In My Shoes: A Memoir (6 page)

For the longest time we had nothing to sell, so just for appearance’s sake, we put a few Jimmy Choo couture shoes on display. We also bought some shoes from a factory and sewed in the Jimmy Choo label. But money flying “out” of the store was the least of our worries.

Jimmy kept his workshop in Hackney from which, supposedly, the designs for the collection were going to emanate. Assuming that I could leave this essential function in his very capable hands, I started looking for factories.

Jimmy had a manufacturing contact in Italy, so in the summer of 1996 he and I flew out, along with his niece Sandra, to visit their facility. We couldn’t afford even the cheapest seats on a regular commercial
flight, so we bought tickets on one of those charters that lands at some decommissioned military air base or other out-of-the-way landing strip you’ve never heard of. The whole trip was something of a bust, with Jimmy not really present mentally, and Sandra having to translate much of what was going on into Chinese for him. But it did help me begin to get a more realistic picture of my new business partner.

On the flight back, after the meal had been served, I noticed Jimmy packing up all the food and everything else on the plastic tray—including the tray itself—to take home. Later, when we went through customs, they asked him to open his bag, and rolls upon rolls of toilet paper came flying out. He’d stolen all the paper and the soap and everything else he could grab from the hotel and stuffed it into his bag. It wasn’t even a nice hotel we’d been staying in. I pretended not to notice and simply walked on through.

In truth, my confidence in Jimmy was beginning to falter, not just because of his lack of sophistication but because of his lack of knowledge about shoe manufacturing. When his contacts came to nothing, Sandra and I found a book that simply listed all the factories in Italy and who they worked for. Book in hand, we left Jimmy at home and went back to Italy, cold-calling, knocking on doors to see if we could get an appointment. We were two young girls representing a brand they’d never heard of, with not so much as a single order to give them.

We made several of these exploratory trips, and when one of our flights to Florence was delayed, we started chatting with an Englishwoman, filling the downtime with a rambling account of what we were all about. She told us she had a friend in the shoe business named Barbara, and she offered to introduce us to her, which she did. When
we went to meet this Barbara, she offered to make some introductions on our behalf—for $25,000. It was a bit of a con, but we paid, and she did get us through some of the right doors. In fact, she introduced us to the factory that would make our first collection for us. But the real value she provided came some months later, when she introduced us to Anna Conti.

Anna had done manufacturing for Bally, and when we met her she was working for a company called Custom Foot, which created made-to-measure shoes. Somehow we were able to lure her away to become our exclusive manufacturing agent, and she set up her own business called IF, with Jimmy Choo as her only client. She offered to source factories, place the orders, follow up, make sure all the leather and fabric samples came in on time, do quality control throughout the run, then oversee shipping to make sure everything was on time. So as soon as we could design our first collection, the rest of the production apparatus would be in place.

But first there was the challenge of designing the collection, and I was by now facing up to the harsh realization that Jimmy was not going to be the creative partner I’d hoped for. Producing shoes for his couture clients was his bread and butter, all he cared about, and all he did. At one point my father offered him £1,000 for each design he produced, but Jimmy simply never could wrap his head around the fact that we had gone into business with him on the expectation that he would actually help us create a global brand, which it was his job to design.

His reluctance to contribute had put us way behind, especially considering that we needed something to show at the Fashion Footwear Association of New York trade show in August and at another event
later in the fall in Düsseldorf. To make the deadlines, we desperately needed sketches at the factory. Grudgingly, he worked up a few with Sandra, and we faxed them to Italy.

Ever the optimist, I spent the summer, when not scouting factories in Italy, phoning up Saks and Bergdorf, Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s, even Neiman Marcus, trying to line up buyers to come see us at the show in New York. I even rang up the specialty shops like Scoop NYC and Chuckies Brooklyn. Everyone recognized Jimmy’s name from those credit lines in
Vogue
and from his association with Princess Diana, so at least he was earning his keep in that one respect.

