Widow who turned her husband’s business into an empire
Wanda Ferragamo was a Wanda
38-year-old housewife and Ferragamo
mother with no experience in 1921-2018
fashion or business when her husband, Salvatore, died in 1960. Yet rather than sell his shoe company, she decided to run it: over six decades, Wanda, who has died aged 96, turned Salvatore Ferragamo into an international brand producing everything from handbags to perfume, with revenues last year of £1.3bn. “In those early days I felt energy like a lion,” she said. “Everyone was surprised, but I wanted to keep alive all the efforts my husband made.”
Salvatore Ferragamo had been apprenticed to a cobbler at only nine years old, emigrated to the US at 16 and, in the early 1920s, found success making shoes for Hollywood studios and their stars. With business booming, he returned to Italy in 1927 to open a factory there, only to be bankrupted by the financial crash of 1929. But by the 1930s he had recovered and bought a palazzo in Florence, and – wanting to fill it with a family – went (as he put it) “shopping for a wife”. He found one on a visit to his home village of Bonito, said The Times. Wanda Miletti, 23 years his junior, was the daughter of a doctor who had got to know Ferragamo in his capacity as the village mayor. Ferragamo paid the mayor a visit and (according to him) asked Wanda, then 18, to take off one of her shoes so that he could demonstrate an anatomical point; when he saw a toe peeping through a hole in her stocking, he fell in love. They married in 1940, and spent their wedding night watching the Allied bombing of Naples. They had six children, the youngest of whom was only two when Ferragamo died.
When Wanda Ferragamo became CEO of Salvatore Ferragamo, it was producing 800 pairs of shoes a month; 20 years later, it was making 60,000 pairs. Insisting it should be a family-run firm, she gave each of her children a senior role – her daughter Fiamma became chief designer – while taking measures to prevent the siblings squabbling: they all started on the same salary, for instance. She stood down as chair of the company in 2006, but supervised its first public stock offering five years later. A diminutive figure known for her elegance – she always wore the seven-centimetrehigh heels that Salvatore had diagnosed as perfect for her height – she came into work into her 90s because, she said, “in what was his office, I feel closest to my husband”.