HELL IN HIGH HEELS
Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon treads on some toes with her juicy new business memoir
‘Our natural instinct I think is to try and make things OK. We’re all so afraid of the myths that have come up — and they are myths — that she is not a team player, or she’s a diva, called a “bitch.” If a woman is being a tough negotiator, she’s considered difficult, not good at her job.’ TAMARA MELLON Co-founder Jimmy Choo
When Tamara Mellon exited Jimmy Choo — the luxury shoe company she co-founded in London — after 15 years in 2011, the parting with Labelux (the brand’s new private-equity group owner) was less than amicable. She was offered “large sums of money” to sign a confidentiality agreement in addition to her contract’s non-compete clause.
During the forced sabbatical of that contract, Mellon wrote a business plan for an eponymous new luxury fashion brand. It launches this month on the heels of the other thing she wrote that year — her candid memoir, In My Shoes (published by Portfolio). Mellon may have since been written out of the Choo corporate timeline, but she said no to keeping quiet about the brand rewriting history.
“It’s very raw,” Mellon admits over the phone from her New York office, “but I thought if I was going to write a book, I’m not going to sugar-coat it. I might as well do it.”
The lively read begins with turning Jimmy Choo, the name of an East London custom cobbler, into an international ready-to-wear success, in the context of the luxury fashion boom, her personal challenges and milestones (the unexpected death of her father and mentor, or sobriety after rehab).
“I wish I had kept a diary!” Mellon exclaims, before explaining that she chose her co-writer, William Patrick, because he was so good at “pulling information out of me, and so good at triggering memories.” There are as many facts as there are emotional truths, “because that’s what makes a story gripping.
“What was going on in my personal life was also a backstory to building the brand and I thought it was interesting to weave in and out of it,” Mellon explains.
“Particularly the early years coming from a sort of dysfunctional family. And then you can see how that affected me and how I took it into the business world.”
Mellon gamely takes on her own creation myth, poking holes in the glossy analogy a journalist made early in her career — that of a plucky heroine in a Danielle Steel novel.
Admittedly, the mergers and demergers in Mellon’s personal life are soap operatic: a brief marriage to an American heir, a drug addict who she defended against charges of criminal conspiracy for hacking into her computer during their divorce proceedings; taking her monstrous-sounding mother and siblings to court over the intricacies of shares in their family trusts, corrupt accountants and trustees, all against a setting of growing up in Belgravia and Beverly Hills in a childhood filled with cameos by stars such as Michael Caine, Nancy Sinatra and Sean Connery, winter holidays in St. Bart’s, checking in and out of the Peninsula hotel.
There are also major accomplishments besides Choo: her beloved daughter (Minty, short for Araminta) and an Order of the British Empire from the Queen. If In My Shoes sounds a little Judith Krantz, it’s also more than a little Jack Welch.
Mellon talks candidly about the intricacies of shares, and about money, including her own. She isn’t cagey on the numbers — far from it, detailing how Choo went from manufacturing 7,300 pairs of shoes in 1997 to 180,000 in 2004 (“more than Manolo”). She gets into revenues and projected profits.
Mellon also reveals it was not with Choo himself but with his niece Sandra Choi that she developed and designed the brand’s wildly successful ready-to-wear collections.
The transparency has its roots in her personal life.
“When you grow up in a dysfunctional family, it’s all about keeping secrets, to look like a normal family on the outside and you can’t tell anybody what’s really going on behind closed doors,” she says. “It was actually really cathartic to tell the truth.”
The crash course in the global luxury industry and high finance is also something of a cautionary tale for fashion startups that dream big, particularly about the perils of private equity investors, whose mind games and power plays Mellon says drove her to the brink of despair in that last year at Choo, to say nothing of the sexism.
When she founded the brand in the 1990s, she arguably had a reputation as a party girl heiress, but as the head of a major brand 15 years later, had come a long way from those dilettante days. That didn’t stop one potential investor from responding to negotiations by questioning why Mellon wanted more money when she was, “rather rich for a woman.”
Family dysfunction would seem the only explanation as to why she tolerated the last Jimmy Choo CEO for an excruciating six years. Mellon recounts the many ways he undermined her and not only had a negative effect on her personally but, she contends, on the bottom line. “So what I’ve learned is if something’s not working, you deal with it immediately,” she says.
For example, last month, on the eve of its launch, as a corrective measure, Mellon replaced her new brand’s existing CEO.
“The fit wasn’t right for me, so for his benefit and mine it was better to pull the Band-Aid off earlier,” she explains, “which is a new behaviour for me.”
“That’s hopefully what I’m going to do with this book — really encourage women to speak up,” she says. “Our natural instinct I think is to try and make things OK. We’re all so afraid of the myths that have come up — and they are myths — that she is not a team player, or she’s a diva, called a ‘ bitch.’ If a woman is being a tough negotiator she’s considered difficult, not good at her job.”
Yet even as she admits the last few years of jostling at Choo put her on the edge, here Mellon is again on the verge of a big new launch.
“I can’t help myself!” she laughs before getting serious.
“I’m taking from everything I’ve learned, good and bad, and I’m setting up a business that I now control and won’t lose control of, creating a corporate culture that I like and is supportive of women, pays women properly and is a happy environment. And it’s not run by somebody else’s greed or for EBITDA to exit in two years. I want to build a real business.”
The Tamara Mellon brand will launch in Canada exclusively at Holt Renfrew.