Founders - #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

When Tamara Mellon’s father lent her the seed money to start a high-end shoe company, he cautioned her: “Don’t let the accountants run your business.” Little did he know that over the next fifteen years, the struggle between “financial” and “creative” would become one of the central themes as Mellon’s business.Mellon grew Jimmy Choo into a billion dollar brand and her personal glamour made her an object of global media fascination. Vogue photographed her wedding. Vanity Fair covered her divorce and the criminal trial that followed. The Wall Street Journal reported on her relentless battle between “the suits” and “the creatives" and Mellon’s triumph against a brutally hostile takeover attempt.But despite her eventual fame and fortune, Mellon didn’t have an easy road to success. Her early life was marked by a tumultuous and broken family life, battles with anxiety and depression, and a stint in rehab. Determined not to end up unemployed, penniless, and living in her parents’ basement under the control of her alcoholic mother, Mellon honed her natural business sense and invested in what she knew best—fashion.In creating the shoes that became a fixture on Sex and the City and red carpets around the world, Mellon relied on her own impeccable sense of what the customer wanted—because she was that customer. What she didn’t know at the time was that success would come at a high price—after struggles with an obstinate business partner, a conniving first CEO, a turbulent marriage, and a mother who tried to steal her hard-earned wealth.Now Mellon shares the whole larger-than-life story, with shocking details that have never been presented before. From her troubled childhood to her time as a young editor at Vogue to her partnership with the cobbler Jimmy Choo, to her very public relationships, Mellon offers an honest and gripping account of the episodes that have made her who she is today.In My Shoes is a definitive book for fashion aficionados, aspiring entrepreneurs, and anyone who loves a juicy true story about sex, drugs, money, power, high heels, and overcoming adversity. This episode is what I learned from reading In My Shoes: A Memoir by Tamara Mellon. -----Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money.-----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

One of the reasons that Tamara wrote this book and this story will shock and surprise you, but one of the reasons that she shares her story is because she wants future generations of entrepreneurs to learn from her experience. And there is a warning in this story. And the warning is always retain control of your company. This is also something that John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods told me. I got to spend seven hours with John over two days and I read his autobiography twice. And it was during one of our conversations that John told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about the podcast. He had listened to over a hundred episodes before we met. And he told me that if Founders existed when he

was younger, that Whole Foods would still be an independent company today. That since the podcast and all of History's Greatest Readers constantly emphasize the importance of controlling costs, he would have put much more of a priority on it, especially during good times, during boom times. It is very natural for a company, for a person, for human nature to just not watch your costs as closely because everything is going so well. This is something that Andrew Carnegie actually warned against. In fact, Carnegie

would repeat this mantra. He would say, profits and prices are cyclical subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled and any savings achieved in costs were permanent. This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of ramp and spent a ton of time with them over the last two years. They all listen to the podcast and they all picked up that the main theme of the podcast is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so gives you a massive competitive advantage. That is a main theme for ramp.

The reason that ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend ramp gives you everything you need to control your costs ramp gives you easy use corporate cards for your entire team automated expense reporting and cost control there is a line in andrew carney's biography that says cost control became nearly an obsession keep in mind when carney sells to jp morgan carney has the largest liquid fortune in the world one of the largest liquid fortune in the world. One of the largest fortunes in the world today is the Walton family. Sam Walton was obsessed with controlling costs and the competitive advantage that it gave you just like Andrew Carnegie was. In fact, Sam wrote in his autobiography, he said, our money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and still

go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ramp is everything you need to control, spend, and optimize all of your financial operations on a single platform. I run my business on Ramp, as do most of the top CEOs and founders that I know. If you are not already running your business on Ramp, make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to get started today. That is ramp.com.

A journalist once wrote that I often seem less an actual person than the heroine of some dicey Danielle Steele novel. The basic Danielle Steele story is to take a plucky heroine, set her on a quest, and then subject her to every villain and viper and obstacle imaginable, which I suppose is not an entirely bad summary of my life so far. When Tamara Mellon's father lent her the seed money to start a high-end shoe company,

he cautioned her, don't let the accountants run your business. Little did he know that over the next 15 years, the struggle between the financial and the creative would become one of the central themes of Mellon's business. Mellon grew Jimmy Choo into a billion-dollar brand. Yet it's her personal glamour that keeps her an object of global media fascination. Vogue photographed her wedding. Vanity Fair covered her divorce and the criminal trial that followed. And The Wall Street Journal covered the three private equity deals, the relentless battle

between the suits and the creatives, and Mellon's triumph against a brutal, hostile takeover attempt. But despite her eventual fame and fortune, Mellon didn't have an easy road to success. Her seemingly glamorous beginnings in the mansions of London and Beverly Hills were marked by tumultuous and broken family life, battles with anxiety and depression and a stint in rehab. Determined not to end up unemployed, penniless and living in her parents' basement under the control of her alcoholic mother, Mellon honed her natural business sense and invested

in what she knew best, fashion. In creating the shoes that became a fixture on Sex and the City and red carpets around the world, Mellon relied on her own impeccable sense of what the customer wanted because she was that customer. What she didn't know at the time was that success would come at a high price. After struggles with an obstinate business partner, a conniving first CEO, a turbulent marriage and a mother who tried to steal her hard-earned wealth.

Now Melon shares the whole larger-than-life story with shocking details that have never been presented before, from her troubled childhood to her time as a young editor of Vogue to her partnership with the cobbler Jimmy Choo to her very public relationships. Melon offers an honest and gripping account of the episodes that have made her who she is today. This is a definitive book for fashion aficionados, aspiring entrepreneurs, and anyone who loves a juicy true story about sex, drugs, money, power, high heels, and overcoming adversity. That is an excerpt from the inside cover of the book that I'm going to talk to you about

today, which is In My Shoes, A Mem, and it was written by Tamara Mellon. Okay, so I organized all of my notes and highlights from the book around a few reoccurring themes that I think are the most interesting and important ideas from the book. I actually discovered this book because Tamara is the long-term partner of my friend Michael Ovitz. Ovitz understands me very well and he's listened to a bunch of the podcasts, and he told me, he's like, hey, I think if you check out Tamara's book, that you're actually enjoying it, and he was right.

