The More Difficult, Most Satisfying Second Act

Tamara Mellon is most famous for cofounding Jimmy Choo. But in 2013, she started building a new brand…named after herself. It’s been bumpy. (She went bankrupt.) But she’s finally become the entrepreneur she always wanted to be.

- Stephanie Schomer

Tamara Mellon just wanted to move on.

For most of her career, she’d been defined by one brand: Jimmy Choo. She cofounded the luxury footwear company in 1996, and it quickly became the final word on playful, sexy shoes for women. She grew the business for 15 years until her relationship with the company soured, leaving Mellon feeling overlooked, overworked, and under-compensated. She left in 2011.

Two years later, in 2013, she was ready to launch a new shoe brand. Everything about it would be different. (For starters, she’d name it after herself.) While the rest of the industry releases one large collection each season, she’d release products monthly. Women, she realized, no longer wanted to see autumn clothing on a runway in February, wait until August to buy it, then wait until it gets cold to wear it. “I was thinking about the next generation of luxury,” she says.

At first, the industry was intrigued. Investors put in $24 million. Retailers set up meetings. But she hit a wall. She kept hearing the same feedback: She was trying to do things too differently. The timing wouldn’t work, people told her. Monthly shipments would be impossible to manage. “I had three investors who wanted me to just go back to fashion’s old calendar and build Tamara Mellon the same way I’d built Jimmy Choo,” she says.

It was a crossroads. She could do things the way they’d always been done, or she could blaze her own path, despite the discomfort that was sure to follow.

She chose her own path. “And that,” she says, “is how I ended up in Chapter 11.”

But it would be worth it.