In My Shoes: A Memoir (24 page)

After some artful persuasion by Joe, Mieck agreed to improve the offer, but even so, I now had less than twenty-four hours to review the details. I responded by saying that I would sign, but that I’d like a good faith commitment that post-deal they would review the report on executive stock options that I’d commissioned from KPMG. They said they would.

When Sunday came, after the stress of a week spent fighting to be treated with more respect, I could hardly muster the strength to leave my hotel room.

I asked Martin to call Joe. “Can’t they just send the papers over?”

Joe’s response was, “You know, they’re spending five hundred million pounds. I think you have to show up.”

I put on a pair of jeans and a shirt and I went to the Morgan Stanley office in Mayfair. It was four in the afternoon on May 22, 2011.

The only other woman present was Josh’s lawyer. Otherwise, it was a sea of blue suits, and all these soulless men strutting about to see who was going to be the silverback gorilla.

They had a table set up for three—there was Reinhard Mieck from Labelux, there was myself, and there was Josh. The signing was largely ceremonial so that Josh could close the chapter.

Earlier in our discussions, Ramez had said to me, “I’m a fair guy, I always leave something on the table for my partners.” So before I signed I said, “Ramez, what are you leaving on the table?”

He sort of laughed it off but clearly he was embarrassed.

After we signed, Ramez came over to shake my hand, and he said to me, “You’ve been a really good partner.”

I looked him in the eye and I said, “I’m afraid I can’t say the same to you.”

His jaw dropped, so I knew I had his attention.

“You’ve been threatening all the way through, and you’ve handled this whole thing like a complete amateur.”

I walked out with people chasing after me, and I got in the car and went back to the hotel. I couldn’t fully release my anger until we were in the car, and then I started shaking. Normally I would have swallowed it, said nothing, and moved on. This was a major breakthrough. For the first time I’d faced down a bully and found my voice.

An hour later Andrew Roberts, my lawyer, called. “
What
did you say to Ramez? He’s absolutely devastated.”

I was the only one who paid my own legal fees. TowerBrook took £1.5 million out of the company to pay for their lawyers but didn’t have the decency to try to negotiate a good deal on management’s behalf.

These were midlevel private-equity people who hadn’t yet learned that you can’t just screw everyone. All they cared about was their own monthly fees, their 20 percent on exit, and their favorable tax rates. They were like feedlot farmers who don’t care about cruel and squalid conditions or the hormones and chemicals flooding into their animals. Their only concern is that their livestock put on sufficient weight to bring top dollar when slaughtered.

Jimmy Choo meant everything to me, but now it was like a love affair in which your partner has cheated on you, physically abused you, and then run off with another woman. My partners had beaten the soul out of it with their lack of care for any of the individuals involved and their fundamental lack of respect for the brand. But it was the way Labelux behaved after the sale that was the final nail in the coffin.

We had a Cruise Collection presentation in New York, and I knew that Reinhard, the CEO, would be in town, so I suggested we have dinner. “We need to talk,” I said.

He said, “I’ll just see you at the presentation,” but we never connected.

•  •  •  •

IT WAS A NOSTALGIC SEASON
for me, the fifteenth anniversary of Jimmy Choo. To mark the occasion we’d launched a feature on our Web site called “Choo Stories” where our fans would write in. My favorite was from a young female soldier in the British army who’d bought herself a pair of red patent Jimmy Choos to be sent to her while on tour in Afghanistan. She sent us a picture of herself wearing them with her uniform.

We also published a book with Rizzoli. The foreword was penned by fashion writer Colin McDowell, and I wrote the preface. It covered the entire history of the brand, with behind-the-scenes design sketches. Revenue was donated to the Jimmy Choo Foundation, which I’d recently initiated to help fight gender discrimination and the sex slave trade, and for gaining equal pay for women.

Josh also suggested that we go back into the archives, revive some of our greatest hits, and call the collection Icons. Of the thousands of shoes in the Jimmy Choo archive, some were seminal, either because they marked a moment in our history or they became famous because of the women who wore them. One of these was the “feather” shoe made famous when it slipped off Carrie Bradshaw’s foot in
Sex and the City
. We got the artist Nan Goldin to shoot the campaign, and in our
promotions we showed the vintage piece, then showed how it would have been designed if we started from scratch today. Our customers loved it.

In midsummer I went to L.A. for an inspiration trip with the design team, and I called Reinhard again. I said, “Time’s going by. You haven’t looked at my KPMG report. I’m not getting fair market value. And you’re stalling on moving the office.”

