Are the Jimmy Choos you own a product of Jimmy Choo, the man himself? More likely than not, they’re not. The convoluted history of the brand is such that the designer who created this eponymous brand is far removed from the billion dollar business. The “Malaysian cobbler” and the “English socialite” – as the players in the game have been labeled by the media – are now at peace after an embittered battle for ownership. P.Ramakrishnan looks at the precarious past and the promising future of the man and the distinct brand, albeit of the same name. Scarcely could the crowd believe that there he was, Dato Jimmy Choo OBE, 57, the man himself. Seated two feet away form a sea of recorders and numerous cameras trying to get him to a centripetal point, he is renowned for being media shy and generally inaccessible to the teeming masses.
Attending BODW (Business of Design Week, 2006), the media en masse descended to capture him while they could, in small window of opportunity to shoot the most famous shoe designer in the world (with all due respect to Mr Blahnik!) as he finally stepped out of the workshop that he was participating in.
Choo looks a good decade younger than he is and his legend is much larger than him; the small frame of a man in an impeccable suit, more sophisticated than stylish, had black leather loafers on, of an indistinguishable brand. But naturally, we had to ask and find out which label the namesake of a shoe empire wears.
“These shoes? I made them for myself,” he says, with his ever persistent smile. “I don’t make men’s shoes much, but for myself, in my size, I do. It’s very simple, I use soft, high quality leather because comfort is very important, and I wear them out because I wear the same shoes all the time. They last about ten months, then I make another pair.”
It would be hard to list the lengthy number of people who would love to own a new pair of Jimmy Choos at such regular intervals. With a sly grin, he continues, “Let me tell you secret, I am much taller at night than I am in the day. You know, I’m just a small Chinaman so when I go to parties, and events with all these big Western people, I wear shoes with pumps to make me look taller. I wear my regular shoes and, in the car, just before I step out, I make a quick change. When women come to see me in my shop in the day, they are suddenly surprised that I’ve shrunk overnight!”
In the early '90s, Jimmy Choo was known to an extremely select and very elite group of serious fashionistas in London, for making incredibly beautiful shoes that were a heady concoction of comfort and supreme style. Princess Diana was a regular client and friend.
“She was a wonderful lady. Always kind to me and a great friend. I made shoes for her all the time. I’m not sure but at a certain point I think only I made her shoes, no one else. You know, when she was married to Prince Charles, I would make low heels or flat shoes because she would be so much taller than him otherwise. After they separated, I made high heels for her and I was actually making a pair of gold strappy sandals with a four-inch heel for her when... when she died. I met her just two days before the accident, when she came to see me. I keep the golden pair in my house, as a reminder. She was such a wonderful lady.”
Choo’s shoes weren’t just for chic royals, they were also the best kept secret in the annals of British Vogue, where a woman by the name of Tamara Mellon was accessories editor. The glamourous daughter of a wealthy industrialist and former model mom, Mellon observed the virtual monopoly that Manolo Blahnik had in the high end market of high-heeled shoes. With money borrowed from her well-to-do father, she and Choo set up shop in 1996. Well, shops actually – four in the first year alone.
Through sheer word of lip-glossed mouth and clever marketing, the quality shoes hit the social consciousness in a hitherto unseen stampede. There was no turning back and the immediacy of their success made for economics and business lore.
A synonym associated with the fashion forward female, it all culminated with regular plugs by Carrie Bradshaw, the fictional lead character in Sex and the City the barometer of style and rend in the 1990s, a show that in the first season paid homage to his arch, professional rival. By season five, all four leading ladies from the show were well heeled in Jimmy Choos in a major coup de....shoe. Above: The cast of Sex and the City
However, somewhere along the way the straps came loose in the partnership. In April 2001, the company expanded with the announcement of a new collaboration with Equinox Luxury Holdings Ltd which acquired Choo’s share of the ready-to-wear business with Robert Bensoussan, Equinox’s Chief executive becoming CEO of the company. This was followed in 2004 by Lion Capital announcing the acquisition of a majority shareholding in Jimmy Choo, in a transaction valuing the company at 101 million pounds. Choo was left out of the billion dollar wheeling and dealing and Mellon was “liberated” she says from Choo between 2001 and 2002.
