YouSaid · the spoken record

Tamara Mellon

lines on the record: 37
first: 2025-05-26
most recent: 2025-05-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Doesn't mean I can't treasure it now that I'm the mother. And this is the perfect ending. This is the very last sentence in the book. It may have seemed then now and then I needed a rescuer, but over time I learned to rescue myself. And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, I highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player or available at founderspodcast.com, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Make sure you're on my personal email list. For every book that I read, I email you my top 10 highlights from every book. It's available down below and also available at davidcentra.com. That is $389 books down, 1,000 ago. And I'll talk to you again soon.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrong instincts for what you're trying to do, that will become evident soon enough, and you may require you to change course. But being blown back and forth by the winds of conflicting opinions will get you nowhere. And then this is what I meant about, I think this is actually the most important lesson other than retention of total control that she wants to pass on. And it's breaking the cycle that she was born into. I enjoy the pleasure of watching my daughter's transformation into a smart, beautiful, and resourceful young woman. In the mornings, when she comes in to kiss me before she's off to school, it's the greatest gift. Sometimes she'll climb under the covers of me to give me a hug, and we'll have a little chat before we start out the day. I feel truly sorry for my mother that she denied herself the pleasure of this kind of relationship. But just because I missed out on this kind of closeness as a daughter”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continue so long for a founder until it finally has to reach its end. She finally reaches her limit. She steps down from the company she founded. She steps down from the company that she gave a large part of her life energy to. This is why I always tell you it's bullshit when people say, oh, it's not personal, it's business. For founders, it's always personal. On August 1st, 2011, 15 years almost of the day since I'd gone to that first trade show in New York with samples too awful to show, I gave them my notice. What I was feeling was a combination of anger, relief, mourning, and a profound sense of loss after leaving Jimmy Chu. This is in the last chapter, she has all this advice for entrepreneurs. She goes, I've learned to always retain majority ownership and control. And then she tells us why she wrote the book. I'd love it if entrepreneurs find it useful. My most fundamental piece of advice is to follow your instincts. If you have the”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not good enough. We need to constantly nurture and protect the most endearing franchise and valuable thing that we have, which is our brand. And their response is, that's not going to pay off during our time horizon. They still cared nothing about the long-term health of the business or the actual quality of the product. I actually cared about the business we were in, the product, the people. I wasn't merely passing through. And then she makes an excellent point. Every few years, we're selling the company again. So what happens before you sell the company? You have to prepare the company for sale. So their competitors don't have this very costly distraction that Jimmy Chu is going through. She says, facilitating due diligence had become a tiresome second job. Meanwhile, our competition wasn't necessarily going through the same kinds of distraction and could focus on the real work of creating and maintaining quality and innovation. And so a situation like this can only”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are trying to pull her into mediocrity. They push our factories to lower their prices so they're forced to use cheaper materials and otherwise cut corners in the manufacturing process. The product we were beginning to produce wasn't my idea of who we were. From Italy, where they were manufacturing the shoes, Anna saw the decline in manufacturing specs being approved. She sent me this message. It's the beginning of the end. So that is the direction that her partners want to take Jamie to. And they own most of the company at this time. I can't remember her exact ownership, but it's not large and she doesn't really have as much control or influence as she obviously wants to. So that's one direct description of the direction of like somebody just doesn't really give a shit about the long-term health of the business. At the same time, I was reading this book, I reread this excellent interview that Steve Jobs gave when he was 29 years old, and he gave it to Playboy Magazine. And there was a paragraph that I read in that interview the same time I was reading this section of the book. I'm like, wow, this is a concept.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To my lawyer's fees. After 40 years, we were at last severed. This might be the last time that she ever sees her mom. There was no sense of exuberance or celebration. I could see nothing but wreckage all around and I felt empty and alone. And so all of the stress of all these factors just compounds and makes her absolutely miserable. She's still building the company. She's still fighting with her partners. She had a deal for this lawsuit with her mom. She went through a divorce. She says, I've been having massive anxiety attacks and night sweats. I couldn't sleep. I was so distracted. They would take me hours to dress. I couldn't make decisions and I couldn't stand to be with other people. Our owners became greedy and they began pushing us to improve our margins. They told us we could no longer use leather that cost more than 30 euro a square meter.