lost. (Years later, Vidal told me that not following up on my dad’s idea was the biggest mistake he ever made.)
In April 1983, while I was floating through Heathfield in a daze, thecompany was sold to Richardson-Vicks for £72 million, so my father did very well.
By then Dad was ready to shift into a lower gear, so he bought a small newspaper called
Beverly Hills People
, and he invested with Vidal in another very “L.A.” product, MicroCool, which is a misting system for helping people stay comfortable outdoors in the heat. He was also on the board of Illingworth, Morris, an English textiles brand owned by the widow of actor James Mason.
Lucky for me, Dad’s semiretirement left him available to become the elder statesman and spirit guide—not to mention investor—in my new venture. As chairman, he contributed enormously to the birth of Jimmy Choo. The legwork, however, was left to me.
• • • •
THE FIRST THING I SET out doing was to find space for a shop in my preferred habitat, a location convenient to Knightsbridge and to Mayfair, near where the ladies who lunch at Harry’s Bar and San Lorenzo do their shopping. I had observed that Manolo Blahnik, our only real competition at the time, was on Old Church Street in a residential area in Chelsea, twenty 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 Motcomb Street, near Harvey Nichols, at the top of Sloane Street, between Belgrave Square and Harrods. If these points were the stations of the cross for a certain kind of woman, we were in the hot burning center.
The space was small, only 540 square feet, but I put down cream-colored carpet, and I found a furniture store somewhere in the Strand where I bought a sofa and had it covered in purple velvet. I installed some glass shelves, then went to an auction house on Lots Road and bought a cream marble table that I put in the back of the store with some flowers on it. It was all very basic, but it had the right look.
Behind the scenes we were even more frugal. We set up an office with two desks in the basement alongside the stockroom, and for quite a while that’s where I worked, with no windows, and certainly no frills. When we started out I didn’t even have a proper computer.
Jimmy’s only concern was to have a famous feng shui master bless the enterprise. So we paid to fly this guy over from Malaysia and put him up in a smart hotel. Then we went with him to the shop at midnight and sat in a circle and went through some sort of chanting ritual. He put a Chinese symbol on the mirror, rearranged the cash register so that the money wouldn’t “fly out of the store,” and that was that.
For the longest time we had nothing to sell, so just for appearance’s sake, we put a few Jimmy Choo couture shoes on display. We also bought some shoes from a factory and sewed in the Jimmy Choo label. But money flying “out” of the store was the least of our worries.
Jimmy kept his workshop in Hackney from which, supposedly, the designs for the collection were going to emanate. Assuming that I could leave this essential function in his very capable hands, I started looking for factories.
Jimmy had a manufacturing contact in Italy, so in the summer of 1996 he and I flew out, along with his niece Sandra, to visit their facility. We couldn’t afford even the cheapest seats on a regular commercialflight, so we bought tickets on one of those charters that lands at some decommissioned military air base or other out-of-the-way landing strip you’ve never heard of. The whole trip was something of a bust, with Jimmy not really present mentally, and Sandra having to translate much of what was going on into Chinese for him. But it did help me begin to get a more realistic picture of my new business partner.
On the flight back, after the meal had been served, I
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