And it starts off with a bang. She starts the book by getting fired from Vogue, and this winds up being probably the best thing that could have possibly happened to her. And she's very open and honest about the struggles she was going through at the time. And the way I think about this, like, oh, she had to hit rock bottom before she actually got her life

together and then as a result of hitting rock bottom, there's only one way to go and that's up. But this is also leads her to the founding of Jimmy Choo. And so this is the way that the book starts. So I just dragged myself to my desk at Vogue, yet again, two hours late. I'd been up all night consuming prodigious quantities of cocaine and vodka. I'd been at Vogue for five years at this point.

And despite my after hours in discretion, I'd always worked very hard. And so this is what I meant earlier. And this actually idea from Jim Simons, just an episode on him. He's the founder of Renaissance technologies way before he found Renaissance technologies, which goes on to make over a hundred billion dollars in profit and continues to make what I hear billions of dollars in profit every year to this day. He got fired and he said something looking back on his life. He has this great quote about this and he says, getting fired can be good for you. You just don't want to make it a habit. So her boss pulls her into the office and she, and this is the way Tamara

describes what is happening to her at this point in life. I did not fully appreciate the huge favor Anna was doing me. She was setting me up to mend my ways. She was setting forces in motion that in time would lead to success far beyond anything I could have ever imagined. She continues, in the days after getting fired, I realized more and more that I had slipped

into the realm of personal crisis. What exactly was I going to do with my life? I needed a plan. And so she had talked about what do when you read self-help books, like what's their advice? And some of the advice is actually pretty good. And it's like, well, you should ask yourself, what do you love and what are you good at?

And her answer leads her directly to this idea that she'd been in the back of her mind while she was at Vogue. She was like, well, fashion, certainly I'm good at, with a particular fixation on shoes. And so her previous work at Vogue was actually instrumental to the founding of Jimmy Choo. She says, for the past year or so, I'd been germinating an entrepreneurial idea. There was a cobbler in London who had made a name for himself creating bespoke shoes.

That cobbler was Jimmy Choo. He worked out of a tiny showroom with an old dirty carpet. It was hideous, but the Bentleys would pull up. Whenever we were planning a shoot at Vogue, we'd go down to this hideous little workshop and we'd describe what we were doing. Jimmy was able to custom make shoes on short notice. That is the totality of his business at the time.

He is not a shoe manufacturer. That's what Jimmy Choo's gonna turn into when Tamara and Jimmy partner. So in addition to discovering Jimmy Choo through her past job, she also understood the power of media to drive sales. So Jimmy's making these shoes for Vogue. What does Vogue do?

They list who made the shoes and you could predict what's going to happen next. We'd give him a fashion credit on the page and then even more wealthy ladies would find their way to his shop. So the idea was what if I could convince Jimmy Choo to manufacture shoes? So there's a lot more detail in the book but I think it's important to understand the prehistory of Jimmy Choo and what I mean by that is there are several experiences that Tamara had that are going to be beneficial for when she built Jimmy Choo and so before Jimmy

Choo she worked in a prestigious retailoo, she worked in a prestigious retail store, she worked in public relations, and she worked in fashion media. And I think those three things are going to contribute to some of the success that she has much later on. Another important thing that was also hinted at at the inside cover of the book was the fact that she was going to be the first customer.

She says, I was the customer that I wanted to reach. This actually plays a role because she has a fundamental understanding. People like me that are gonna like the shoes that I like, I know where they shop, I know who they admire, I know what magazines they're reading, I know what TV shows they're watching. All of this is gonna play a huge role

in the success that Jimmy Choo has. And it's successful pretty rapidly. It's actually mind-blowing. And so the first thing that she has to do is she has to go down and she has to actually convince Jimmy Choo to partner with her and so her pitch was this. Jimmy would design a line of X-Wish to choose and I would find a factory to make them and manage the sales and marketing. We would open stores to start a wholesale line to be carried in high-end stores all over the world and we would both become incredibly rich. This low point of her life is when she's determined to turn her life around.

So at the same time that she's trying to sell Jimmy Choo on a partnership, which is gonna take several, several months of salesmanship and persuasion, she actually goes to rehab so she can get clean and off drugs. She's not gonna be able to run Jimmy Choo if she's out all night doing what she called what prodigious quantities of alcohol and cocaine. And this is the way she describes this period of her life.

Desperate as I was to find a new direction for my life I was not going to be easily deterred. Now, it's actually something that's really interesting that happens while in rehab. So in rehab you have to obviously go through therapy. And the therapists are trying to get her to think small. Just be a normal person. Don't have these grandiose visions for your future. If you paid attention to the episode I did last week on Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters,

I think one of the most important lessons that Jeff was trying to teach, and he says it was one of the most important lessons, actually came on the last page of the very last shareholder letter. And he says that differentiation is survival and the universe wants you to be typical. And it takes a lot of energy and drive

to not have everybody else, society, all your friends, everybody else, kind of smooth out your rough edges. Jeff's saying, no, no, no, you should, whatever makes you special and different, you should actually embrace it and understand how much energy that's gonna take to do it. It's such excellent advice, obviously for somebody who's ferociously intelligent, as Bezos is. When Tamara's going to take to do it. Such excellent advice, obviously, for somebody as ferocious and intelligent as Bezos is.

