But each year I would also take the team on an inspiration trip, shopping in flea markets and collecting vintage pieces that spoke to me. Then we would come back and put into groups everything we’d picked up.
I took the team once to Jaipur in India, and then to shop in the hippie market in Goa. I also took them to Morocco, and we shopped in the bazaar and stayed in these cute little riads and got inspiration from the lanterns around the courtyards.
Istanbul was next on my list, but no one else wanted to go, which I didn’t understand at all. Later I found out that it was a Robert-inspired mutiny. Be that as it may, I took the trip by myself, absorbing the souk and the rugs, the jewelry and the spice market with its amazing colors. I took hundreds of photographs there, including shots of the architecture with the patterns of the tiles and the paintings on them.
But Robert’s most costly power play came at a very pivotal moment in fashion, when we were poised to capture the next wave.
At the Lineapelle show in Bologna, I’d been sitting with one of the suppliers when I picked some components off the shelf—a very stiletto heel and a platform with a very thick sole—and I said, “I want it just like this.” Right there on the spot I was designing, and actually assembling, a very different kind of shoe, the heavy platform sandal. We and everyone else had been making shoes that were single soled and very strappy, and now I was proposing to increase the volume of the shoe, making it considerably heavier, even clunky, but with a thin heel.
I set this new idea in motion, and then I went on a business trip. When I came back, the shoe I had designed had been taken out of the collection. Sandra and a product developer named Katarina had decided to drop it. I was astounded that they would be so presumptuous. It wasn’t until later that I became aware of the propaganda campaign Robert had launched against me in-house, encouraging the creative team essentially to disregard my input.
To make matters infinitely worse, just at this moment, Christian Louboutin came out with his peep toe platform, and women flocked to him. The platform stiletto became the hot shoe, Louboutin became the hot brand, and for a while our customers transferred their loyalty to him. Then Yves Saint Laurent came out with almost exactly the same design—and that was that. We couldn’t go ahead without looking like copycats.
It may seem absurd to make so much over one missed opportunity. But until that moment, Louboutin had only one platform style, and this new shoe he brought out truly made him a household name. It’s like that in fashion—make or break on one roll of the dice. It was truly a watershed moment, and not our finest hour.
We continued to grow the business, but only by opening new retail stores. Robert was able to tout this increase in dollar volume, which is certainly better than flat sales or a decline, but the proper measure for the health of a brand should be “like for like” growth in the same universe of stores. That kind of growth would require the continuous creativity I was trying to keep alive, but which my jealous CEO was undercutting at every turn.
My father was dead, my marriage was over, and now with Robert firmly installed, it looked as if I was going to be stuck in a never-ending custody battle over the company that I’d conceived and carried to term. Not only that, but I was still fighting for “custody” of half the shares I’d already earned.
• • • •
THAT NEXT SUMMER I RENTED a house in Malibu, which was pleasant, but everything shut down at night, and there was only one good restaurant and just this empty stretch of sand and surf, and I felt isolated.
While I was there my friend Diana Jenkins introduced me to her neighbor, Robert Ritchie, also known as Kid Rock, and we all hung out together on the beach. I liked him a lot, and in fact we’re still good friends, but the media made it out to be far more than it was. They did the same with Flavio Briatore, the head of the Renault Formula One racing team, with Pharrell Williams, even George Clooney. Every friendship I struck up with a well-known bachelor became, in the pages of the tabloids, my next reckless affair. The fact is, I was far too busy, and far too exhausted, to get too worked up about anyone.
I was also still trying to reach out to my mother, so while I was in California I put together a housewarming party for her. Older people don’t get out much, so I gathered my brothers and a bunch of friends and some Hollywood people around a long table outside by the pool.
Later, in an affidavit pertaining to our dispute over the shares, she said I’d thrown a wild party and destroyed her house. My mother made the evening I’d put together for her sound like a major debauch, so much so that she described it as the “defining moment in the breakdown in our relationship.” What I remember most vividly is my wonderful cook from that summer standing in the kitchen in tears because my mother was being so vile to her.