In a profile of Tamara Melon in Vanity Fair (VF), “the Malaysian cobbler” (a phrase that crops up alarmingly often in print when referring to Choo) became “the other difficult man in her life.”
For this article, we could not get a quote in time from Tamara Mellon or her representatives as we headed to print, but in the feature in the August 2005 edition of Vanity Fair, the industrious socialite said, “Some people see him as the underdog. ‘She came in and stole his name and did this and did that.’ He was very happy. He went away with a lot of money, and he was very happy. I made him wealthy.”
Undeniably so. The Choo of today is on another postal code area from the garage that he once worked out of in London’s East End. Rumours refer to his 7-figure buyout and settlement. Currently, he has absolutely no take in Jimmy Choo. It bears repeating; Jimmy Choo has nothing to do with Jimmy Choo – the shoes!
Therein lies a strange sense of questionable fair play. Choo gets no royalties, no credit, and no acknowledgement from the brand as we know it, and yet his name is walking down the red carpet at every celebrity-studded event. The sundered partnership has unequal beneficiaries, and when asked if he gets a cut from the billion plus brand, he deftly deflects the question,
“You know, I don’t like to look at the past. I look at the future and my health, my happiness, and my family. I’m glad Tamara’s doing well and I’m glad that my name is still associated with a quality product. When they say ‘It’s a Jimmy Choo shoe’, they mean that it’s a good quality, fashion shoe. It has not become a cheap brand. They don’t sell rubbish.”
Editor of Style magazine, Carmen Li, says, “Well, honestly, I wouldn’t paint Tamara as the bad person. In my opinion, I would not portray her as some evil capitalist either. She made the brand a marketing success and put in her money and made it grow. He was already making shoes, and she expanded the business with her entrepreneurial spirit and his know-how. We don’t really know of the exact details that occurred in negotiation but they’re both richer for it.”
It is a hot topic to broach but as the press prodded Choo, he remained reticent.
What do you think of Tamara Mellon?
“She is a good friend. You know we don’t’ meet as much now because we’re both busy but when I was in London last week, we had dinner together.”
In the debate, celebrity designer Charlie Lapson (who owns his namesake brand too), has his own take, having shared a similar litigation dotted history. ”I would hate it if my name was out and about and I had no control over the products and what they represent. I fought really hard to maintain my name with my former partners for the same reason. I’m not entirely familiar with their (Mellon – Choo) exact history but I’d fight for ownership of my name – and I did. It cost me millions of dollars, but I know I couldn’t lose control of how my name was used, and the brand that I had worked on for all my adult life.”
Though he’s left the company, Choo has not left the business. “Now I concentrate on my couture shoes,” he says, speaking in an excited tone of his latest venture. “When a lady goes into my shop, I make a pair for her, a special pair, just for her, for a wedding or special event. She comes, I measure her feet, I make the shoes, ask her to wear them for a week and then come back to me to see if they’re perfect. I don’t even ask for money until she’s happy. I make only very special shoes.”
As representatives of various financial papers and magazines broach the subject of facts and figures (“Did you walk away with 45 million pounds? “Did you hear of the 2.4 billion sale last year” ),
Choo just smiles, “Really, all that is the past,” he says with an omniscient stance - with information he refuses to share with the media.
Having played the game before in the British tabloids, a far more ruthless exercise than the press waiting for him in Hong Kong. “I have a good team, I have very good lawyers and I am happy. I take a walk everyday around the park near where I live and I am thankful for all that I have.”
“So many people here… thank you for coming and talking to me,” he says, astonished at the media hullabaloo around him.
In person, he’s all humble charm and self-effacing humility. “I’m just a simple man who does what he loves,” he concludes. “Now I want to pass information and my knowledge forward, that’s why I teach and I take apprentices to show them. In London and Malaysia, I work in schools to teach the next generation, but, you know the young of today, they don’t work as hard as they did in my day. My daughter and her friends, they all want to go out and have a good time and see movies and shop and… (laughs).”
As he walks away in stride, the fashion rag editors follow his wake, hanging on every word. “But they are kids of today. I’m glad they enjoy life. I do too, with my work.”
Sex and the City;
Season 6, episode 9, A Woman's Right to Shoes.
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