When Tamara's talking to all these therapists, they're trying to like just narrow your scope. Like, no, no, you're just like, you know, you're an alcoholic or a drug addict. You can't do anything special. And I love Tamara's response here. Like, this is complete bullshit. Their horizons were always remarkably limited. When I'd say I'm going to start a luxury shoe brand, they'd say, perhaps you might just want to take a job in a shoe store. In other words, don't

be grandiose. Think small. My response to them was no fucking way. When I got out of rehab, I threw myself and trying to win over Jimmy Choo. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. So we need to pause where we're on the story. If you really think about where she is right now, okay? She was just fired, she's broke. She just got out of rehab and she's living in her parents basement. If Tamara can build a wildly successful company

from this point, you and I have certainly have no excuses. So now I need to introduce another main theme of the book, maybe the main theme of the book, because you see clearly what is driving her. She has this torturous relationship with her mother and it's talked about in the first few pages, talked all the way to the very end and I actually think it influences. Very similar to the Michael Dell episode where you know Michael Dell had a remarkable life but I feel the most important lesson of Michael Dell's incredible autobiography is at the very end of the book and the end of the episode the same thing will be here but this will give you a hint about how what's driving Tamara and what's going on

with her relationship with her mother. My very first memory is of my mom throwing me across the bed in my head, hitting the radiator. One of the driving forces was my mother and the enigma of why she always despised me. The other force at play was a demonic drive for the financial security I hope would keep me out of her clutches. My worst fear was remaining under my mother's thumb. Her mother was an alcoholic. It sounds like to me, because I've dealt with this in my family as well, that she had undiagnosed mental illness. Says she had severe emotional problems exacerbated by alcoholism. She had always been the most painful warp in the loom of my life. My mother's raging lunacy flared up routinely these are all

These are different descriptions read throughout the book. I just put together this just goes on and on and on I could never understand what I'd done to deserve her wrath. It was a steady drip drip drip of psychological assaults and Pleasure in hurting me. She said I was stupid. I was lazy. I was ugly This is I get induced into states of rage You've heard it on past episodes when people mess with kids because essentially what's happened here This is a psychological assaults from unhappy people But directed at their own children

Children who view you as their entire world. This part was really hard for me to read too because this reminded me of my grandmother. So my grandmother absolutely, she was just like this, she destroyed the self-confidence of her two children. And what I realized from this is like, when this happens, you know, this happens, unfortunately, I find a lot of examples of these books, a lot of examples of my own family and friends family as well. You can either fight back or you let

them win. And so my grandmother, my grandma, keep in mind, my grandmother died, I was probably 12 years old when she died, 11, 12, 13, something like that. And my response to her because she tried to do this to me, she told me, I'll tell you the story real quick. You'll see this in Reconciled 2, where people are raised by people that attack them, make them feel bad about themselves. Exactly what Tamara's mom is doing here. You're stupid, you're ugly, you're lazy.

And so for my grandmother, her two kids' response was they didn't fight back and they both turned to drugs. And so my aunt actually was addicted to cocaine, did cocaine when she was pregnant. So my older cousin is actually developmentally disabled. She's a couple, you know, maybe half a decade older than me or something like that. My grandmother tried to tell me for some odd reason,

you know, I was probably 10 when this happened, maybe 11, that I was stupid. And I was stupid because I could only speak one language, I only speak English and not Spanish. And my developmentally disabled cousin was smarter than me because she could speak Spanish and English. And now being an adult with my own kids, like, who the hell, what kind of monster says these kind of things to their children or their grandchildren? And then now with the benefit of, you know, being a few decades removed from that, you just realize like these are just unhappy people.

They're either unable or unwilling to fix their own lives. And so what do unhappy people try to make everybody else around them unhappy? That doesn't excuse their behavior, but it helps me understand their behavior. And then what is Tamara's response to this psychological torture that her mom puts her through? And this also affects her when she's fighting with partners later on. She says at a very early age, I simply learned to shut down and never show any emotion, either happy or sad. She learned avoidance. Another inspiring part about Tamara's memoir is she says like, listen, when I was in school, there's just no way that my classmates would have voted me most likely to succeed.

And she said, I didn't even have any interests or passions. There was nothing that spoke to me, no class or no moment where I said, ah, this is what I want my life to be about. Now one of the most confusing parts about this book is that her dad for some reason did not stop her mom from tormenting her when she was young. And her dad's a very successful entrepreneur. He's going to wind up being her co-founder. And so maybe he was just traveling a lot, maybe he was just working.

But when they were adults and they could have a much closer relationship, he did tell her that your mother is the most selfish and self-obsessed woman I've ever come across. And then there's this idea where she was also likely narcissistic or just obsessed with how good looking she was. She was a model when her parents met. And in fact, Tamara says that her entire life was about how she looked. And the reason I say that's really confusing is because of the, you could tell how important her father was.

To, to her life, to her business. In fact, she dedicates when you, when you open up the book, it's dedicated. dedicated one of the people she dedicates her the book to says to my memory of my father who inspired me through my darkest days Her dad's gonna be her co-founder her advisor her main supporter before he helps his daughter He had been a very successful entrepreneur He did a bunch of businesses that pride business business biggest success was the fact that her dad had helped scale and build Vidal Sassoon. So they just sold, right before they found Jimmy Choo, a few years before they found Jimmy Choo, he had just sold the business for $72 million.

And then he had a bunch of free time, and lucky for Tamara that he was able to act as her advisor and co-founder. And they became closer as they age. And I love the way she would describe this, because now her conversations could be about like building the business and says that her father gave a sort of kitchen MBA like you know steady drips of how to think about business over the dinner table. She said, I felt a bond growing between my father and me that had never been allowed to flourish during my childhood. Lucky for me dad sent my retirement left him available to become the elder statement

and the spirit guide in my new venture. And you could tell she just really admires him. She talks about how charismatic, how refined he was. He always maintained an understated elegance. He always flew first class. He wore bespoke suits. You'd feel his presence the moment he came into a room. He was very, very charismatic. So now she's out of rehab. She's talking to her dad about this idea, she wants to get the hell out of her parents basement, and so she goes and she's now hounding Jimmy Choo, who's again not initially receptive to the idea of partnership by any means. So this is where she has to be excessively persistent and persuasive, and so she says he needed to get a better sense of

me as a person and to see a demonstration of my commitment in action. He wanted me to quote smell the leather. So the only way to demonstrate what I was about was to hang around down on his shop with him and get my hands dirty. So every day for three straight months, she shows up and she's trying to persuade Jimmy Chu to partner with her. Eventually she is successful. Now, remember, this is a company that's going to sell for $.2 billion dollars in about 15 years from where we're on the story. They start

the company with just a hundred, her dad puts up a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That's all they start with the company. Company's going to be profitable from day one and wildly efficient. Wait till I get to that, it'll blow your mind. And the basic deal, okay, at the time is we're going to be 50-50, meaning Jimmy Choo is going to own own 50%. Me and my father will own the other 50%. And there's a line in the book that it's probably in every single autobiography looking back. I just simply did not know how difficult it was going to be to actually do this. I simply never imagined when I started this journey had just how many backstabbing

cliffhangers and oncoming trays trains lay ahead. So there is a series of unbelievably smart decisions that take place right at the founding. So I already introduced one of them, the fact that she knows her customer because she is the customer. There is this idea that I've talked about over and over again on, you know, you need to work with the absolute best people

that you can. Talent really matters. And it's not just for the big decisions, which are really important, but it's for like the thousands of little thousands of little decisions are going to make over the lifetime that you guys work together. And I think those decisions compound. And the reason that I introduce that idea,