Shortly after the California dinner, Nick Morgan, the trustee, forwarded a handwritten letter my mother had sent to him. It was so degrading to me, and she talked about me in such a disparaging and dismissive way, that I’ve never spoken to her since. But then she’d always had a way of taking any detail of my life experience and making it sound utterly shameful, if not criminal. She seemed to relish using phrases like “she was BROKE!” when, in fact, the financial pinch that had me borrowing money from my dad was the result of the ridiculously low salary I took in order to help grow the company. What hurt most is that I was at her house, with my daughter, when she was putting these thoughts to paper.
Our book of celebrity photographs to raise money for Elton’s AIDS Foundation continued to occupy a great deal of my time, and our list of models was pretty amazing: Christina Aguilera, Rebecca Banks, Tony Briar, Rachel Hunter, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Jodie Kidd, Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss, Macy Gray, Paris Hilton, Geri Halliwell, Serena Williams, Minnie and Kate Driver, Elle Macpherson, Sophie Dahl, Anne Heche, Mimi Rogers, Pamela Anderson, Yasmin Le Bon, Sarah Ferguson, among others. Of course I had to take a turn as well, lying on my belly on a bar with a huge Cartier diamond, my feet in the air.
A friend of mine, Beatrice Vincenzini, agreed to publish the volume. Her family owns newspapers, cable TV channels in Spain, the Italian national lottery, as well as the book company De Agostini. We called our photo collection “4 Inches.” The innuendo in the title did cross my mind, but the fact is that “4 inches” was the maximum height for stilettos at the time. Now, of course, heels have gone on and up through the roof.
The book sold for $75, and it brought in a ton of publicity, and then we did an auction of photographs at Christie’s in London, in New York, and in L.A. All in all we raised $3.5 million, which at the time was the single largest donation ever to the Elton John charity. We built rape shelters across South Africa that could provide every service that a woman would need under one roof: medical treatment, legal advice, and counseling. It’s said that the money provided treatment for more than five hundred thousand women.
• • • •9• • • •
When Phoenix acquired us in 2001, we had only three stores; by the time Lion Capital came on the scene in 2004, we had nineteen. Now we were adding new stores on Bond Street and on Sloane Street, and on Via San Pietro all’Orto in Milan. Rents were going up all over Europe, which meant that you could pay millions for a top location, which also required a lump-sum payment to buy out the lease held by the old tenant.
In Paris the shopping mecca is Avenue Montaigne, and Robert found a space there that had been the concierge’s flat for an apartment building. It was empty, and next to an alley, so the rent was cheap, but it took two years in court to gain permission from the prefecture. It was only 538 square feet, but it had 14 feet of window looking out on the avenue. I will give credit (even to Robert) where credit is due—this tiny location racked up nearly $3.7 million the first year.
On the product front, after shoes and bags, fragrance was our next objective. We talked to Clarins, to Procter and Gamble, and then to Interparfum. Primarily a distribution company, I
nterparfum had launched the fragrance brand for Agent Provocateur, as well as the fragrance for John Galliano. They were doing about $190 million a year, but with nine international subsidiaries, their global reach matched that of billion-dollar companies.
We also did an eyewear deal with Safilo, the huge Italian company that manufactured and distributed for Armani and all the Gucci Group brands. They had the capacity to merge plastic and metal, which seemed essential for capturing our design aesthetic.
I began to push our boundaries in other ways. In 2006, I initiated our first collaboration with an artist, Richard Phillips. He does large, hyperrealistic paintings that recall the pictorial style of fashion magazines from the fifties and sixties. We began working to reappropriate his images and put them on bags. Robert never understood what I was doing, and the board dithered over whether or not this was a good investment of resources, so the whole process dragged on and on.
