Daphne Nwobike
Staff Writer
On Monday, September 9, the Babson Center of Global Commerce invited Stuart Weitzman, the Humphreys Entrepreneur-in-Residence, to share the details of his career journey as a renowned shoe designer who has worked with clients ranging from Taylor Swift to Beyoncé. He sat down with The Purple to share an inside look into his entrepreneurial experiences, the highs and lows he encountered on this path to success, and everything in between.
Hi Stuart, how are you?
Stuart: I’m glad to be here. I have been to Tennessee, but not for any reason like this. I’m going to speak at Vanderbilt also. I said [to them],[are there] any other universities in Tennessee you think I ought to visit? They said to me, well, if you want to see something beautiful, you should go up to Sewanee. So someone led me to you.
That’s incredible. You obviously like pretty things, so how did you start making pretty shoes?
Stuart: So, well, I went to the Wharton School. It’s a Business School in Philadelphia. Somebody saw me painting the scenery at a theater group. One of the fellas I knew said, ‘you know, you ought to draw some shoes for my father.’ I said, ‘why would I want to do that’? He said, ‘well, he has a shoe factory, and he’s a wonderful shoemaker: he buys designs from freelancers’. So, I drew some sketches, and they invited me to lunch to show his father what I had. I spread the designs out on the table like a deck of cards. Meanwhile, I’m a senior at Penn, and I already have a commitment for a job at this banking firm called Goldman Sachs, which was as important then as it is now. It was a pretty good deal, you know. Anyway, he picked one out and said, ‘you drew this’? Skeptical, he held the design up to the chandelier hanging over the dining room table and said I see the tracing marks. Then he ripped up my sketch, picked up another one, flipped it over, and asked me to draw it again. I did, and he offered me $20 a sketch afterward. It was a lot of money for a short amount of time, so I called Goldman Sachs and asked to take a year off. I sold over $2800 worth of sketches, more than my tuition.
What a turn of events! So what came next?
Stuart: That summer, in the best shoe store in New York City, which is now Bvlgari jewelry store, I came across four colors of a high-heel pump with a big fluffy snake and leather alternating petals. It was one of my sketches! They told me in the store they’d placed a re-order, and that was when I quit my job at Goldman Sachs, and shoemaking has been my hobby ever since!
Did that hobby become a passion?
Stuart: It became [a passion] because that’s what I decided to do. I was working at my hobby, and when you do that, it’s not the same. It’s really great. You can’t wait to get to work because that’s what you want to do. I hope some of the students I meet here can find that kind of love.
Did you feel scared or uncertain when you were committing to this path?
Stuart: No, I mean, I worked somewhere else for about six to seven years to learn enough before I felt I had the knowledge and a bit of capital to start a small company, and then I found [reliable people], and we just all love what we do.
How did you go about finding people who had that same zeal for the things that you wanted to do?
Stuart: I kind of decided that I didn’t want to hire people from other companies that were already doing the job I needed to be done because they would already have their habits and their way, and it wasn’t my way. I would rather they grow up with us and learn our way, so we didn’t hire a professional employee until Susan, and that’s the only person out of 70-something managers and more. I took my mantra from the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken, which helped me realize that it was okay for everybody to know how to do things differently and to find multiple routes to get to the same finish line—and that’s how we did it. While leading people, I realized that I didn’t need to carry the trophy because they’re the ones that make it happen. So when we got a Clio award, which is like the Oscar of marketing and advertising, Susan got up and collected it and made the speech. I told her, you’re the one who marketed this company so well.
That’s so amazing. Now I’m curious: what’s your creative process like?
Stuart: It’s a real effort. You have to know what to look for, where to go to get inspired, and who your muses might be. Never listen to your salespeople. They will always tell you about today’s shoe because they see the shoes when they go selling them to other stores. A designer is the only one who will tell you [about] tomorrow’s shoes. So I paid attention to that, as well as clothing, art, architecture, and other things that influence the way our eyes see things. And then we would have themes, you know. A movie might start a theme; for instance, I made Cinderella slippers. You have to know who your customer is — that’s the key. What is your market? When I started, my market was the career woman, housewife, suburban woman, professional woman, not a fashionista.
Finally, what does success mean to you now that you’ve come this far versus when you initially started the company?
Stuart: That’s a complicated question, and I’d like to give you a simple answer about what I really believe success is over your lifetime. If the people who are supposed to love you truly love you, that’s success. It leads to everything else.