In a typically farcical footnote to the relationship, shortly after our breakup I started getting calls at the office from someone saying that Matthew owed him money. Not only that, the caller said, but Matthew owed some nasty gangsters money and they were going to murder him unless I paid all the debts.
It so happened that a friend of mine was in my office at the time, a friend who, on his mother’s side, has family connections in the world of people who make other people disappear. He took the phone, and he had a very pointed conversation with the would-be debt collector/extortionist on the line.
An hour later the man called back. “I’ve paid off the debts myself,” he said. “You’ll never hear from me again.”
• • • •7• • • •
If only I could have achieved that kind of closure with Robert Bensoussan.
Our accidental CEO tormented me relentlessly, and yet I could never find the extenuating circumstances that might make me feel more charitable and forgiving about his boorish behavior. He was forever going into rages in the office, directing his wrath toward anyone and everyone up and down the organization chart. His unpredictable behavior reminded me all too much of my mother, which made him doubly exhausting to be around.
I became a particular target not only because I was a rival as a figure of authority but because of my role as the public face of Jimmy Choo. In most private-equity ventures the CEO is the star, but in fashion it’s the creative head that people want to see and hear. Still, Robert should have made his peace with this by now. He’d been in the business a long time.
Especially in the early days, I was unique in being able to speak about everything, from the design of the collection to the nitty-gritty of operations, so of course I did the press interviews. And it was not as if I were trying to hog the limelight. I would have been happy to share the responsibility of living in the media’s glare. In fact, I tried to, but in Sandra’s first exposure to the press she was quoted as saying that no one could possibly wear our shoes for more than four hours. Another time, when she was asked why we were at the Oscars, her carefully crafted answer was, “I have no idea.”
As the brand grew and the press attention became global, I found myself doing one or two interviews a week, and any time I was to be photographed, it was on me as the representative of a fashion brand to engage fashion industry professionals to assist with hair and makeup.
After a while I was being asked the same questions so many times in so many different languages that I dreamed of being able to give them a recording that addressed the top dozen or so issues that journalists always wanted to ask me about. I tried to find more creative ways to describe what we were doing, if only so that in every interview I wouldn’t have to listen to myself repeat the same tired lines.
Robert just never seemed to accept the fashion industry’s requirement that the person in charge of creating the brand serves as the face of the brand. My father had warned me that by being out front I would become a target, but Robert began to act like an insecure and spiteful child. “I guess she gets the attention because I haven’t got the legs,” he said once.
After a while he decided to bring all Jimmy Choo PR in-house and to hire Tara ffrench-Mullen, who’d worked at Gianfranco Ferré. Not long after, Robert called Caroline Berthet, in charge of marketing in New York, and asked her to take me out of a promotional video. But that was trivial when set against his other spiteful actions that actually did serious damage to our business.
In 2005, we were making our mark in France with the very successful shop in Paris and opening another in Cannes, so Carine Roitfeld, the editor in chief of French Vogue, agreed to host a party with us. Both as an editor and as a former model, Carine is a true fashion icon, someone women all over the world look to as an arbiter of exquisite taste, so this was a real coup, but once again Robert insisted that his name be on the invitation along with mine. Carine said, “No. I do this with Tamara!” Fashion CEOs don’t necessarily attend these kinds of parties, much less plaster their names all over the invitation. You would never have seen Domenico De Sole put his name on an invitation at Gucci when Tom Ford was there. But Robert’s ego simply couldn’t accept that, in the fashion industry, “the suits” stayed in the background. Regardless of how much it could have meant for the brand, Robert canceled the party.
Not long after, the singer Pharrell Williams approached me about doing a collaboration. Pharrell loves fashion, and we agreed that he’d design a shoe, we’d put it in our collection, and we’d split the profits fifty-fifty. Robert went ballistic. Lawyers got involved. Obviously the idea couldn’t go forward with Jimmy Choo, but Pharrell went on to design sunglasses for Louis Vuitton, and to be featured in American Vogue.
That was when the penny truly dropped for me regarding the character of this man who now had executive authority over the business my father and I had built. It was also the moment when the full burden of regret descended on me for agreeing to go down this path. In retrospect, the evidence for Robert’s character had been there all along.
Months earlier, when we were opening the store in Beverly Hills on North Canon, my father and I did an interview—a sort of father-and-daughter relationship piece. Robert didn’t like something my father said, and so he rang him up and screamed at him. That was the first time my father said to me, “This man is no good.”
Not long after, Dad, Robert, and I took a trip to Hong Kong to scout out opportunities. We had taken on a partner called Bluebell to facilitate our expansion into Asia, and as we were visiting a Chinese shopping mall with them we bumped into Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH. LVMH is the home of Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon, Hennessy cognac, and Guerlain, among others. Robert stepped forward to shake Arnault’s hand, and the Frenchman involuntarily recoiled.
I was taken aback by this strange reaction, one that I’d have to describe as disgust.
On the heels of that odd moment, my father told me about an earlier encounter in London, a time when he’d bumped into Joseph Ettedgui, founder of the luxury retailer Joseph. This was just after the Phoenix deal, and just to make conversation, Dad mentioned that Robert Bensoussan was to be our new CEO. Apparently Joseph had the same reaction as Arnault.