I met the same kind of resistance when it came time to create a Web presence for us. Back in 2000, I had been one of the first to support Natalie Massenet when she founded the fashion site Net-A-Porter. Natalie didn’t have the cash to pay up front for the shoes she wanted to sell, so I let her have them on consignment. As a result of that early boost to her business, Natalie and I had always enjoyed a great relationship. So when I wanted to launch a Web site for Jimmy Choo, I called her and asked her to run the back office—the bookkeeping and order fulfillment. It wasn’t part of her business model to offer these kinds of services to outside clients, but for us, she said yes.
Robert’s response was to tell people that she was going out of business. In fact, Robert had an investment in a competing company he wanted us to bring in. Bottom line: Net-a-Porter is still thriving. In 2010, Natalie did a deal that valued her company at £350 million.
By 2006, we were selling shoes and bags in over forty Saks outlets, and even Neiman Marcus was selling our bags (Manolo doesn’t make bags). We followed the Tulita with the Tahula, with round handles inspired by the hula hoop. Bags were now 40 percent of sales, and bags deliver profit margins roughly 10 percent higher than those of shoes.
The general economy was soaring, fully recovered from the dot-com bust of 2000, and we still had immense room for growth, especially in Asia. We were opening stores in Mumbai, Dubai, and Kuwait, as well as in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan, and our revenues were approaching $120 million. With a growth rate of 45 percent, Jimmy Choo had already exceeded Lion’s financial goals for the acquisition. So it seemed natural enough that we would begin to talk about an exit.
Even so, I was more than a little taken aback in November when Lyndon called me quite out of the blue and asked me to drop by his house in South Kensington. I went over and we sat down, and he said, “I have an offer for the company at £185M, and we’re closing the deal in two weeks.”
I thought, “My God, I’m being squeezed out. They’re selling my company out from under me.”
He said, “Here’s the deal. You’re going to cash out. You can retain 3 percent, and you can stay on as a sort of ambassador, but with no executive position.”
I was still trying to absorb the implications, too stunned to say anything. You don’t reach this point in a transaction overnight. This whole thing must have been going on behind my back for months, and it was no great challenge to figure out who would have been at the heart of it.
Robert’s guerrilla campaign against me finally came into perspective. For whatever animosity or jealously he may have felt toward me, his ultimate goal was to have complete control of the company. In his mind, this meant that the company’s founder could no longer be tolerated on the premises.
Apparently, Lyndon had been testing the waters with potential buyers when Robert asked flat-out what it would cost for him to acquire the company. Lyndon had come back with a price of £185 million. Robert then brought in Ramez Sousou from TowerBrook Capital Partners, who’d worked for George Soros and been the “underbidder” during the sale to Lion. A Palestinian with a Harvard MBA, Ramez had also worked for Goldman Sachs in New York and London, even headed the Goldman Mezzanine Partners fund. When Soros retired, Ramez and his partners bought the private-equity division of Soros Fund Management and created TowerBrook. Soros remained a significant investor, and lots of other family funds and institutional investors came on board.
TowerBrook were quite flush, with $2.5 billion to work with, all aimed at acquisitions. They were also making money hand over fist, even winning the European Fund of the Year by the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association—none of which bode well for my chances of coming up with a more promising backer to team with in making a counteroffer.
With TowerBrook’s bid on the table, Ramez and his colleagues would have exclusive access to our data and staff for their due diligence over the next four weeks, and during that time Lyndon had agreed not to solicit any other offers.
I called Lyndon and proposed a lunch at Harry’s Bar. As soon as I sat down across from him I said, “I’ll bring you £200M in two weeks. If I do, will you take it?”
He said he would.
In fact, he had nothing to lose. My offer, should I be able to deliver, would be a bump up of £15 million. But then, I’m also sure he never thought I’d be able to deliver.