I want to introduce that idea at the same one. I keep repeating that, hey, she knows the customer because she is one. The decision she's going to make right at the beginning, which is where are we going to put our first store is so important because this is the store that the creator of Sex in the City happens to stumble upon to walk in and be like, wow, I love these shoes. I love these shoes so much. I'm going to put them as the preferred shoe of the main character and maybe probably the most influential show for Tamara's ideal customers.

And listen to what she says. And just again, just understanding very clear thinking and an understanding of, Hey, I'm designing for myself. What would I want? And then if I compare like what I want with what other businesses or other competitors are doing, like why aren't they doing this? Very very clear thinking here. I set out to find a space for a shop in my preferred habitat. This is in London Okay a location convenient and near where the ladies like me do their shopping

Their main competitor was Manolo Blahnik, right? Just like this is kind of weird. Well, Blahnik It's very popular with the same people I'm going after, but where did they put their store? I noticed that Manolo Blahnik was 20 minutes from the nearest tube station. God forbid that a customer has an actual job in an office and wants to pop over at lunchtime. I wanted us to be more accessible and I found the perfect spot on Mottcombe Street.

Remember the name of the street for later. I found the perfect spot on Motcom street. Remember the name of the street for later. I found the perfect spot on Motcom street for a certain kind of woman, me, we were in the hot burning center. So you may think, okay, you're reading this, David. Why does Steve Jobs come to mind? You go back and Steve Jobs has this excellent idea that I should talk about more frequently because repetition is persuasive. Steve Jobs come to mind. You go back, and Steve Jobs has this excellent idea

that I should talk about more frequently because repetition is persuasive. You need to ambush your customers. So I got to this part and I'm reading this part, I'm like, wait, this kind of thinking reminded me of Steve Jobs. So I just asked Sage, which is my personal AI that you trained on all my notes and highlights

and transcripts about, hey, what did Steve Jobs say about the importance of putting Apple stores close to where there was a lot of foot traffic and What happens is it turns out in three different books that I've read in the past He talks about this over and over go over and over again He says jobs had a clear insight about retail location that went against conventional wisdom This is how jobs is explaining the Apple Store strategy one time He says it in different ways, but the idea is always the same

And so he says the real estate was a lot more expensive But people didn't have to gamble with 20 minutes of their time. They only had to gamble with 20 footsteps of their time. So what Jobs is talking about there is the conventional wisdom when he had the idea to do the Apple store was Gateway and all these other PC manufacturers,

Gateway stores had just failed. And what Gateway did is they put these huge warehouses out like 20 minutes from town. So you have to that the rent was cheap, but you'd have to drive 20 minutes. And everybody's like, well, first of all, you can't, Steve, what are you doing? You can't open. Everybody knows gateway just failed. So why the hell would a computer manufacturer have their own stores? And jobs is like, well, one, they're not Steve Jobs. But two, it's like, I'm not gonna have them drive 20 minutes in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna put I'm gonna pay an insane

amount of money. Because what is jobs one he wants an aspirational brand talked about that over and over again, that Apple is one of the best brands most aspirational brands in the world. I'm going to go and identify where excessively expensive retail, but guess what? They're not going to drive 20 minutes or 20 miles because people won't do that, but they'll walk 20 footsteps. Later on, he talks about this. We may not be able to get them to drive 10 miles to check out our products, but we can get them to walk 10 feet. If they're passing by, they will drop in out of curiosity.

It's exactly the same kind of thinking that Tamara has. It's like, hey, I'm in the red hot center of where women like me are working, they're shopping, they're going out to lunch. This is where I'm going to pit my store. The summary of this idea is, I love, again, Jobs is a genius at this, and he calls it ambushing customers.

We had to ambush them. What that meant is that we had to go to high traffic locations and put stores there even if it was more expensive. Ambush your customers is exactly what they're doing at the very beginning of Jimmy Choo. And again, it's not like she has to pay, she's paying $15,000 a year in rent because these are tiny tiny locations. This is also in the mid nineties. So how efficient and profitable this company, uh, with these tiny spaces will

just absolutely blow your mind. They set up a very tiny showroom and then in the back there's an office and they're very frugal. She said, we were very frugal. That's a line in the book. We set up an office, two desks in the basement. There was no windows and no frills. So then she's like,

Okay, I don't have any experience as an entrepreneur. I've never made shoes. I like wearing them. I like looking at pictures of them. I liked writing about them in vogue, but I don't know where I make them. So what do I do? Let's go find a list of people that make shoes and go ask, will you make shoes for us? So she goes, I found a book that just had all the factories in Italy and who they worked for. So we went to Italy, cold calling and knocking on doors to see if we can get an appointment. We were two young girls. She's working with Jimmy's niece, Sandra at the time.

We were two young girls representing a brand that they never heard of with not so much as a single order to give them. Now eventually you find, you find somebody to manufacture shoes and the first trial run was an unmitigated disaster. They had like a, they had to do it in a fast turnaround time because they were going to sell them at a trade show in New York. And so at the very beginning they had no way to manufacture a high quality product. They had to learn how to do so. Our selling samples barely made it to New York on time and what we saw and when we saw

them we were horrified. They were covered with black scuff marks and the stitching was awful. They were so bad, we absolutely could not use them. I tried to carry on selling off of sketches, but nobody was interested. Again, then the next breakthrough is gonna be really important. She goes back to the fact that I am the customer.