He said, “We’re not moving the office.”

So nothing I’d discussed with Peter Harf that night at the Mark was being carried through. They had completely dismissed my concerns.

With that I’d had enough. “I’m tired guys. . . . I’m tired of fighting you bastards for everything.”

On August 1, 2011, fifteen years almost to 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. And this is what I said:

Dear Peter and Reinhard,

After reflecting on my deal and looking at where I have actually landed up, I am very sad to say I am going to have to resign.

My father taught me two things in business:

1. Don’t let accountants run your business.

2. Lawyers always ruin deals.

His words ring true now. I’m sure your lawyers and accountants feel they’ve done a great job, but they have forgotten that happy people are productive people.

Looking at the numbers, I do not feel motivated at all. The compensation is fixed in pound sterling, but I live in New York, so I feel I should be paid in dollars.

My compensation is still below market value, even though it has increased significantly from TowerBrook years. Over the last
decade I have basically worked for free, using my capital to live off. I can no longer do this.

It is a great pity that TowerBrook blocked access to negotiations.

The management equity plan is subject to income tax, which now approaches 50 percent. I have not worked this hard to pay income tax on my shares. I’m afraid the carrot has turned into a peanut.

Also for all the management team to put their own money in and then, at the end, pay income tax, I consider grossly unfair.

Peter and I discussed moving the office to New York, which I don’t see for a long time to come. The travel is a totally false economy and I can’t work to my full potential being burnt out.

At this stage in my life half measures avail me nothing.

Yours sincerely,
Tamara

The saddest part of my departure was that I was leaving before I was able to get the Jimmy Choo Foundation going in a larger way. They haven’t done anything with it since. It appears there’s no one left at the company with the motivation to work for women’s empowerment.

T
he last collection I put together for Jimmy Choo was fall/winter 2012, and it was a very stressful four months during the time I was still working with the design team but couldn’t say I was leaving.

The moment I’d told them that I’d reached the end, Labelux, in the typical fashion of abusive partners everywhere, expressed dismay and suddenly became very attentive. But their entreaties were too little too late. My notice period ran through January, but by November the strain was obvious, my resignation was made public, and I was gone.

Like TowerBrook before them, Labelux offered me large sums of money to sign a confidentiality agreement, but obviously I said no. However, my employment contract with them already included a one-year non-compete, which would begin in February 2012.

Despite the miseries I’d been feeling for years, it was when I stopped working altogether that the cumulative stress, exhaustion, and emotional turmoil hit me like an oncoming train.

In the world of rehab they speak of a “respite admission,” when you really need just to check in (or check out), like some nineteenth-century aristocrat taking the cure at Baden-Baden. That’s what my “non-compete” year was like.

It began at Thanksgiving, which is a holiday Minty always spends with her dad. Happily, Valentino was kind enough to invite me over, so I enjoyed a very traditional American feast at his apartment on Fifth Avenue. The group was mostly family, and we ate turkey and dressing and cranberries, and I had a lovely time.

In keeping with my own family tradition, though, I did my best to hide what I was feeling, which was a combination of anger, relief, mourning, and a profound sense of loss. The ancient Greeks reserved a time of quarantine for their returning warriors before they were expected to resume their place in society. I needed that same kind of buffer. And not just to recover, but to rediscover who I was, to come back to being me without all the pressure. I’d been on a fifteen-year voyage with Jimmy Choo, and when I finally jumped ship I was a different person.

Shortly after the holiday, Josh dropped by and we had a nice chat. Referring to Jimmy Choo, he said, “This was you . . . you created all this,” kind words that I appreciated. Despite a bit of friction over the package for management, we’d always gotten along because he could always be human. Which is not to say that he never repeated favored phrases like “Everyone’s replaceable,” “It’s TowerBrook who owns this company,” and so on. But I knew once again that he was merely doing his job, passing along TowerBrook’s message to me.

What I learned from Josh’s visit was that he, too, had resigned. In their inimitable fashion, Labelux had not told me that he was leaving, and they hadn’t told him that I was. Even at this point, Reinhard had tried to prevent him from talking to me, but Josh had insisted.

  •  •  •

I WENT AWAY TO ST.
bart’s for Christmas, and when I got back in January I really started spiraling down. My energy drained away until I could barely speak. When you’re in the middle of so much stress, you rationalize how terrible you feel and you attribute it all to the job. But the body takes a while to let go and really feel the trauma it’s undergone. Often the damage persists well after the pressure has subsided and you’re no longer locked in battle mode, rising to the bell each morning and counterpunching all day.