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That much worse. This is how she describes her mother. Madness combined with stunning beauty. So in the middle of this lawsuit, her mother is losing a lawsuit and her mother's attorneys ask to meet to discuss settling. This is the first time that she sees her mom. She's going to see first time she sat across and saw her mom in four years. And the description here I need to read to you. I hadn't seen her up close in four years and she looked amazing. Everyone ages, so God knows what she's been doing to retard this process. Then again, that's how she spends all of her time. She couldn't even look at me. I studied her face. I was facing down my most profound demon, and her mom loses and withdraws the lawsuit. Finally, he came to the point. They were folding. We're going to withdraw. You take the money that's owed to you and each side will cover our own legal fees. Half the $4 million I recovered went to my”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Jimmy Chew IPOs companies valued at $546 million. Three years after that, Michael Core's Holdings acquires Jimmy Chu for $1.2 billion. So now she is left without her father and her business partner. She's dealing with all these different owners of and partners of Jimmy Chu. And in the middle of this, her mom sues her. This is so sad and nuts at the same time. So the lawsuit is complicated, but it boils down to her mom wanting more money from her even though she had nothing to do with building Jimmy Chew. The note I left myself on this page was instead of being proud of the woman that your daughter has become, you fucking sue her for more money from a company you didn't even build. This is insane. Tamara says, I think my mother was simply born a narcissist whose extraordinary beauty only made her selfishness.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I held him and tried to say goodbye, and he was so strong that it took him eighteen hours to die. I don't think I stopped crying once the whole time. She's around 36 years old when this happens. And from here on end, she's dealing with just one private equity company after another. I'm just going to give you the outline so you understand how many times Jimmy Chu was sold. 2001, Jimmy Chu sells 50% share to Phoenix Equity Partners and leaves the business. Three years later, Lion Capital buys Jimmy Chu for $101 million. Three years after that, Lion Capital sells Jimmy Chu for $185 million to Towerbrook Capital Partners. Four years after that, Towerbrook Capital Partners sells Jimmy Chu to LeBlau for $525 million. Three years after.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys, doing, and what I also thought was fascinating was the fact that Tamara, even back then, his book is 12 years old, understood the genius of her knowledge. She said a luxury brand offered the owner the opportunity to profit from ideas and image with almost limitless prospects for scaling up. A brand image could travel all over the world and migrate to other products. One of the very first to see the opportunities here was Bernard Arnault. One of my favorite tweets I've ever read was by this guy named Cedric Chin. And he says one type of remarkable career, and certainly the most interesting type comes from finding an earned secret and then exploiting the hell out of it for the good part of two to three decades. That is a great way to think about Bernard Arnault and what he's done with LVMH. Now, there is another devastating tragedy that's going to happen in Tamara's.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was being treated like an employee at the company I had founded. Now she's fighting with her supposed partners and she still has her husband in his crackhead-like behavior. He was doing coke and alcohol to the point of psychosis. We had a board meeting at my house a week after I gave birth, and all the while I was worried my husband might be free basing in the kitchen. There's very difficult times in her life. She's a new mom. She's a founder with terrible partners and she's got a drug addict for her husband. I realize now the full irony of my huge mistake. I had rid myself of the man who had vexed me most, which is Jimmy Chu, only to saddle myself with an insecure CEO whose damaged ego knew no bounds, in addition to which I now had a bipolar drug addicted husband who was spiling out of control. I actually met Tamerit a mutual friend's birthday party last month. I should have asked her if she had retained control and if she owned a majority of Jimmy Chu, I wonder if”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's essentially the opposite of what a missionary founder would do. She says these people were all about the exit. Are Ebita going in when the deal was completed was 2.9 million? So making about 3 million a year, okay, which is a lot for a company with only nine employees. Jimmy Chu was not a distressed asset. We were a household name with a product that was flying out of the stores. And so now with her new partner, she wants to continue on with that same exact strategy. We should ambush our customers. We should be using influence. I guess it would be called