Jimmy, it turns out, had no interest in becoming a designer. He was just a cobbler. And so she goes, oh my God, I set up a business with a creative head who in fact had no creativity. So then she realized, I have to play this role. I'm the one that has to come up with the ideas. And so she looks for inspiration in a very basic place.

She just goes down to the flea market and tries to pick out pieces that could inspire designs. And then she realized, hey, I'll just take a little idea from here, a little idea from over here, and I'll combine them and I come up with something new. Then she would go to manufacturing trade shows in Italy. And then she found all these different pavilions

that had all these materials that people weren't putting on shoes at the time. So she's talking about like feathers and flowers and studs and glass beads, and then a glitter fabric that wanted to becoming a Jimmy Choo staple later on and this is what she said about this I never known there were so many possibilities but that's how the Jimmy Choo DNA began to emerge the first collections were based on things that

had caught my eye the lovely part of that was that the things that struck me and that I related to emotionally other other women related to as well. One of my favorite filmmakers is Quentin Tarantino. I did an episode on him. He was completely obsessed with movies for two decades before he made his own. And so when he starts making movies, they're like, oh, do you have an audience in mind when you're making a movie? Like me, I'm the audience.

I've been obsessed with movies, just like she was obsessed with shoes for a very long time. Well, before I made my own movie, just like she was obsessed with shoes. Well, before she made her own shoes. So I'll just make what I want to see in the world. And it winds up paying off. This is incredible. So then she finds these trade shows that other buyers go to. Okay.

And she says they were on the edgier realms of fashion. This is again, understanding the importance of, she was like an insider into the industry that now she's creating for, right? Edgier Realms of Fashion. This is again, understanding the importance of, she was like an insider into the industry that now she's creating for, right? She's like, okay, we'll go to this exhibition. It's on the Edgier Realm of Fashion. This wind up being one of the most important things that ever happened to her,

because there's a buyer from Saks Fifth Avenue there. Her name is Julie Townsend. She stops by their exhibition, looks at the samples. She says, wow, these are great. And then she was so enthusiastic. She does an order for 3000 pairs of shoes. And Tamara says, just like that, we were in, we cracked it. The reason I wanted to put this part in because they had, they had modeled this out

and her and her father realized, hey, if we just sell 20 pairs of shoes a week out of our little location, we actually have a business. That was their expectation going in. 20 shoes a week and then they get an order for 3,000 pairs in one shot. And Saks is going to be a huge partner with Jimmy Choo. They're going to put them in 30 or 40 stores pretty quickly. So it says, suddenly we had the rarest of good fortunes for a startup company, positive cashflow. Our sales for the first year were $250,000, and the shop cost us 15,000. And the only, there's only one employee other than Sandra and myself.

And then this is a great description of the very beginning of a business that will eventually sell for $1.2 billion. I was still living at home, I had no car, and I had absolutely no social life other than entertaining related to the business. Now, right at the beginning, this is what I mentioned earlier, the prehistory of Jimmy Choo is really, I think important to the story.

When I got to this page of the book, I was like, this is just a page full of good ideas. This is her understanding the power of media and celebrity and the importance of ambushing potential customers. And what she realized that magazines had always put beautiful models on their cover. But over time, they realized that featuring an actress instead would send their newsstand sales to the roof.

A magazine feature could reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers for a fashion brand. Magazine, she understands intuitively, because she saw this at Vogue, magazines and media can push product. And then she goes, okay. So we don't want to just target models. We want to target celebrities. Celebrities are becoming more and more important, especially in the mid 90s. So how can we get that?

How can we get to them? And so they they would gift shoes to celebrities forever. OK, but then they realized, well, there's actually a more effective way to do this, too. Because if you gift them to their agents, their stylists, even their lawyers, like the same stylist, if you can build a relationship with a stylist, that stylist might have a relationship with five or ten of the celebrities that you want to reach. Even more aware of the cutting edge with the stylist to the stars and because these people work for multiple clients, contact with a single stylist gave us many more shots at scoring a wind. So they would gift shoes to celebrities with the hopes that they're either going

to be photographed or they'll talk about them. Right. And they have a huge win right from the very beginning doing this in the spring of 1998, we made our first foray into the Oscars. I was up all night on the phone, trying to orchestrate the gifting of shoes to all the right women that same year. Kate Winslet, who was nominated for best actress for Titanic that year,

she mentions that she's wearing Jimmy Choo shoes. That has such a positive effect on sales that going forward, Oscar night was a huge focus. And so they would try to dominate the Oscars every year. And so the idea here is a very simple but effective one. Just identify the media, whether it's magazines, TV, podcasts, radio, award shows, dinners, like where are your customers congregating?

And then make sure your product is put in front of them. And this combines with the idea of ambushing your customers. Go back to Tamara's decision to place her first store where people like her are likely to go and visit, okay? On July 5th, 1998, we made our first appearance on Sex and the City, and our visibility skyrocketed. The script had Carrie Bradshaw running for the Staten Island Ferry when she stumbles and screams out, Oh my God, I lost my chew.

That one mention helped turn us into a household name. Suddenly, women who had never heard of us, women who lived in small towns, thought about us in the same company as other luxury brands being mentioned like Prada like product Gucci and Manolo Blahnik. Manufacturers of everything pay fortunes for product placement in movies and tv. We got this huge call out entirely for free. Why? The show's creator said she put the reference in the script because she'd been in London and stopped by the store on Motcom street and fell in love with the product. Ultimately, Jimmy Choo would be mentioned on the show 34 times.

So that is the good, now we need to get to the bad and the ugly. So this is all about her husband, her first marriage, and the dangers of drug addiction. There is, I mean I've dealt with this my whole life, so I've seen, you know, cocaine abuse. And it's like, well I've never done it, I never would. You never get around a cocaine and be like, Oh, that seems like a good idea. Like a good path. I should, I should go in life. So you read this book, her experience,

you know, when she hit rock bottom, the fact that she, she was doing a bunch of drugs, going into clubs and drinking, but she turned her life around. Some people never turn her life around and including her husband. It's actually devastating because I get really angry reading about her husband in the book for what he was doing to his wife and his daughter. And then I looked up after the book was published, she actually dies a few years later from a drug overdose at a relatively young age.