Looking back, I really wish I’d had the wherewithal to get rid of Robert before he could do any serious damage. Every time I made a comment that was particularly on point, he greeted it with disdain or rage, which was the same way my mother had treated me all through my childhood. Unfortunately, I followed through with my childhood habit, which was to go along and feign agreement as a way of escaping conflict.
Robert was very effective at opening stores and in bringing in partners, but that skill set was replicable. With a company as profitable and well regarded as ours, we could have easily found a CEO who truly understood what we were trying to do and whose ego wasn’t constantly getting in the way.
Hope springs eternal, and three or four years is the normal term for a private-equity firm to hold a company they’ve invested in. So by the time I had Robert’s number, we were expecting Phoenix to exit and I thought we could simply wait him out.
Truth be told, my father was ready to cash out himself. He was only seventy-four, but his mind was as keen as ever and he kept very fit, going for an hour walk in the park every day. But he’d begun to talk more and more about liquidating his shares, buying a house in Beverly Hills, and settling in for a nice retirement in the sunshine surrounded by lemon trees.
So with impetus from both sides of the Jimmy Choo ownership equation, “Exit Strategy” became an item for discussion at our monthly board meetings.
For an entrepreneur, this kind of transaction is the moment of truth. You’ve worked like a dog to build something from the ground up, often laboring for years without much compensation because, rather than pay yourself the going rate, you’re pouring every cent back into the business. And no matter how successful the venture, extracting
the value of the equity you’ve built up is dependent on multiple factors, most of which are beyond your control: the general state of the economy, the health of your particular industry, the short-term profitability of potential buyers.
In the fashion world, extracting value is trickier still because there has never been a natural fit between fashion and the world of the Dow and the UK Financial Times and Stock Exchange. A successful brand has to juggle art and commerce every day, and Wall Street and the City are interested only in the latter.
In the nineteenth century, when most of the grand old fashion houses were founded—Hermès, Bulgari, Burberry, Louis Vuitton—they were owned by an individual or by a family. The same was true for Chanel, Prada, Gucci, and Fendi in the early twentieth century, Dior just after the war, and Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, Armani, and Versace more recently. Serious investors paid attention to businesses with smokestacks, and they viewed fashion as something of interest to their wives, a marginal realm of artisans holding pins between their lips, plying their trade in tiny ateliers.
But about the time I was having my first cigarette at Heathfield, the engine of the economy was shifting from heavy industry to high technology. Ideas, protected by copyrights and trademarks, were being valued more highly as assets than big brick buildings and clunky machines. The potential for growth seemed inversely proportional to tangibility.
Eventually, the big financial players took note that luxury goods were embedded with “intellectual property” in the same sense that software and biotechnology were, and thus had some of the same advantages. A luxury brand offered the owner the opportunity to profit from ideas and image, with almost limitless prospects for scaling up through licensing, and through the halo effect of brand image that could travel all around the world, even migrating to other products.
One of the first to see the opportunities here was Bernard Arnault, and it made him the richest man in France. His family had already made one fortune in construction, developing vacation homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, in 1984, he gained control of Société foncière et financière du groupe Agache-Willot, which owned the Boussac textile group, which in turn owned Christian Dior.
In 1987, Arnault hired Christian Lacroix away from Patou, a couture house, to establish their first brand from scratch. He then acquired Céline, the leather goods company, and bought a controlling interest in LVMH.
Meanwhile, a Bahrain-based private-equity firm called Investcorp bought Tiffany & Co. and took it public. They invested in Saks Fifth Avenue, the watchmakers Ebel and Breguet, and the exclusive jeweler Chaumet. In 1993, they bought Gucci and revitalized it by hiring Dawn Mello as creative director. She, in turn, hired Richard Lambertson, as well as a young fellow named Tom Ford.
By the mid-nineties, Hermès, Tiffany, and LVMH were already publicly traded companies. Then Bulgari did an initial public offering to finance global expansion, and the stock more than doubled within the first year. Morgan Stanley, who had done the public offering for Bulgari, began to encourage Investcorp to put Gucci on the same track. In October 1995, Gucci appeared on the exchanges in New York and Amsterdam, as well as in Milan. The stock doubled in value in only six months.
Suddenly, there was a strong “luxury goods sector” in the world of global finance, with additional IPOs by Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Burberry. Coverage of the fashion world expanded beyond Women’s Wear Daily to the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
But as the suits failed to acknowledge to the detriment of all concerned, fashion is not a “rational” business that can be brought to heel by an MBA wielding a spreadsheet. You don’t necessarily spur success by tightening the supply chain or by cheapening the quality of the materials. Winners and losers are subject to the ineffable forces of creativity, inspiration, and very fickle trends. You can have a $12 billion business, but each decision to purchase each individual item of inventory still depends on the customer’s fantasies, her self-image, and her own awareness of what makes her feel more attractive. Making such an intimate connection with the customer relies on a different set of skills entirely.