influencer marketing today, but one influencer market influencer marketing one is not new. And two can be excessively valuable. So they talked about a single picture of Madonna coming out of a store was worth millions of dollars to them. And so Tamara has this idea, hey, we want to sponsor this very prominent dinner. It's at the British Academy of Film and Television. Her idea was like, well, look at other luxury brands. Cartier has, they own this event called the Cartier International Polo Tournament. We should have a”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tamara makes a fatal mistake that she warns future entrepreneurs not to do. They come in, they're like, We don't want just 50%. We want 51%. And her dad's like, no, we're not doing this. And he says he was never one to surrender control of anything. But she says, I was so desperate to get rid of Jimmy because they had such a bad relationship that I talked my dad into taking the deal. Later, I could only blame myself. And so at the very end of the book, she's going to talk about one of the reasons that she wanted to write the book was for the benefit of fewer entrepreneurs and retain control is one of the warnings that she had for future entrepreneurs. This is 2001. For the next 10 years, she's going to go through hell with this series of private equity partners. She hates private equity. And right away, she realizes, oh, that 1% is a huge deal. The fact that someone else would now have the final say in how we ran the company was going to take some getting used to. This is my first painful lesson in private equity. The founder is no longer in control. And they just do a bunch of dumb shit.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the main lesson from a lot of them. It's like if you have a founder and you love what you do, never, ever, ever give up control. Retention of total control, retention of total control, retention of total control. This is why every hundred episodes, it's episode 25. It's episode 200. It's episode 300. It'll be episode 400. Is James Dyson's autobiography? That is his main lesson, retention of total control, because his story is a life story of being the main source of value creation, the creative force, the inventor behind everything, the one running the company and having stolen from him until he finally realized I'm not going to let anybody happen. And then what happens? You fast forward 30 years later. From what I hear, James is pulling at James Dyson that was 100% of his company. And from what I hear, he's pulling out a couple billion dollars a year. So Jimmy sells his 50% share for around 8 to 10 million dollars to Phoenix Equity Partners, and he leaves the business.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One mention helped turn us into a household name. Suddenly, women who had never heard of us, women who lived in small towns, thought about us in the same company as other luxury brands being mentioned like Prada Gucci and Manolo Blonic. Manufacturers of everything pay fortunes for product placement in movies and TV. We got this huge call out entirely for free. Why? The show's creator said she put the reference in the script because she'd been in London and stopped by the store on Mock Comb Street and fell in love with the product. Ultimately, Jimmy Chu would be mentioned on the show thirty four times. So that is the good. Now we need to get to the bad and the ugly. So this is all about her husband, her first marriage and the dangers of drug addiction. There is, I mean, I dealt with this my whole life, so I've seen, you know, cocaine abuse. And it's like, why I've never done it? Never would. You never get around a cocaine and be like, oh, that seems like a good idea.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was up all night on the phone trying to orchestrate the gifting of shoes to all the right women that same year, Kate Winslet, who was nominated for Best Actress for Titanic that year. She mentions that she's wearing Jimmy Chu shoes. That has such a positive effect on sales that going forward, Oscar Knight was a huge focus. And so they would try to dominate the Oscars every year. And so the idea here is a very simple but effective one. Just identify the media, whether it's magazines, TV, podcasts, radio, award shows, dinners, like where are your customers congregating, and then make sure your product is put in front of them. And this combines with the idea of ambushing your customers. Go back to Mara's decision to place your first store where people like her are likely to go and visit. Okay. On July 5th, 1998, we made our first appearance on Sex in the City and our visibility skyrocketed. The script had Carrie Bradshaw running for the Staten Island Ferry when she stumbles and screams out, oh my God, I lost my chew.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can push product. And then she goes, okay, so we don't want to just target models. We want to target celebrities. Celebrities are becoming more and more important, especially in the mid 90s. So how can we get to them? And so they would give shoes to celebrities forever. But then they realized, well, there's actually a more effective way to do this too. Because if you gift them to their agents, their stylists, even their lawyers, like the same stylist, if you can build a relationship with a stylist, that stylist might have a relationship with five or ten of the celebrities that you want to reach. Even more aware of the cutting edge where the stylists of the stars. And because these people work for multiple clients, contact with a single stylist gave us many more shots at scoring a win. So they would gift shoes to celebrities with the hopes that they're either going to be photographed or they'll talk about them, right? And they have a huge win right from the very beginning doing this. In the spring of 1998, we made our first foray into the Oscars.