And the reason I got angry is because you left behind your daughter, man, your inability to get your shit together. I remember a friend of mine a few years ago, and we don't talk anymore, and maybe this is like related to it but I remember him making excuses about why he was drinking and a lot of this just had to do with the fact that he was his inability to eliminate

the root cause of his stress that that you know led to him drinking and I just couldn't break through to him and finally told me we had we had kids around the same age at the time and I I was like, you need a little son. I was like, one day, your son, right now you're his hero, no matter he doesn't understand like what's going on. He can't comprehend anything. And he looks at you and he admires you and he loves you and spend time with you. One day when he's old enough, he's going to take the measure of the man.

And when he's able to do that, what do you want him to see? Some fat fucking drunk that can't get his life together? If you won't change for him, there's no possible way I can help you. And so this is the devastating part. So Matthew Mellon is actually the great, great, great grandson of Judge Thomas Mellon. This is a family dynasty.

Thomas Mellon and then his son, Andrew, actually have biographies of both of them. It's one of the few robber barons that I haven't actually done episodes on, even though I have books on them. But you would put Judge Mellon up there with Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. And then now the generations have gone down

and you see how far they've deviated from the kind of person that Judge Malin was. And here's a description of Matthew. Matthew used to hire limos with drivers rotating shifts. Coked out of his mind, he kept the party going around the clock. This is their wedding night. I went up to my room alone and Matthew partied until dawn. This is, again, you're not going to clean up yourself.

You just want to clean up for yourself, but at least do it for your children. This guy, again, you're not gonna clean up yourself. You just wanna clean up for yourself, but at least do it for your children. He, this guy turns into a coke head, he's doing crack, he's an alcoholic. Meanwhile, his wife is the one that has to support the entire family. I was in the office every day working hard, and Matthew had nothing but free time in his hands,

and I'd come home to find him free-basing in the kitchen. At times, I had to track him him down relying on his limo company. Once I found him in a crack house. This is why I think this story is important to tell on the podcast, because it's all the stuff she had to do. She's going to have a series of ongoing problems. She's got to deal with the problems of building a successful company, which by itself is unbelievably difficult.

Then she's got her husband's drug habit. She's got her mother tormenting her, and then she winds up just having all these partners with these short-term outlooks, they have these ridiculous ideas that are at complete odds with a founder that loves what they do, that loves the product, that wants to build the best product that she possibly can.

So from the very beginning, remember, she goes through so many partners. She's gonna last from, let's say, they start the company around 96, 97. She's gonna last from let's say they start to come here on 96 97 I think by 2011 she's out and from there she's got like four different partners, which will go over but from the very beginning Jimmy Choo and Her and Jimmy Choo never had a good relationship He was not interested in turns out he wasn't interested in manufacturing shoes at all

he wanted to keep doing his bespoke shoes as they start having this huge fight and Her dad has a great idea. It's like, we should just buy out his shares. It's like, why don't you just tell us what you want for the shares? If that would have happened, it would have been the best possible thing for them with what's about to happen in the story. Jimmy's response was to sue them for 22 counts of breach of contract.

And then he decides, hey, I'm not going to sell my shares to you guys. I'm going to sell it to a private equity company. Okay. So it says until this time we'd been entirely self-funding. They were profitable from day one after that. They didn't need any other investment after the first 150 grand they put up. Okay.

Tamara is going to tell us, you know, a fatal mistake, the main lesson from the book and it's the main lesson from a lot of them is like if you have found her and you love what you do never ever ever give up control retention of total control retention of total control retention of total control this is why every hundred episodes it's episode 25 it's episode 200 it's episode 300 it'll be episode 400 is James Dyson's autobiography that is his main lesson retention of total control, because his story is a life story

of being the main source of value creation, the creative force, the inventor behind everything, the one running the company and having stolen from him until he finally recollects, I'm not gonna let anybody happen. And then what happens? You fast forward 30 years later, from what I hear, James is pulling out,

James Dyson owns 100% of his company. And from what I hear, James is pulling at James Dyson owns 100% of his company. And from what I hear, he's pulling out a couple billion dollars a year. So Jimmy sells his 50% share for around eight to $10 million to Phoenix Equity Partners, and he leaves the business. This is where Tamara makes a fatal mistake that she warns future entrepreneurs to not do. They come in, they're like, we don't want just 50%,

we want 51%. And her dad's like, no, we're not doing this. And he says he was never one to surrender control of anything. But she says I was so desperate to get rid of Jimmy, because they had such a bad relationship, that I talked my dad into taking the deal. Later, I could only blame myself. And so at the very end of the book, she's going to talk about one of the reasons she wanted to write the book was for the benefit of future entrepreneurs and retain control is one of the warnings that she had for future entrepreneurs. This is 2001 for the next 10 years. She's going to go through hell with this series of private equity partners. She hates private equity. And right away she realizes, oh, that 1% is a huge deal. The fact that someone else would now have the final say in how we ran the company was gonna take some getting used to. This is my first painful

lesson in private equity. The founder is no longer in control and they just do a bunch of dumb shit. So their idea is like, hey we're gonna buy this company. We're going to, in the short term, we're gonna maximize EBITDA because we're gonna sell to another private equity person in a few years. It's essentially the opposite of what a missionary founder would do. So she says these people were all about the exit. Our EBITDA going in when the deal was completed was 2.9 million.

So make it about 3 million a year, okay? Which is a lot for a company with only nine employees. Jimmy Choo was not a distressed asset. We were a household name with a product that was flying out of the stores. And so now with her new partner, she wants to continue on with that same exact strategy. We should ambush our customers.

We should be using, I guess it would be called influencer marketing today, but one, influencer marketing, one, is not new, and two, can be excessively valuable. So they talked about a single picture of Madonna coming out of a store was worth millions of dollars to them. And so Tamara has this idea, hey, we want to sponsor this very prominent dinner. It's at the British Academy of Film and Television.