With a full year off, not only was I able to reflect deeply, but I was able to take a long look at my health. The fact is, my sleep problems and issues with depleted energy had been with me since Heathfield. Back then I was always in the fog, and certainly never able to make it to breakfast. This was when my mother started saying I was a hypochondriac. This was when nothing could reach me—except, of course, drugs that acted directly to excite the nervous system.

Even as an adult, whenever I tried to get help from doctors about my lack of energy, their response was usually, “With all you’re doing, how bad can it be?”

But the fact is, I’d launched a global brand while struggling to get out of bed each morning, then struggling all day to stay awake—which says something about the nature of existential fear, the power of feeling that if you fail, you’re going to die.

I’ve suffered from insomnia, but more often my problem is that I sleep too much, and the sleep I get isn’t refreshing. Left to my own devices, I can be out for fifteen hours at a time, but I wake up with that
terribly foggy, jet-lagged feeling, as if it were three in the morning in a very alien time zone.

I’d delved into all the psychological factors that might have been causing this condition. I’d dealt with my most self-defeating patterns through therapy, and then, after the trial in Jersey, I felt as if a huge obstruction in my chest—my mother—had been surgically removed. But while everyone knows that psychological trauma can leave emotional scars, the fact is, relentless stress, especially in childhood, also leaves its imprint in the cells, disturbing how the endocrine and nervous systems operate. The “vacant” quality I’d always had when I was young was actually what psychologists call a “dissociative disorder,” which is also a response to stress.

One of my doctors, a psychopharmacologist, suggested that I go to the New York Sleep Institute for a diagnosis. I spent the night there, wired up with sensors like an astronaut, and they determined that I have true hypersomnia, meaning that my “wake up” system doesn’t activate, and, because I have attention deficit disorder, I exhaust myself trying to focus.

They also determined that, in addition to serotonin dysregulation, I have low dopamine—and suddenly the penny dropped. Dopamine helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. Serotonin affects mood. Both are affected by the adrenal system, and relentless stress can lead to something called adrenal fatigue. So all those years drifting through school like a zombie? And my particularly avid response to stimulants like cocaine and even tobacco?

During my sabbatical year I started taking dopamine supplements, along with my usual medication, and the change has been
astounding. For the first time in my life, the morning is my favorite part of the day.

I also found that there’s something in me that doesn’t tolerate leisure all that well. So in an odd way, my time off was a bit like the experience of that bomb squad soldier from
The Hurt Locker
who comes home only to find that he really needs to get back into the thick of it. After spending half my life flying back and forth across the Atlantic and being constantly “on,” suddenly having unlimited time to myself was unnerving. But then my diary quickly filled up with charity events, and with raising a child, and I began to think, “My God, how did I ever have time to work?”

One of the gratifications that came with announcing my departure from Jimmy Choo was that my in-box suddenly filled with messages from very serious people saying, “What’s your plan? Let me know. Whatever you do next, I’d love to be in on it.”

•  •  •  •

JUST AS I’D BEEN INCUBATING
the idea of Jimmy Choo while still at
Vogue
, even while nestled in rehab, I’d long ago started thinking about a new brand that would carry my own name. With the non-compete I couldn’t really do anything with shoes or bags, or bring another product to market for twelve months, but I could start writing a business plan, and I could start talking to investors. What was nice about my legal restrictions is that I was forced to take it slowly. I also had the chance to think through what needed to be fundamentally different and how to avoid the mistakes of the past.

At Jimmy Choo we did shoes, bags, and other small leather goods,
fragrances, and eyewear. If I’d stayed on, I would have started ready-to-wear: dresses, skirts, and blouses. I actually had a vision for a full lifestyle brand that extended all the way to housewares. Ralph Lauren, Armani, Versace, Vendi—they all do it. And now that’s what I’m going to do with my new brand, Tamara Mellon.

I feel that the fashion business has become a dinosaur. A fashion house will have a runway show, and the images appear online that same day, but the actual product doesn’t get into the store until six months later. By that point the merchandise is overexposed, and it seems old and tired. The PR departments have sent it out to celebrities, and it’s been seen everywhere, so a customer thinks, “I don’t want to wear that dress. Why should I be the last person to this party?”

As a result, speed to market is now much, much more important. So is changing the way the fashion business has always operated on a set seasonal schedule. Women have been forced to buy their spring/summer clothes in February and their winter coats in June. But attitudes have changed. Customers don’t want to think about a coat in June, and if they don’t want to think about it, they’re not going to buy it.