But our selling samples barely made it to New York on time, and when we saw them we were horrified. They were covered with black scuff marks, glue was visible along the seams, and the stitching was awful. They were so bad that we absolutely couldn’t use them, so here we were at the Plaza Hotel with a stand for displaying product and, once again, no product to display. We felt like fools. We were so ashamed, in fact, that on the way out we actually walked down a half dozen flights of stairs to avoid the elevators for fear of running into anyone who might ask to see what we had to offer.

I tried to carry on, selling from sketches, but no one was interested. Well, almost no one. The lone ray of hope during this otherwise dismal expedition came from Michael Stachowski, who placed a modest order for Giorgio Beverly Hills. This was the legendary boutique that had launched Rodeo Drive in the early sixties, when movie stars like Natalie Wood and Liz Taylor used to come with an extra limo in tow for their packages. So if we had only one outlet, this was not a bad one to have.

The next shoe show was in Düsseldorf later that fall. We had no
choice but to go with the same designs, but I asked Jimmy to remake all the samples by hand. “I’m only doing this for you,” he said, and I was thinking, “What’s your problem? You own half the company, you know.” But he still acted as if doing anything on behalf of the brand was a major imposition on his time.

In Düsseldorf we at least had well-made shoes to display, but nothing sold, and now I had to face the fact that even with quality samples, the concepts Jimmy and Sandra had come up with were just not that exciting. This is when it dawned on me that Jimmy was a cobbler, and he really had no interest in becoming a designer. I had set up a business with a “creative head” who, in fact, had no creativity.

This was the point at which I moved Sandra to Motcomb Street. For the next collection, I would come up with the ideas and Sandra would sketch them out on paper.

Over the winter, Sandra and I started going to the weekend flea market on Portobello Road where I’d had my T-shirt stand with Barnzley, only now the objective was to pick out pieces that could inspire designs. But we were not alone. One day we were browsing, only to realize that we had Dolce on one side of us and Gabbana on the other, and we were all staring at the same shoe.

I would buy vintage things and put them into different groups that made up little stories. Sometimes I would find a focus on a single vintage shoe. At other times I would say, “Let’s put the front of that sandal together with the back of that shoe.” I was also collecting pieces of jewelry and bits of fabric. Later, we would go to the manufacturing trade show in Italy called Lineapelle, which was a huge eye-opener for me, with pavilion upon pavilion devoted to buckles, feathers, leather
flowers, bits of fur, resin, studs, glass beads, lasts and heels, and, of course, the glitter fabric that became a Jimmy Choo staple. I had never known there were so many possibilities.

But that’s how the Jimmy Choo DNA began to emerge. The first collections were based on things that had caught my eye. The lovely part of it was that the things that struck me, and that I related to emotionally, other women related to as well.

During this period Jimmy would drop by the shop nearly every day, but only to drink tea and to check in on his niece. It was obvious that having Sandra beyond his immediate control was very upsetting for him. Never one to give in easily, he insisted that she be picked up every day precisely at six p.m. in a minicab driven by a friend of his so that she could then work “the night shift” back in Hackney, helping her uncle fill orders for his couture clientele.

The few times that Jimmy had anything to say about design, it was with a complaint that I was making the heels too high or in some other way violating the cordwainers’ code. But what he saw as heresy, the rest of us saw as innovation, style, and fun.

•  •  •  •

AT THIS VERY EARLY STAGE,
a friend introduced me to two young publicists named Natalie Lewis and Tracey Brower, who had just set up their own firm, Brower Lewis PR. They, too, were just starting out, hungry and talented, and we were able to put them on a retainer of something like £500 a month.

Natalie and Tracey went with me to our first Paris show in the spring of 1997. This collection was our breakthrough moment, and it
was the result of my inspirations and Sandra’s skill as a sketch artist. We now had good samples as well, but we were still on the fringes. We’d rented space at Tranoï, an exhibition for the edgier realms of fashion that was set up in tents and stalls in the Jardins des Tuileries, just down from the Crillon.