Her idea was like, well, look at other luxury brands. Cartier has, they own this event called the Cartier International Polo Tournament. We should have a prestigious event around like this annual, like an annual gathering. So a lot of potential customers in the audience, a lot of chance for us to photograph the event and use that for promotional material. And so it's like, this is incredible. The turnout is gonna be incredible,

but the CEO, his name is Robert, who she hates by the way, looked at the numbers and canceled our participation. Robert's decision was incredibly foolish and a wasted opportunity comparable to the loss of exposure we would have suffered if we had been too timid to take the risk and make our commitment to outfitting stars on Oscar night. So again, when it's a founder-led company, you don't have to think about this. I know gifting these shoes to actresses and stylists and to being a mainstay on Oscar night is worth the investments. We

have a very similar idea playing out now, but in England, we should sponsor this very prominent dinner at the Academy of Film and Television Awards. And Robert doesn't want to because he sees this, hey, it's gonna cost us $200,000 that's going to temporarily decrease our EBITDA. Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, would be turning over in his grave, do not remember, in his autobiography, it's hilarious,

because his whole thing was like, he really believed in the marketing and promotion, the educating of the entire, of educating your customers, especially when you're designing a new product and how important it was, and he was getting a lot of pushback. He wanted to spend, I think, like $2 million on this campaign for one of the new products,

and the guy running the campaign's like, oh, what if we spend like, last, I think it was like a couple hundred grand or whatever it was, and they go back and forth for several weeks. At one point, Akio can't sleep, so he calls the guy in the middle of the night. He's like, if you don't spend two million dollars in this campaign, you're fired. Akio understood that as a long-term investment because Sony was going to outlive him. But if you're this Robert guy and you don't give a shit what happens to Jimmy Choo after you sell it, you'll make decisions like this.

And this is a heartbreaking sentence. I was being treated like an employee at the company I had founded. Now she's fighting with her supposed partners and she still has her husband in his crackhead-like behavior. He was doing coke and alcohol to the point of psychosis. We had a board meeting at my house a week after I gave birth and all the while, I was worried my husband might be free-basing in the kitchen. It was very difficult times in her life. She's a new mom.

She's a founder with terrible partners and she's got a drug addict for her husband. I realize now the full irony of my huge mistake. I had rid myself of the man who had vexed me most, which is Jimmy Choo, only to saddle myself with an insecure CEO whose damaged ego knew no bounds. In addition to which, I now had a bipolar, drug addicted husband who was spiraling out of control. I actually met Tamara at a mutual friend's birthday party last month. I should have asked her. If she had retained control and if she owned a majority of Jimmy Choo, I wonder if she'd, I bet you she'd still be working on it to this day.

So here's, it's funny in my mind, I had a series of people, I was thinking about Edwin Landon, I was thinking about Steve Jobs, thinking about James Dyson, Akio Morita, I was thinking about all these other people essentially. Like what is the opposite of this behavior that I'm reading about in this book right now? And maybe the best example of this, because they're in the same industry, is Bernardo Noll. He's the opposite of his partners.

He's all long-term and there was a hilarious, he actually pops up in this book, which was, which was really hilarious to me. And I didn't know this, this Robert De Sio that, uh, of the first private equity company used to work for Bernard. So it says we were visiting a Chinese shopping mall when we bumped into Bernardo Nol, the head of LVMH. Robert stepped forward to shake Arnol's hand and Arnall recoiled. It was a reaction of disgust. What would Arnall do? He wouldn't make any of these short-term decisions. Wait till they get to like, hey, we got to cut product. Use cheaper leather. Don't

refurbish the stores. Don't invest in any marketing. It's like, what are you guys doing? And what I also thought was fascinating was the fact that Tamara, even back then, his book is 12 years old, understood the genius of her knowledge. She said, a luxury brand offered the owner the opportunity to profit from ideas and image with almost limitless prospects for scaling up. A brand image could travel all over the world and migrate to other products. One of the very first to see the opportunities here was Bernard Arnault. One of my favorite tweets I've ever read was by this guy named Cedric Chinn.

And he says, one type of remarkable career, and certainly the most interesting type, comes from finding an earned secret and then exploiting the hell out of it for the good part of two to three decades. That is a great way to think about Bernard Arnault and what he's done with LVMH. Now there is another devastating tragedy that's gonna happen in Tamara's life. Her father dies unexpectedly. On April 19, 2004 my dad suffered an aneurysm. I was in shock. I couldn't believe this was happening and I was utterly torn apart. He was my dad and I loved him, but he was also my mentor and my business partner. He was the one solid rock I'd ever known in my life

and now he was leaving me. I held him and tried to say goodbye and he was so strong that it took him 18 hours to die. I don't think I stopped crying once the whole time." She's around 36 years old when this happens. And from here on in, she's dealing with just one private equity company after another. I'm just gonna give you the outline

so you understand how many times Jimmy Choo was sold. 2001, Jimmy Choo sells 50% share to Phoenix Equity Partners and leaves the business. Three years later, Lion Capital buys Jimmy Choo for $101 million. Three years after that, Lion Capital sells Jimmy Choo for $185 million to Towerbrook Capital Partners. Four years after that, Towerbrook Capital Partners

sells Jimmy Choo to Leblos for $525 million. Three years after that, Jimmy Choo IPOs, companies valued at $546 million. Three years after that, Michael Kors Holdings acquires Jimmy Choo for $1.2 billion. So now she is left without her father and her business partner. She's dealing with all these different owners and partners of Jimmy Choo.

And in the middle of this, her mom sues her. This is so sad and nuts at the same time. So the lawsuit is complicated, but it boils down to her mom wanting more money from her, even though she had nothing to do with building Jimmy Choo. The note I left myself on this page was instead of being proud of the woman that your daughter has become, you fucking sue her for more money from a company you didn't even build. This is insane. Tamara says, I think my mother was simply born a

narcissist whose extraordinary beauty only made her selfishness that much worse. This is how she describes her mother. Madness combined with stunning beauty. So in the middle of this lawsuit, her mother is losing a lawsuit and her mother's attorneys asked to meet to discuss settling. This is the first time that she sees her mom. She's going to see... First time she sat across and saw her mom in four years.