For my new brand, I’ve created a business model that allows us to actually sell in real time so that our customer can buy her coats in September and her bikinis in June. Breaking from the established cycles means going much more directly to the consumer.

At Tamara Mellon we’re going to do a biweekly drop of clothes, and because it’s biweekly, the clothes will be slightly limited and more exclusive. It also means that every couple of weeks we’ll be creating an event to generate some excitement, which we hope will bring customers into the stores.

We’re also going to have an aggressive presence online, with ten-second ads with a click-and-buy component. I love the fact that I’ll be able to communicate directly with the customer through social media.

This time there will be no phantom namesake to complicate matters (while owning half the company): I’ll be using my own name, everyone will know that I’m creating the collection, and I’ll be free to speak to the customer in my own voice.

Trust me, I’ve learned my lesson: Private equity will not be part of the deal. If we’re successful, then ten years down the line we might do an IPO, but what I’ve learned is to always retain majority ownership and, with it, control. I’ve set up Tamara Mellon as a privately owned LLC, with a few well-chosen minority partners putting in their own money, but leaving the creative vision to me. These partners include Sandbridge Capital, where Tommy Hilfiger is a senior adviser, and Tory Burch from the fashion world; Ronald O. Perelman from MacAndrews and Forbes; Michael Spencer, the founder of ICAP, probably the biggest brokerage in the world; David Ross of Carphone Warehouse; Lord Jonathan Marland, the prime minister’s trade envoy; and Danny Rimer, Canadian tech entrepreneur.

I’d long ago come to the conclusion that private equity should stick with cement factories and soybeans and stay out of fashion. Certainly the only time to sell to private equity is when you want to divest entirely and walk away.

I think their brand of short-term thinking and exclusive focus on financials is a huge part of what’s wrong with so much of the economy. You can’t have sustainable growth and real innovation when no one
cares about what they’re actually producing or about the people who produce it.

The private-equity mind-set is just as delusional as my mother’s because, like hers, it insists on redefining the world to suit its pathology. With it there’s never an open dialogue between creative and financial. The exchange is always acrimonious, because it’s always about dominance, ego, and control.

Even if its outcomes were always glorious for all concerned, the endless cycles of buying and selling are simply too exhausting. Private equity is like American politics: The endless campaigning, fund-raising, and positioning for the next contest is to the detriment of the job you’re actually being paid to do.

If I’d had an MBA when I started Jimmy Choo, I think it might have given me more confidence to shut down the unimaginative and shortsighted bean counters when they wanted to interfere with the creative process. But having been through the ringer with three private-equity companies and four corporate sales, I now have all the confidence I need. I’m sure I’ll make new mistakes, but I have too many battle scars to repeat those from the past. And as they say in the recovery movement: Sometimes you have to break down in order to break through.

After 2009, which was as close to a “breakdown” as I ever hope to come, I was able to move beyond the trap I’d lived in all my life. It was like I’d been stuck in a box, except that it was actually a triangle, one that has been known in therapeutic circles for a long time.

My psyche was shaped by a childhood in which there was a Persecutor (my mother), a Rescuer (my father), and a Victim (that’s me). Because this dysfunctional pattern was never adequately addressed and
dislodged, it carried over from my family of origin to any and all other relationships I might have, including those at Jimmy Choo.

When your designated role is to be the victim, and when that’s all you know, you sometimes find a perverse comfort in it later on. When you’re endlessly reliving an old pattern, you know what to expect, and you may still see it as the survival mechanism that helped you get through your childhood.

Moreover, the familiarity of the same old pattern, even when it’s destructive, provides a degree of self-soothing because it gives you the illusion of control, though this kind of control is about as effective as a child trying to escape from a house fire by hiding in her bedroom closet. Deep down, your body is saying, “I know how this system works,” and that sense of mastery lessens the anxiety of otherwise unpredictable, interpersonal encounters. And what are addictions and compulsions—drugs, alcohol, gambling, hand washing, promiscuity, avoidance—if not attempts to reduce anxiety and create the illusion of control?

For me, then, while being the victim may have been the road map of hell, at least I knew my way around. When your only experience of maternal attention is victimization, in your most perverse moments you might even see it as a substitute for love. And ultimately, when your psyche is conditioned for being persecuted, you will find plenty of applicants for the job.

Robert’s approach to me was just like my mother’s, but at the time I was unable to recognize it and fend it off. The same was true with Ramez.