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cost us $15,000. And the only, there's only one employee other than Sandra and myself. And then this is a great description at the very beginning of a business that'll eventually sell for $1.2 billion. I was still living at home. I had no car and I had absolutely no social life other than entertaining related to the business. Now, right at the beginning, this is what I mentioned earlier, the prehistory of Jimmy Chu is really, I think, important to the story when I got to this page of the book, I was like, oh, this is just a page full of good ideas. This is her understanding the power of media and celebrity and the importance of ambushing potential customers. And what she realized that magazines had already put beautiful models on their cover. But over time, they realized that featuring an actress instead would send their newsstand sales through the roof. A magazine feature could reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers for a fashion brand. Magazine, she understands intuitively because she saw this at Vogue. Magazines and media.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To being one of the most important things ever happened to her because there's a buyer from Saxfith Avenue there. Her name is Julie Townsend. She stops by their exhibition, looks at the samples, says, wow, these are great. And then she was so enthusiastic she does an order for 3000 pairs of shoes. And Tamara says, just like that, we were in, we cracked it. The reason I wanted to put this part in because they had modeled this out and her and her father realized, hey, if we just sell 20 pairs of shoes a week out of our little location, we actually have a business. That was their expectation going in. 20 shoes a week, and then they get an order for 3,000 pairs in one shot. And Sax is going to be huge partner with Jimmy Chew. They're going to put them in, you know, 30 or 40 stores pretty quickly. So it says suddenly we had the rarest of good fortunes for a startup company, positive cash flow. Our sales for the first year were $250,000.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The lovely part of that was that the things that struck me and that I related to emotionally other women related to as well. One of my favorite filmmakers is Quentin Tarantino. I did an episode on him. He was completely obsessed with movies for two decades before he made his own. And so when he starts making movies, they're like, oh, do you have an audience in mind when you're making a movie? Me, I'm the audience. I've been obsessed with movies just like she was obsessed with shoes for a very long time, well before I made my own movie, just like she was obsessed with shoes well before she made her own shoes. So I'll just make what I want to see in the world. And it winds up paying off. This is incredible. So then she finds these trade shows that other buyers go to. Okay. And she says they were on the edgier realms of fashion. This is again understanding the importance of, she was like an insider into the industry and now she's creating for, right? She's like, okay, we'll go to this exhibition. It's on the edger realm of fashion.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No interest in becoming a designer. He was just a cobbler. And so she goes, oh my God, I set up a business with a creative head who in fact had no creativity. So then you realized I have to play this role. I'm the one that has to come up with the ideas. And so she looks for inspiration in a very basic place. She just goes down to the flea market and tries to pick out pieces that could inspire designs. And then she realized, hey, I'll just take a little idea from here, a little idea from over here, and I'll combine them and I come up with something new. Then she would go to manufacturing trade shows in Italy. And then she found all these different pavilions that had all these materials that people weren't putting on shoes at the time. So she's talking about like feathers and flowers and studs and glass beads and then a glitter fabric that winds up becoming a Jimmy Chew staple later on. And this is what she said about this. I'd never known there were so many possibilities. But that's how the Jimmy Chew DNA began to emerge. The first collections were based on things that had caught my”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cold calling and knocking on doors to see if we can get an appointment. We were two young girls. She's working with Jimmy's niece Sandra at the time. We were two young girls representing a brand that they never heard of with not so much as a single order to give them. Now eventually they find somebody to manufacture shoes. And the first trial run was an unmitigated disaster. They had like a, they had to do it in a fast turnaround time because they were going to sell them at a trade show in New York. And so at the very beginning, they had no way to manufacture a high quality product. They had to learn how to do so. Our selling samples barely made it to New York on time. And what we saw, and when we saw them, we were horrified. They were covered with black scuff marks and the stitching was awful. They were so bad we absolutely