Our growth had been stellar, and all indications were that we would continue on that trajectory. We had manufactured 7,300 pairs of shoes in 1997. In 2001 that figure increased to 15,000. In 2004, our number had shot up exponentially to 180,000, which exceeded the volume of Manolo Blahnik. We also expected to sell 23,000 bags in 2004, up from about 1,000 three years earlier. Revenues had nearly doubled from £12 million in 2001 to £22 million in 2003, with £34 million projected for 2004. Profits were on the same track: £3 million in 2001, £4 million in 2003, and £7.5 million projected for the year ahead. In terms of retail outlets, the potential for growth was similarly exponential. Gucci had nearly two hundred stores. We had barely twenty.
Even so, we were probably too small to capture the interest of the big institutional investors. And the mergers and acquisitions craze of the 1990s had already passed us by. In fact, it had recently reversed, with “de-merging” on the rise. So this was the context in which we began to have talks with bankers.
Goldman Sachs sent over an all-female team—each of the women wearing Jimmy Choos—and they proposed a very public auction. But their valuation came out low—at £60 million.
Rothschild agreed with us that it should be at least £100 million, and they said they could achieve that mark, so we went with them. Their point man, Akeel Sachak, an Indian born in Tanzania and educated at Oxford, pushed for a stealth approach, which he dubbed Project Jewel, a code name to keep the transaction under the radar.
A valuation of £100 million was still comparatively small for Rothschild, but at the same time our public profile was huge. It didn’t hurt that Legally Blonde was in the theaters, with multiple plugs for Jimmy Choo, or that Reese Witherspoon, the star, insisted on keeping all the Jimmy Choos she’d worn on-screen. In their prospectus for potential investors, the bankers could include clips not only from that movie but also from Sex and the City, as well as song lyrics by Beyoncé, P. Diddy, and Pharrell Williams. Jimmy Choo, though always tasteful, was the embodiment of “bling.”
The Swiss firm Richemont was on an acquiring spree, but their profile was hard luxury (Montblanc, Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, Piaget, Alfred Dunhill) rather than luxury fashion per se. On the other hand, they had owned Chloé since 1985.
Gucci Group would have been a natural partner, but they’d been thrown for a loop by their purchase by Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, and now Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole were leaving. Moreover, they had just run up a long string of acquisitions—not just Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney, but also Yves Saint Laurent, and a direct competitor in the market for luxury women’s shoes, Sergio Rossi. So Gucci passed.
LVMH seemed a logical player because they did not have a luxury brand of women’s shoes. Berluti was part of their portfolio, but they made footwear only for men. Still, LVMH was under pressure to develop the strength of their existing brands, rather than to grow by acquiring new ones.
For months we went through pitch meetings and intense discussions with strategic buyers, and with millions of dollars riding on the outcome, it was all incredibly stressful and disruptive for everyone in the organization. Anytime there’s a merger or an acquisition, everyone wonders how it will affect him or her personally, that is, will they still have a job? At times the stress is palpable. Tempers flare.
• • • •
MEANWHILE, MY OWN PERSONAL LIFE was not exactly an island of serenity, with de-merging on the agenda there as well.
I’d been living apart from Matthew, still not ready to face the added stress of a divorce, but my father told me that staying in marital limbo was madness, and after a while I was ready to make the break official. He called around on my behalf, and on his recommendation I engaged Sandra Davis, the divorce attorney who had worked for Princess Diana and Jerry Hall.
Even thusly armed, howeve
r, I was still far more interested in mediation than confrontation. I told Matthew, “I don’t want anything from you. I’ll look after Minty, and you can set something aside for her when she turns twenty-one.”
I was offering to take full responsibility for her life, health, and happiness, and I asked for nothing in return. In my naïveté I imagined that Matthew would say, “That’s great. Thanks,” and we’d split amicably.
Instead, my husband responded by suing me for £10 million, claiming that his name and money had been instrumental in building Jimmy Choo.
For his lawyer, Matthew hired Raymond Tooth, also known as “Jaws,” the man who had represented Sadie Frost against Jude Law, and Pattie Boyd against Eric Clapton. Before Irina Abramovich settled out of court for a pedestrian £155 million, Jaws had been on his way to the largest divorce settlement in history, with Roman Abramovich’s £18 billion fortune in the crosshairs.
Suing me was bad enough, but their line of argument was especially galling, primarily because I’d changed my name to Mellon only at Matthew’s insistence. I had been Tamara Yeardye at work, and that’s what I continued calling myself until Matthew actually got very, very upset, saying, “We’re married! You should be using my name.”
On April 19, 2004, I was at my London home in South Kensington when I got a call from my girlfriend Elika Gibbs at about two in the morning. My father was ill, and my mother had called Elika because her boyfriend was a doctor. Elika had listened briefly and told my mother to call an ambulance. Then Elika called me.
I went over immediately, arriving just as the emergency medics got to my parents’ house. My father was being carried out on a stretcher and my mother was in a state. She was so agitated that she couldn’t go in the ambulance, so I climbed in and I rode with my dad to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Fulham Road.
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 12