Tamara Mellon

I am reviewing the business autobiography In My Shoes: A Memoir by Tamara Mellon which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Tamara is famous as the part owner of Jimmy Chou Company in which she designed a lot of the shoes and boots they sold. Before that she worked for a women's magazine and did a backpage feature on footwear. She got made redundant from that job and had a bit of a drug and drink habit which had to be sorted out. She did go to a rehab centre. She had by then met up with a shoemaker and suggested she could look after the day to day operations of the business and this man, Jimmy Chou could make the shoes. They had a hell of a job getting funding and later they focused on breaking into the American market. They tried to get celebrities to wear their shoes at functions like the Oscars. Kate Winslett almost unbelievably mentioned her Jimmy Chou boots during her acceptance speech. Sales then really took off. At this point Tamara was just drawing a salary of $15,000 per year although later on she would become extremely rich. Funnily enough in those days when Jimmy learned to make shoes, little emphasis was put on designing them. Eventually after the company had been going for a few years and was one of the designer label toasts of the town, Tamara had a cut from the $101 million it was valued at when it went public. She eventually got annoyed that the new set up skimped on materials which she thought would ruin the companies success. She currently has her own new fashion label called Tamara Mellon which will focus on limited edition fashion goods which she is expanding on the shoes and handbags the previous company did.