could not use them. I tried to carry on selling off of sketches, but nobody was interested. Again, then the next breakthrough is going to be really important. She goes back to the fact that I am the customer. Jimmy, it turns out, had”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ambush your customers is exactly what they're doing at the very beginning of Jimmy 2. And again, it's not like she has to pay, she's paying $15,000 a year in rent because these are tiny, tiny locations. This is also in the mid-90s. So how efficient and profitable this company with these tiny spaces will just absolutely blow your mind. They set up a very tiny showroom and then in the back there's an office and they're very frugal. We were very frugal. That's a line in the book. We set up an office of two desks in the basement. There was no windows and no frills. So then she's like, okay, I don't have any experiences as an entrepreneur. I've never made shoes. I like wearing them. I like looking at pictures of them. I liked writing about them in vogue, but I don't know where do I make them. So what do I do? Let's go find a list of people that make shoes and go ask, will you make shoes for us? So she goes, I found a book that just had all the factories in Italy and who they worked for. So we went to Italy.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was Manoloblonic, right? She's like, this is kind of weird. Manoloblonic is very popular with the same people I'm going after, but where did they put their store? I noticed that Manoloblonic was 20 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 Moccom Street. Remember the name of the street for later. I found the perfect spot on Mot Combe Street for a certain kind of woman, me, we were in the hot burning center. So you may think, okay, you're reading this, David. Why is Steve Jobs?”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision she's going to make right at the beginning, which is where are we going to put our first store is so important because this is the store that the creator of sex in the city happens to stumble upon to walk in and we're like, wow, I love these shoes. I love these shoes so much. I'm going to put them as the preferred shoe of the main character and maybe probably the most influential show for Tamara's ideal customers and listen to what she says. And just again, just understanding very clear thinking and an understanding of, hey, I'm designing for myself. What would I want? And then if I compare like what I want with what other businesses or other competitors are doing, like why aren't they doing this? Very, very clear thinking here. I set out to find a space for a shop in my preferred habitat. This is in London, okay? A location convenient and near where the ladies like me do their shopping. Their main components.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“$50,000. That's all they start with the company. The company's going to be profitable from day one and wildly efficient. Wait till I get to that. It'll blow your mind. And the basic deal at the time is we're going to be 50-50, meaning Jimmy Chew's going to own 50%. Me and my father will own the other 50%. And there's a line in the book that it's probably in every single autobiography looking back. I just simply did not know how difficult it was going to be to actually do this. I simply never imagined when I started this journey had just how many backstabbings, cliffhangers, and oncoming trains lay ahead. So there is a series of unbelievably smart decisions that take place right at the founding. So I already introduced one of them, the fact that she knows her customer because she is the customer. There is this idea that I've talked about over and over again on, you know, you need to work with the absolute best people that you can. Talent really matters. And it's not just for the big decisions.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whose presence the moment he came into a room, he was very, very charismatic. So now she's out of rehab. She's talking to her dad about this idea. She wants to get the hell out of her parents' basement. And so she goes and she's now hounding Jimmy Chu. Again, not initially receptive to the idea of partnership by any means. So this is where she has to be excessively persistent and persuasive. And so she says he needed to get a better sense of me as a person and to see a demonstration of my commitment in action. He wanted me to, quote, smell the leather. So the only way to demonstrate what I was about was to hang around down on his shop with him and get my hands dirty. So every day for three straight months, she shows up and she's trying to persuade Jimmy Chu to partner with her. Eventually she is successful. Now remember, this is a company that's going to sell for $1.2 billion in about 15 years from where we were in the story. They start the company with just a hundred. Her dad puts up $150.