It was in this outdoor environment more suited to a craft show or a farmer’s market that I first met Julie Townsend, the buyer from Saks. She stopped by, looked at our samples, and said, “These are good. These are great!” Then she backed up her enthusiasm by placing an order for three thousand pairs of shoes.

Just like that we were in. We’d cracked it.

My father had told me that if we could sell twenty pairs of shoes a week from our Motcomb Street shop, and priced them at roughly £250 a pair, we’d have a business. Now here we were with three thousand pairs en route to the leading retailer in North America. Suddenly, we had the rarest of good fortunes for a start-up company: positive cash flow. Our sales were £250,000 that first year, with the shop rental costing us £15,000, and only one employee other than Sandra and myself.

After that huge breakthrough with Julie’s order we still had a show to run, and other customers to talk to, but already my mind was moving ahead. I was positioning Jimmy Choo as a luxury brand, so we were out of place with all the fringe designers and jewelry makers at Tranoï. As we closed up shop that day, I remember walking past the Crillon and thinking, “Someday, that’s where I want us to be.”

Brower Lewis was brilliant at getting our story out and setting up appointments with the editors to get them to come see the collection. That spring they also helped us throw a fabulous party at the
Wellington Club for about three hundred guests that was a huge hit. I remember somebody mentioning that if this business was as successful as that party, we’d do very nicely. So clearly we were getting the “style” and “image” part of the business down as well.

The fashion world is like a traveling circus—the same designers and the same editors showing up season after season on the same schedule in New York, London, Paris, and Milan. But I didn’t like the idea of being seen in a crowd along with all the other shoe lines, isolated in the separate universe reserved for accessories. So in the fall of 1997, rather than go to FFANY once again and simply hire space in the exhibits at the Plaza, we came for Fashion Week instead and took a suite at the Carlyle, got rid of the bed, and filled the room with shoes.

For Fashion Week in London, we set up in my apartment, and Sandra and I would literally sit on the floor while the buyers told us what they wanted. I would write out the order by hand and then fax it to Anna.

Now that we had demand, Anna Conti was expanding our network of suppliers, adding the Ballin factory in Padua, outside Venice, and Paoletti near Florence. Her husband made gift boxes in Florence, and she sat in a tiny office in his factory while I was downstairs at Motcomb Street and we would fax each other back and forth.

When we came back to Paris for the spring 1998 show, I had another meeting with Julie Townsend, and what she had to say was just about as exciting as that first huge order she’d placed the year before. Our first year sell-through at Saks was an incredible 95 percent, and we were indeed exhibiting our wares in a suite at the Crillon.

The other recurring event for anyone in the shoe business is, of
course, Lineapelle, which takes place twice a year in Bologna. Shoes are made from separate components that have to be assembled, and all the best components—uppers, heels, insoles, as well as the best leathers—come from Italy. All the tanneries and all the leather makers exhibit at the show, and you go around until you find the leather that you like, from the tanneries you like, and then you establish a relationship and these become your regular suppliers. You also see what new colors they’re showing and the new technologies that have come along.

I was still trying to engage Jimmy—after all, my dad and I had signed over half the company to him—but when I invited him to come with us to Lineapelle, he spent all his time trying to find whatever he could swipe to take home for his couture operation. He was fixated on picking up heels and scraps of leather, never on the big picture.

Now that we were up and running, my itinerary also included six trips a year just to keep tabs on the manufacturing end of things. So six times a year Sandra and I would fly to Italy, stay in a not particularly great hotel, and have Anna drive us around. We’d spend the day at Ballin near Venice, then drive three hours to Petra, stay the night, and get up at six in the morning and work with the next factory. Later, Anna brought her younger brother Massimo on board, and she would stay in the office, leaving it to Massimo to come with us and drive us around.

I also wanted to keep our investor in the loop, so I brought my father along on one of these trips to Paoletti and then up to Ballin. To make it a full team effort, Jimmy and Sandra came, too, so it was the four of us checking into some little pension just below the factory and, of course, I’d booked four separate rooms. But then in front of everyone Jimmy said, “No, no, Sandra and I will share.”