Tamara Mellon
I was paid less than men at Jimmy Choo
Equal Pay Day in the US always falls in early April. The fourth month symbolises how far into the new year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous 12 months.
The US has an average gender pay gap of around 21per cent, which puts it just ahead of the UK at 18.1per cent, according to OECD data. But, both home and abroad, numbers have languished around the same mark in recent years, something of major concern to Tamara Mellon, the CEO of her eponymously named luxury shoe business.
“I have a 16-yearold daughter. We worked out that, at the current crawl, the pay gap isn’t going to close until she is 60 and I’m in my 90s,” she says. “I want to do something to help close the gap by the time she leaves college.”
Along with speaking out about her own experiences at Jimmy Choo – which she co-founded in 1996 – Mellon is marking Equal Pay Day US with a discount on her website. “We never have sales or markdowns, but on Equal Pay Day we give a discount of what the pay gap is between men and women. We were hoping it would be smaller this year.”
After departing from the company she started with East End shoe designer Jimmy Choo in 2011, Tamara struggled to establish her own business. She filed for bankruptcy in 2015, but in 2016 the shoe fanatic – who started out as an assistant accessories editor at British
Vogue – launched tamaramellon. com, a scaled-down, online-only retail business. With no wholesale operation, or bricks and mortar shops to support, it means the prices are keener than those of close rivals – such as Choo.
Mellon, who now lives and works in Los Angeles, claims that she was never adequately compensated at Jimmy Choo.
In 2001, when her co-founder decided to sell his shares, it was the beginning of a buy-and-sell process that resulted in four different funding rounds and four different boards over a period of approximately 11 years. Despite expansion into new global territories and huge profits, Tamara, as the creative force behind the brand, personally struggled to make ends meet. “On the first deal we did in 2001, I wasn’t really earning enough to be able to live on. I did some research on what my peers were being paid elsewhere in the industry and spoke to one particular person who was running a similar company. They were paid three times more than I was. I was a single mother with a small child so the board organised for me to borrow money from the company, to pay myself! So when we went to an exit (with the next sale) I had to sell shares to pay my salary back.”
During another sale, later in the company’s evolution, Tamara uncovered something alarming in the deal’s paperwork. “I found that the earnings for the men in our C-suite [executive suite] were a lot more than mine.”
As in many businesses, senior executives’ pay will vary wildly, but it was clear in Tamara’s mind that as chief creative officer (travelling to and from factories in Italy and running the creative side of the business), it felt grossly unfair and she should have at least been paid on a par with what they were earning. In Forbes last year she wrote: “During my time at Jimmy Choo, I negotiated three sales of the company to private equity firms. It was during one of these sales that I [discovered I] was being paid less than the men who worked for me.”
Today, she reaffirms this belief and how bad it made her feel. “In sweat equity alone on my part that worked out to millions of dollars. It was
really unfair. I put as much hard
‘I was being paid less than the men who worked for me. It was really unfair’
work into the business as they had. They were rewarded for it and I wasn’t.”
Taking her findings to the board and asking for more money was met with rejection on three separate occasions. Looking back, Mellon believes there were two reasons. The first was inequality in the numbers of men versus women. “I went through three private equity sales and one sale to a private company and in none of those deals were there any women. I only met one other woman in the whole process. If you think about how crazy this is: there still need to be more women at the table in these deals.”
Second, although the company founder was loaded with a gut instinct for her market, she lacked any business qualifications or mentors to ask for advice. She admits that when she started she was only interested in making beautiful shoes that “she had no idea what I was about to face as a woman in business”. Having built up one of the most recognised luxury brands over 16 years, she says: “I wasn’t formally educated in finance, business banking or operations. I had to learn as I went along.
“It’s so important for women to get educated if they can. Some kind of business training would have given me much more confidence to deal with what I was facing.”
The challenges facing female entrepreneurs in being treated as equals and securing funding are behind the Telegraph’s Women Mean Business campaign, which is calling on the Government to help boost Britain’s female founders. Currently, just nine per cent of annual funding for UK start-ups goes to women-led businesses.
In direct response to a number of factors including gender and racial bias against women, the US passed the Women’s Business Ownership Act in 1988.
This included measures to improve access to funding and technical training, plus the establishment of a National Women’s Business Council. The organisation supports female entrepreneurs with training, data and research, and reports annually to government. British campaigners, including the 200 who signed up to the Telegraph’s campaign, are hoping to build the foundations for similar UK legislation. “I’ve learned it’s a mistake to try to handle everything alone,” confesses Mellon. “We – women in business – should ask for help or get ourselves mentors. Any resources for women around business support, advice and training would be more than helpful.”
As a female boss, Mellon has now placed the equal pay debate at the centre of her company’s corporate altruism. “We try to talk a lot about these issues and build awareness around them,” she adds. In a company that can ill afford markdowns, thanks to a lean business model, the Equal Pay Day discount is a small but significant gesture, and more will follow. Since starting her own business, the shoe guru has undertaken a personal revolution. At tamaramellon.com she was determined to break the cycle of male dominance in her businesses. Her company now has 23 employees, five of them men.
“Having a female CEO is the best thing I ever did,” she says of hiring Jill Layfield from outdoor clothing company Backcountry, in 2016. “I finally feel like I have a true partner in my business, and the culture is so different now. We’re creating an atmosphere that’s really supportive – people come in with a great attitude every day.”
After 22 years and counting in the luxury business, Mellon is still learning by her mistakes, but says there is one in particular that she will not be repeating. “I am still trying to work on the idea of speaking up. To never believe I’m not valuable enough to have a voice. The movements we’ve had recently – #Metoo, #Timesup – mean that everyone is much more conscious and aware, particularly women, of how important it is to speak up for yourself.”
‘I’ve learned it’s a mistake to try to handle everything alone’