#389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon

**David Senra** (0:00)
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 100 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 Such Putters 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 their 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 listened 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 to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. There is a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says cost control became nearly an obsession. Keep in mind, when Carnegie sells to JP Morgan, Carnegie has 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 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 of 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. 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 Memoir, 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 struggle she was going through at the time. And the way I think about this is 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. I just dragged myself to my desk at Vogue yet again, two hours late. I had 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 is actually a little 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 $100 billion 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 this is the way Tamara describes what is happening to her at this point in her 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, 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 had 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 is going to 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 is 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 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 going to 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 going to 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 Exquisite Shoes 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 going to take several, several months of salesmanship and persuasion, she actually goes to rehab so she can get clean and off drug. She's not going to run Jimmy Choo if she's out all night doing what she called prodigious quantities of alcohol and cocaine. 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 well in rehab. So in rehab, you have to obviously go through therapy. The therapist are trying to get her to think small, just be a normal person. And 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, you should, whatever makes you special and different, you should actually embrace it and understand how much energy that's going to take to do it. It's such excellent advice. Obviously, for somebody who's ferocious and intelligent, as Bezos is. When Tamara is talking to all these therapists, they're trying to just narrow your scope, like, no, no, you're just an alcoholic or a drug addict. You can't do anything special. And I love Tamara's response here. 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 in trying to win over Jimmy Choo. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. So we need to pause 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.