castle but it comes at a cost.
DeJoria and his fellow investors are spending approximately £300 million to transform the castle and its 450-acre grounds into an exclusive playground for the rich and famous.
Even an untrained eye can tell that no expense has been spared. We sit down to enjoy a light lunch in the castle’s Chinese Room, a luxurious drawing room renovated with silk panels matching the original design from 1801. Its intricate, gold-leafed ceiling, meanwhile, has been painstakingly restored to bring back to life the original designs of 19th century ornamental painter Cornelius Dixon.
Outside, the old golf course has been ripped up and redesigned. The castle itself will be an exclusive members’ club with luxurious bedrooms for those wanting to stay the night. There will be a further 100 or so private residences built on the grounds. “We’ve already got a couple of big American celebrities that want to get something here,” he says. “We’re just dividing up the land right now.”
He’s coy about dropping any names, but then DeJoria’s wife, Eloise, 67, a former Playboy model and actor breezes in from a long walk. While enthusing about the glorious Perthshire nature, she recalls how the controversial podcaster Joe Rogan visited recently and ended up in a staring competition with a stag.
Born in 1944, DeJoria was just two when his father left, leaving his mother with no choice but to put him and his brother into foster care while she worked to make ends meet.
He was in the same high school class as singer and actress Michelle Phillips, and recalls how the pair of them were caught passing notes to each other by their teacher. Both were ordered to stand and admonished by their teacher who announced to the rest of the class that neither would amount to anything.
Phillips went on to enjoy stardom in 1960s quartet The Mamas & the Papas, and won big roles in soaps like Knots Landing. DeJoria would have to wait far longer to make his mark on the world, however.
He served in the US Navy following high school after which he went into sales. This included a stint selling encyclopaedias door-to-door while living in his car after being forced out of his home when his first wife walked out and left him with a mountain of debts.
“The average encyclopaedia salesman with Colliers lasts three and a half days after training,” he says. “I lasted three years,” between 1964 and 1966.
Various sales jobs followed in the decade and a half that followed, but he never settled until he met Scottish hairdresser Paul Mitchell in 1980.
Mitchell and DeJoria saw a gap in the market for salon-quality hair styling products that would allow the public to do their hair themselves, instead of relying on their weekly trip to the hairdresser. With $700 between them — DeJoria was homeless again after his second marriage broke down — the pair ordered a shipment of bottles on 30-days’ credit. They just about sold them in time to pay the supplier, and it wasn’t until 1982 that things started looking up.
“We were two years old, and for the first time in our history, we paid our bills on time. And then we had $2,000 each left over. We thought: ‘Boy, from now it’s all downhill from here,’” he says.
How wrong he was. Over the following years, Paul Mitchell hair products have sold in salons across the world in huge numbers. And success has also yielded a long list of Hollywood friends with whom he remains close to this day. Actor Pierce Brosnan says: “John Paul is an exceptional human being and a remarkable example of the American dream. He strives to make the world a better place — I am proud to call him my friend.” The company, John Paul Mitchell Systems, now operates across nearly 90 countries, supplies 150,000 salons and has annual sales in excess of $1 billion. Mitchell died of pancreatic cancer aged just 53, but he survived long enough to see the business blossom.
By the late 1980s, DeJoria had started to diversify. This included going into business with the architect Martin Crowley to import furniture, paving stones and other artefacts from Mexico for display in high-end Californian properties.
At the same time, DeJoria had been toying with the idea of getting into the spirits game. Tequila was growing in popularity in the US, but DeJoria found it harsh tasting “hold your breath stuff.” So he gave Crowley a mission the next time he went to Mexico. “I said: ‘Find out what the aristocrats drink’.”
DeJoria could hardly believe what Crowley brought back. “It was the smoothest I’d ever had,” he recalls.
The two men hunted down master distiller Francisco Alcaraz and ordered 12,000 bottles, labelling it Patrón, a name that Crowley liked because it loosely translated as “the good boss”. But persuading bar managers to stock it was not easy. “They said: ‘It’s the best tequila in the world, but it’s too expensive.’” To earn a profit, DeJoria says, Patrón needed to be sold for $37.95 a bottle. “And in 1989 the average tequila was $5 a bottle.”
Yet, against the odds, Patrón did start to catch on. In the first year, the duo sold 1,200 cases. A year later this swelled to 12,000 cases.
Having famous friends helped. Clint Eastwood, to whom DeJoria had sent free samples, surprised him when he invited him to the premiere of the 1993 blockbuster In the Line of Fire. Unbeknown to DeJoria, Eastwood’s character, Frank Horrigan, drinks only one drink during the entire film: Patrón tequila.
Distribution deals with the likes of Jim Beam and then Seagrams provided a further boost throughout the 1990s. Sales took off the following decade as American country music artist Joe Nichols recorded the hit Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off. Meanwhile, the Paradiso Girls and rapper Lil Jon enjoyed Billboard success with the helpfully entitled Patrón Tequila.
By 2018, Patrón was selling 3.5 million cases-a-year when Bacardi came knocking on DeJoria’s door, asking to buy his 70 per cent stake.
“I said: ‘Well, I’m not really interested in selling it. I’m having fun,’” he says. Undeterred, Bacardi told him to name his price. DeJoria, aware that Grey Goose vodka had broken records when the brand sold for $2.2 billion, said, half-jokingly, “at least $5 billion” for the whole business.
Two months later, Bacardi came back and said: “Would you take $5.1 billion?”. DeJoria snapped their hands off.
DeJoria clearly loves Britain — his next appointment after me is a kilt fitting — but he could be forgiven for detesting the place.
In 2018, when he struck the deal to buy Taymouth Castle, he transferred £10 million purchase price to his lawyer Stephen Jones to buy the castle. Jones ran off with the money and DeJoria and fellow investors were forced to pay twice to secure the property.
A high court judge declared the case was cut and dried crime, recommending the police investigate, but no criminal charges came.
“It was like, basically, what the f***? You gotta be kidding? An attorney stole this money.”
DeJoria launched a rare private prosecution at a cost of millions of pounds that led to Jones being sentenced to 12 years in prison. But the money disappeared.
So, he sought to claim it from Jones’s professional indemnity insurers, Lloyd’s of London firm Axis Specialty. But Axis refused to pay up. So, DeJoria took them to court, too, all the way to the Court of Appeal, which found in his favour in January and ordered Axis to pay him $7 million.
For DeJoria, who counts his wealth in the billions, chasing a few million dollars might seem trifling. But he did so because he had heard other clients of Jones had money stolen from them and the Axis ruling could now open the floodgates for other people to recoup loses.
“If there is a message I’d like to get across to your readers, it’s this: the little guy can still win,” says DeJoria.
Once again, the octogenarian is determined to see the positives in the most difficult of situations.
“We have five major wars going on right now: that’s what you see on the news. But if you were to set the news aside, there’s a lot of good stuff going on this planet,” he says. “My philosophy is this, it’s one sentence. In the end, everything will be OK. And if it’s not OK, it’s not the end.”