In My Shoes, A Memoir By Tamara Mellon, Co-founder of Jimmy Choo
My thoughts following the reading of this book…
When you start working in the footwear fashion industry, one of the first things you do is a benchmark. What are the famous and successful brands and designers and what they did to be what and where they are today.
And then, you try to find testimonies of people who work in the field to have insider stories, and not just only the glamorous vision of the brand that you have from ad campaigns and fashion weeks.
My first encounter of that sort was with the book In My Shoes, A Memoir by Tamara Mellon. Even before being deeply inside the fashion industry, I’ve already heard about the Jimmy Choo’s shoes and even tried on some models during a trip in Italy in my previous life before Turkey.
But what I knew about the brand was quite basic: it was a British brand will elegant women high heels shoe models and one of the most liked brand of the celebrities (the Sex and the City syndrome I guess).
And then, one day quite by chance to be honest, I found this book in my bookstore. I started to read it as a novel, as if it was a fiction story. But then, after some times, I just get into her story, wondering how she will deal with her personal issues and day-to-day fights at work to make her ideas and points of view accepted and, still, manage to be successful, putting the Jimmy Choo brand where she wanted to put it: a renowned global footwear brand.
At the end of the book I just couldn’t help myself being moved by Tamara Mellon’s story, by how she put all her energy in that project to try to change her life, as if it was her only way to get out of her addictions and complexes and, despite all the difficulties she encountered, always believed in the success of her project, knowing, feeling what will be good for her brand.
I won’t be a footwear designer and I’m just starting to give a face and tone of voice to the footwear company in which I started to work this year. However, there are some lessons I learnt and some universal thoughts to take into consideration when you are the creative mind, should you work in the fashion industry or not.
One of the first lessons, even if it’s a general rules, is that there is no success without hard work. This means quite a lot of sacrifices that we are not always ready to do. The second one is to believe in one’s intuitions and instincts, even if it means to leave one’s comfort zone and to fight with everybody. It’s not always easy to accept to sacrifice some kind of material comfort, to invest all your energy and passion in the project of your life. And you feel always more reassured when you know that the most important people of your company or sector share your ideas and points of view. But this is not always the case…
Think out of the box and, as far as I understood from Ms Mellon’s experience, this is the behavior to have when working in the fashion industry, not to be afraid of unconventional partnerships, to make you different from the other players of your niche.
And I will complete with think out of the accounting plans, as being the main advice her father gave her when she started her project.
After some considerations, this book was a lesson of marketing and Public Relations. She was the face of the brand, the one that gave the tone of voice and design orientation, the one that knew people. As for any communication and marketing strategy, it took her time to position the brand as the elite shoe of the celebrities. But the long term results are here.
She also demonstrates that it is a day-to-day work, a long time effort that can be destroyed in a second by inadequate comments or problems of ego and priorities of some people.
To me, fashion, should it be clothes, footwear or jewelry, is a form of art with its own beauty. And, as for every form of art, creativity is the basis. No creativity, no differentiation. No differentiation, no sales. No sales, no profits.
But creativity needs freedom to express itself and we are now in a world where the return on investment (ROI to use the right technical term) is the king word. To come back to the creativity aspect, I liked very much the inspirational trips’ concept she organized for her design team. Travelling, going out of the walls of your office, meeting new people are the best way to free your brain from the daily working obligations and, thus be able to have new and original ideas.
What stroke me the most in In my shoes was that, even for people working in the fashion sector, the most important for them was the intrinsic value of the brand, how much they will be able to sell it in the end and the amount of profits they will have, and not the philosophy of it, its positioning, the quality and originality of its products, its tone of voice and its perception by the customers.
I may sound a little bit naïve, even if I understand that in our capitalistic world money is the only referential. As a communication person, what makes a brand a brand is important to me, how they communicate, which causes they are defending, which positioning they have. Of course, as every consumer, the price I’m ready to pay for a pair of shoes or a dress is also a big motivator. But there is a kind of consciousness starting to appear recently, where profits and money don’t have the main role anymore. The working conditions of people who did the shoes or clothes you are wearing, the spirit of the brand, how it makes you feel when wearing it, the quality of its products and its marketing strategy are only a small part of all the intangible assets of a fashion brand that will influence the buying decision.
And the personality of the person you choose to represent the brand is a more crucial choice. Through this person, thanks to his/her charisma, people will identify themselves to the brand and make them willing to buy the shoe or the clothes.
And, at the end of my reading, I had the impression that the owners of the Jimmy Choo’s brand missed this point, all focused on the brand’s profitability. They didn’t understand that a brand is made by the energy of creative people and the power of interpersonal communications.
People tend to personalize their favorite brands. Giving a soul and a face to a brand is making it available, warmer, closer to the targeted audiences. They find and recognize themselves in it. Now a brand is not just a logo and a cold description. A brand is an entire universe, mostly done of subjective uncontrollable data, that you have to constantly support as if is was your own child with its caprices and ups-and-downs. And this is what I will remember from Ms Mellon’s experience at Jimmy Choo.
These were my personal thoughts after my reading of In My Shoes, A Memoir by Tamara Mellon. You may agree, you may not. In any case, I will be happy to hear your comments on this book if you read it and what you learnt from it.
In my shoes
A memoir
Tamara Mellon with William Patrick
Penguin Editions
2013