And the description here I need to read to you I hadn't seen her up close in four years and she looked amazing everyone ages so God knows what she's been doing to retard this process then again that's how she spends all of her time she couldn't even look at me I studied her face I was facing down my most profound demon. And her mom loses and withdraws the lawsuit. Finally he came to the point. They were folding. We're going to withdraw. You take the money that's owed to you and each side will cover our own legal fees.

Half the $4 million I recovered went to my lawyer's fees. After 40 years, we were at last severed. This might be the last time that she ever sees her mom. There was no sense of exuberance or celebration. I could see nothing but wreckage all around and I felt empty and alone. And so all the stress of all these factors just compounds and makes her absolutely miserable. She has to keep in mind she's still building the company. She's still fighting with her partners.

She had to deal for this lawsuit with her mom. She went through a divorce. She says, I've been having massive anxiety attacks and night sweats. I couldn't sleep. I was so distracted that it would take me hours to dress. I couldn't make decisions and I couldn't stand to be with other people.

Then they're also fighting over some stuff that is ridiculous. Our owners became greedy and they began pushing us to improve our margins. They told us we could no longer use leather that cost more than 30 euro a square meter. Why? Why such an arbitrary decision?

I was thinking about what Warren Buffett says about this. Because when you're reading about the direction that some of her partners want to take the company in, some of the ideas they have for product, which essentially just like, let's charge more for a shittier project or a product. Yeah, that's gonna work long-term. It reminds me of something that Warren Buffett

would repeat over and over again. Munger also made the observation. And Buffett's like, hey, keep in mind, Buffett had in his mind essentially like an outline of almost every single business in America. And he says, the real issue is mediocrity. There are way too many 240 hitters in business. Businesses often settle for a notch or two above mediocrity, Buffett said.

Buffett continues, we've seen so much of the ordinary in business that we can fully appreciate a virtuoso performance. So the way I think about this is mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. Her partners are trying to pull her into mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. Her partners are trying to pull her into mediocrity. They push our factories to lower their prices. So they're forced to use cheaper materials and otherwise cut corners in the manufacturing process.

The product we were beginning to produce wasn't my idea of who we were from Italy, where they were manufacturing the shoes. Anna saw the decline in manufacturing specs being approved. She sent me this message. It's the beginning of the end. So that is the direction that, that direction that her partners want to take. Jimmy Choo, and they own most of the company at this time. I can't remember her exact ownership, but it's not large.

And she doesn't really have as much control or influence as she obviously wants to. So that's one direction, a description of the direction of like somebody just doesn't really give a shit about the long-term health of the business. At the same time I was reading this book, I reread this excellent interview that Steve Jobs gave when he was 29 years old, and he gave it to Playboar Magazine.

And there was a paragraph that I read in that interview. The same time I was reading this section of the book, I'm like, wow, this is a contrast. Steve had soul in the game. These are the entrepreneurs I admire the most. They have soul in the game. These are the entrepreneurs I admire the most. They have soul in the game. This is what having soul in the game sounds like and looks like and compare that to what you and I have been talking about

with these private equity partners. We didn't build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't gonna go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers,

you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there. So you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality has to be carried all the way through. And so she goes, she says, hey, we've now had these stores for over a decade.

We need to reverse them. They're not good enough. We need to constantly nurture and protect the most enduring franchise and valuable thing that we have, which is our brand. And their response is, that's not going to pay off during our time horizon. They still cared nothing about the long-term health of the business or the

actual quality of the product. I actually cared about the business we were in, the product, the people. I wasn't merely passing through. And then she makes an excellent point. Every few years we're selling the company again. So what happens before you sell the company? You have to prepare the company for sale. So their competitors don't have this very costly distraction

that Jimmy Choo is going through. She says, facilitating due diligence had become a tiresome second job. Meanwhile, our competition wasn't necessarily going through the same kinds of distraction and could focus on the real work of creating and maintaining quality and innovation. And so a situation like this can only continue so long for a founder until it finally has to reach its end.

She finally reaches her limit. She steps down from the company she founded. She steps down from the company that she gave a large part of her life energy to. This is why I always tell you it's bullshit when people say, oh, it's not personal. It's business for founders. It's always personal. On August 1st, 2011, 15 years, almost to the day since I'd gone to that first trade show in New York with samples too awful to show, I gave them my notice.

What I was feeling was a combination of anger, relief, mourning, and a profound sense of loss. After leaving Jimmy Choo, this is in the last chapter, she has all this advice for entrepreneurs. She goes, I've learned to always retain majority ownership and control, and then she tells us why she wrote the book. I'd love it if entrepreneurs find it useful. My most fundamental piece of advice

is to follow your instincts. If you have the wrong instincts for what you're trying to do, that will become evident soon enough and you may require you to change course. But being blown back and forth by the winds of conflicting opinions will get you nowhere. And then this is what I meant about I think this is actually the most important lesson other than retention of total control that she wants to pass on. And it's breaking the cycle that she was born into. I enjoy the pleasure of watching my daughter's transformation into a smart, beautiful, and

resourceful young woman. In the mornings, when she comes in to kiss me before she's off to school, it's the greatest gift. Sometimes she'll climb under the covers of me, give me a hug, and we'll have a little chat before we start out the day. I feel truly sorry for my mother that she denied herself the pleasure of this kind of relationship. But just because I missed out on this kind of closeness as a daughter doesn't mean I can't treasure it now that I'm the mother. And this is the perfect ending. This is the very last sentence in the book. It may have seemed that now and then I needed a rescuer. But over time, I learned to rescue myself. And

that is where I leave it for the full story highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player are available at founders podcast.com. We'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Make sure you're on my personal email list. For every book that I read, I email you my top 10 highlights from every book. It's available down below and also available at davidsenra.com. That is 389 books down one dozen ago, and I'll talk to you again soon.