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 cle
arly 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.”
I looked at her and saw her face go white. “To save money,” Jimmy explained.
At that point my dad still hadn’t caught on. He said, “Oh. Okay. Great!”
Jimmy always wanted to share with Sandra, and when he didn’t get to, he would sit in the meetings at the factories and sulk and make rude, off-the-wall comments. His strange behavior was very obvious to the Italians and very embarrassing to the rest of us.
Each season, our first conference with each of the suppliers would be based on Sandra’s sketches. By the time of the second meeting we saw every shoe in the collection, with Sandra marking the shoe with a silver pen, moving the strap a millimeter down or up to get the balance right. I was obsessed. I really wanted to make the perfect shoe.
I would stand next to Francesco, our last maker, and say, “No, I want the toe flatter” or “Shave it down by a millimeter.” Then we’d go to the heel supplier and stand next to his machines. “No, thinner in the middle,” or “Wider,” or “More flared out at the base.” I had very clear ideas about what I wanted.
Month by month, the DNA of Jimmy Choo was expressing itself more and more clearly. In terms of manufacturing, this meant only the best components and an obsessive attention to detail. In terms of design, it meant vintage ideas reconsidered, exotic fabrics and extras, and sex appeal that was also sophisticated, never cheap.
So what makes a shoe sexy? It’s the balance of the foot, and where the straps are placed, and maybe being low cut at the front so you see toe cleavage. Then again, I’ve been told that the nerve endings for the genitals and the foot are adjacent in the brain, which is why a little cell migration is capable of giving people all too great a passion for feet and for shoes. We tried to stop just short of that point.
When we started out, the shoe industry offered plenty of opportunities to innovate on a purely practical level. Boots for women had always been too wide at the calf, for instance, and nobody had thought about improving that aspect of the fit. So I created a line of boots with the upper portion cut very tight. Say your foot was a size 39 or 40 (8.5–9). For boots that size we would use the same upper portion you’d find on a traditionally sized 38 (7.5–8), which led to some comical moments in the store. For the longest time our only dedicated salesperson was Hannah Colman, my brother Daniel’s girlfriend. Hannah would have the customers lying on the sofa with their leg straight up in the air, struggling to pull the zipper down.
Vassi Chamberlain’s 1996 story in Tatler about the launch of Jimmy Choo had confirmed my sense that it was incumbent on me to have a certain look, a certain lifestyle, and plenty of exposure in the media. I never set out to “live” the brand. It just so happened that I had specific interests and friends, and I lived a certain way, all of which contributed to the buzz around Jimmy Choo. After a while, maintaining that lifestyle became part of the job, with all the added stresses and strains of running a company, along with encroachment on what otherwise might be considered “free” time. I was still living at home, I had no car, and I had absolutely no social life other than entertaining related to the business. And all the while, Sandra and I were each making the same £15,000 a year, which meant that I was always overdrawn at the bank.
At the beginning, we made Jimmy available to the press as well as me, but at the events Brower Lewis set up, his only contribution was to complain that he was not designing the collection. This was entirely true, but not for want of our begging him to do so. Moreover, this was not a positive message we wanted conveyed to the public. But then even within the inner circle he remained a pall of negativity. When he came to monthly board meetings, he always brought his attorney, and then he’d have nothing to say. Adding insult to injury, he began to complain to his couture clients. “They stole my name. They’re ripping me off.” These were the phrases that got back to us. Somehow he failed to remember that we had licensed his name. In 2001, we bought it outright.
• • • •
OVER TIME, JIMMY’S ECCENTRICITIES BECAME even more personal, and more problematic.
A girlfriend of Sandra’s invited her to go to a Sting concert, and Sandra adored Sting. Jimmy called the friend and threatened her life. So that was that for the concert.
Then I was in the store one day, on the shop floor, when Jimmy came in. He went downstairs to see Sandra, and almost immediately she started screaming. I called my father and I said, “You better get here quick—something’s going on downstairs with Jimmy and he’s hurting Sandra.” Luckily, Dad was just around the corner at the Lowndes Hotel and it took him about two seconds to get there. My dad went racing down the stairs and told Jimmy to get out of the store. That would be the last time I’d see my business partner for many months.
Still an
other time, Sandra and Jimmy were supposed to be coming to Motcomb Street for a meeting. They showed up late, and when Sandra walked in I could see she’d been crying. I took her aside and asked her what had happened. She said that Jimmy had hit her in the car on the way over. It seems Sandra had committed the unforgiveable offense of falling in love with Tony, the minicab driver her uncle had hired to spirit her away each evening. It was like something out of a fractured fairy tale. True to the trope, when the controlling uncle found out about this “betrayal,” as he saw it, he went absolutely mad.
A few days later my father and I took Sandra out to lunch at the restaurant across the street from the shop. We said, “Listen, something clearly is not right. If you need our help, we’ll help you.”
Shortly thereafter, Sandra showed up on my parents’ doorstep in an absolute state. She said she’d been sleeping in a car all weekend because Jimmy had chased her down the street with a knife.
“That’s it,” I said. “You’re not going home. You’re going to move in with me.”
So Sandra moved into my house on Chester Row, which gave her the opportunity to really open up and confide about the madness she’d been experiencing.
“Do you think I should see a psychiatrist?” she asked me.
I’d been through a spate of therapy myself, of course, and I’d found it quite helpful, so immediately I said yes. Obviously she was suffering from the consequences of a very twisted relationship with her uncle, and she needed a dispassionate observer to help her sort it out. Jimmy had helped her when she first came to London, but he’d been manipulating her sense of obligation ever since, as well as any guilt she may have felt for no longer being at his beck and call. So she got some professional help, and she lived with me for about a year, and after a while she seemed fine.
Jimmy stayed in his shop during that year, and his only contact with Sandra was through forwarding her mail. When it arrived I could see Chinese characters scrawled across the envelopes in pencil. I asked her, “What does this mean?”
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 6