Mellon stresses the importance of trusting her business and design instincts.
“I also had strong instincts, a certain entrepreneurial skill and an incredible work ethic,” she says.
“Almost every mistake I’ve made in business has come from not trusting myself. But now I know that if something doesn’t work for me, it’s not going to work for the customer.”
Mellon designed the first Jimmy Choo collections based on things that had caught her eye.
“The lovely part of it was that the things that struck me, and that I related to emotionally, other women related to as well,” Mellon says
Jimmy Choo’s first collection of shoes was a failure but Mellon did not let that deter her from pursuing the business.
“The factory left them covered with black scuff marks, glue was visible along the seams, and the stitching was awful,” she says.
“They were so bad that we absolutely couldn’t use them.”
Instead Mellon learnt that she needed to pay attention to detail.
“In terms of manufacturing, this meant only the best components and an obsessive attention to detail,” she says.
“In terms of design it meant vintage ideas reconsidered, exotic fabrics and extras, and sex appeal that was also sophisticated and never cheap.”
Mellon learnt the importance of cash flow for a fledging business at an early stage when Julie Townsend, a buyer from Saks in the United States, placed an order for 3000 pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes after she spotted Mellon exhibiting them in Paris.
“Suddenly we had the rarest of good fortunes for a start-up company: positive cash flow. Our sales were £250,000 that first year, with the shop rental costing us £15,000 and only one employee other than Sandra [Choi] and myself,” Mellon says.
Mellon tried to innovate by creating products where she saw a gap in the market.
Jimmy Choo was one of the first brands to have a “house style” which provided basic shoes that were sold every season and never went on sale.
“When we started out, the shoe industry offered plenty of opportunity to innovate at a purely practical level,” Mellon says.
“Boots for women had always been too wide at the calf, for instance, and nobody had thought about improving that aspect of the fit. So I created a line of boots with the upper portion created very tight.”
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Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