I started talking to other private-equity funds, as well as to people who knew people, and one of my friends put me in touch with the Kuwaiti billionaire Maan Al-Sanea. We had a meeting and Maan expressed interest. He hired Lazard to begin putting together the deal, and another friend of mine, Ricardo Pavoncelli, to prepare the due diligence.
Things were looking up, but I couldn’t let it get around that I was trying to raise money, so now, on top of everything else, I was forced to run a cloak-and-dagger operation à la John Le Carré.
The holidays were coming on, and I was at Matthew Freud’s Christmas party when one of his partners, Kris Thykier, came up to me and said, “I know what’s going on. Seems you’re alone in this.” Then he pointed to Bonnie Takhar, Robert’s right-hand person who negotiated all the licensing deals. “Why don’t you get Bonnie on your side.”
I went over and spoke to her, and she was immediately receptive. From that moment on she became my well-placed eyes and ears, with her office directly next door to Robert’s.
I’d already rented a house in St. Bart’s for the holidays, and I’d even sent Minty ahead with the nanny to stay with my friends Vassi Chamberlain and Adrian Harris. I told the office that I was away on vacation when in fact I was in London, working from home. My assistant could tell from my e-mails that I hadn’t really left, and so she called Sandra to see what was going on. This assistant also happened to be dating Sandra’s boyfriend’s brother, so it was all getting a bit too close for comfort.
It was also getting down to the wire, and I was not without anxiety as I waited in my lawyer’s office on the evening of December 17, the day after TowerBrook’s exclusivity expired. Then, at about ten p.m., my new friend from Kuwait, Maan Al-Sanea, came through with a nonbinding offer at the level I’d requested: £200 million.
Robert’s deal was to be signed at nine the next morning, so I called Lyndon and I said, “Don’t sign with Ramez. I have a firm bid of £200 million. You can call Lazard to verify it.”
He said to me, “Okay, Tamara, I’m a greedy capitalist. I’ll take your deal.” But then he said, “You better call Ramez.”
Lyndon wanted me to dampen Ramez’s ardor until he’d had time to speak with Robert.
So I called Ramez and I told him, “I’m not in favor of this deal. If you sign tomorrow, I promise you I won’t publicly support this. And I will damage all your future acquisitions.”
He was furious, and he knew that Lyndon had said he would not sell without my support.
But then with a touch of braggadocio that would become all too familiar, he said, “You know what, Tamara? I’m going to sign, and then I’
m going to sign you up post-deal.”
In other words, he didn’t care what I thought. And he knew that I was captive to whoever owned a majority stake in Jimmy Choo.
By the next morning Lyndon had told Robert the whole story, including the fact that I was the one who’d topped his offer, and when he got to the office he was throwing thunderbolts.
His deadline had passed without closure, but nothing had been signed for my deal, either, and he was not about to give up so easily.
He quickly banged out a letter for everyone in management to sign, saying that they all wanted to go with his deal. In Star Chamber fashion, he then set himself up in the conference room and had all the senior executives come in one by one for their individual dose of intimidation. But none of them would sign. Except Sandra.
Years before, my father had warned me, “Watch out for her. She’ll stab you in the back.” I don’t know how he’d had this intuition, except for the old adage, “Beware the rabbit in a rage.”
But rabbit or conniving, sly fox, she was literally by Robert’s side the whole time. She had never expressed to me that she was unhappy with her position, but then again, everyone wants to be recognized, and just because someone doesn’t assert her ego doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it. But mostly, Robert had worked her over, fueling the idea that she should have been recognized more and that I had been the one unjustly blocking her path. If I could be gotten out of the way, her path to recognition would be cleared. During TowerBrook’s due diligence, Ramez had asked her what would happen if I left. Later, he told me she’d said, “I’m a big girl now. I can handle Tamara’s job.”
Robert’s palace revolt failed, but now the problem was that the Kuwaitis were stalling. They weren’t signing, and they had a Muslim holiday and they weren’t contactable. So everyone was getting really nervous, especially me.
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 15