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the fact that her dad had helped scale and build Vidal Sassoon. So they just sold right before they found Jimmy Chu, a few years before they sold Jimmy Chu, he had just sold the business for $72 million. And then he had a bunch of free time. And lucky for Tamara that he was able to act as her advisor and co-founder. And they became closer as they age. And I love the way she would describe this because now her conversations could be about like building the business. says that her father gave a sort of kitchen MBA like you know steady drips of how to think about business over the dinner table so i felt a bond growing between my father and me that had never been allowed to flourish during my childhood lucky for me dad semi-retirement left him available to become the elder statesman and the spirit guide in my new venture and you could tell she just really admires him she talks about how charismatic how refined he was he always maintained an understated elegance he always flew first class he wore bespoke suits you feel”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Co founder. And so maybe he was just traveling a lot. Maybe he was just working. But when they were adults and they could have a much closer relationship, he did tell her that your mother is the most selfish and self-obsessed woman I've ever come across. And then there's this idea where she was also likely narcissistic or just obsessed with how good looking she was. She was a model when her parents met. And in fact, Tamara says that her entire life was about how she looked. And the reason I say that's really confusing is because of you could tell how important her father was to her life, to her business. In fact, she dedicates when you open up the book. It's dedicated. One of the people she dedicates the book to say to my memory of my father who inspired me through my darkest days. Her dad's going to be her co-founder, her advisor, her main supporter before he helps his daughter. He had been a very successful entrepreneur. He did a bunch of businesses.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're either unable or unwilling to fix their own lives. And so, what do unhappy people try to make everybody else around them unhappy? That doesn't excuse their behavior, but it helps me understand their behavior. And then what is Tamara's response to this psychological torture that her mom puts her through? And this also affects her when she's fighting with partners later on. She says at a very early age, I simply learn to shut down and never show any emotion, either happy or sad. She learned avoidance. Another inspiring part about Tamara's memoir, she says, like, listen, when I was in school, there's just no way that my classmates would have voted me most likely to succeed. And she said, I didn't even have any interests or passions. There was nothing that spoke to me, no class or no moment where I said, oh, this is what I want my life to be about. Now, one of the most confusing parts about this book is that her dad for some reason did not stop her mom from tormenting her when she was young. And her dad's a very successful fontrepreneur. He's going to wind up being her.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything special. And I love Tamara's response here. Like, this is complete bullshit. The 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 Chu. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. We need to pause where we run 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. If Tamera can build a wildly successful company from this point, you and I have certainly have no excuses. So now I need to introduce another main theme of the book. Maybe the main theme of the book. You see clearly what it is.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Chu to partner with her. And so her pitch was this. Jimmy would design a line of exquisite chews 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 Chew 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 be able to run Jimmy Chu if she's out all night doing what she called what prodigious quantities of alcohol and cocaine. And 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.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was Jimmy Chu. 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 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 Chew is going to turn into when Tamara and Jimmy partner. So in addition to discovering Jimmy Chew through her past job, she also understood the power of media to drive sales. So Jimmy's making these shoes for Vogue. What does Vogue do? They list who made the shoes. And you can 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 Chu to manufacture shoes? So there's a lot more.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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, like 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'd been in the back of her mind while she was a fog. She's 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 Chu. 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...”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 indiscretions, I'd always worked very hard. And so this is what I meant earlier. And this is actually an idea from Jim Simons, just an episode on him. He's the founder of Renaissance Technologies. Way before he founds 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 that 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 life. I did not fully appreciate the huge favor Anna was doing me. She was setting me up to mend my ways.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Chu, 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”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Tamera 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 fifteen years the struggle between the financial and the creative would become one of the central themes of Mellon's business. Mellon grew Jimmy Chew into a billion dollar brand, yet it's her personal glamour that keeps her an object of global media fascination. Vogue photographed her wedding.”
2025-05-26 · Founders · #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source