Less than a decade ago, London socialite Tamara Yeardye-Mellon was an accessories editor at Vogue magazine and Jimmy Choo a Malaysian cobbler with a small bespoke business in an East End garage making shoes for well-heeled clients such as Princess Diana, writes Deirdre McQuillan.
In l996, armed with a £150,000 loan from her wealthy father, Yeardye-Mellon bought a 50 per cent stake in Jimmy Choo with the idea of starting a ready-to-wear range and then set about putting the name and the shoes on the map internationally.
Today, aged 37, she is one of the UK's most successful businesswomen, president of a brand valued last year at more than £100 million (€147m), with 33 shops around the world and another seven to 10 opening next year. Four years ago Jimmy Choo was bought out by Equinox Luxury Holdings, though his niece Sandra Choi remains as creative director.
Before Yeardye-Mellon's visit to Dublin to open the new Jimmy Choo boutique in Brown Thomas next Tuesday, I meet in Yeardye-Mellon South Kensington headquarters where her press agent is eager to tell me how inspiring and decisive she is. It has taken weeks to organise this encounter and Tamara is still tied up at a management meeting when I arrive, so the PR and I take a trip to Sloane Street to see the new shop. It is decked out like a 1940s boudoir, all cream suede and crystal drop chandeliers, mirrored vitrines and bowls of white lilies. On display is the footwear that has made her fortune: strappy gold mesh sandals, sparkling diamante slingbacks, snakeskin stilettos and high boots in punched lime suede, shoes for gilded lives.
"Pretty shoes are like jewels," Yeardye-Mellon says when we meet back in her office, "they make you feel so sexy and elegant and getting a pair is like getting a box of sweets". With a pair of sandals starting at around 200, the look may be sweeter than the prices, but she argues that "people recognise a beautiful product, and our costs are extremely high as we use the best leather and handwork. We have customers who save all year just to buy one pair."
High-profile fans include Oscar winners, the Sex and the City team and Beyoncé Knowles who has celebrated the shoes in one of her songs. Part of the success of the business, however, is that however glamorous and fashion forward the shoes are, the collection has practical considerations such as everyday courts, heels in three heights, flatties (for New Yorkers) and a wedding line. Bags have also become a success story now representing 30 per cent of all turnover.
Dressed in purple stilettos, jeans and a teal sweater, very much the uniform of hip young London females, she is, surprisingly, chewing gum. Slim and striking, with green eyes, long brown hair and an engaging smile, she is friendly, but guarded, answering questions dutifully and perfunctorily rather than eagerly, occasionally flashing glances at her PR.
It has been six years since she was in Ireland, she tells me. Her husband's family, the Mellons, American bankers, have origins in Co Tyrone and she has been to the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh. Her beloved father, the late Tommie Yeardye, was Irish, though she doesn't proffer any further information.
Despite her financial success, Yeardye-Mellon's private life and disastrous marriage to Matthew Mellon, heir to the US Gulf Oil and banking fortune, has been the stuff of endless tabloid gossip in the UK. What began with a hugely glamorous and highly publicised white-tie wedding in Blenheim Palace ended acrimoniously two years ago. The couple have a daughter Araminta, now aged three, and, according to Vanity Fair, Matthew is suing her for joint custody among other claims, with the trial set for this month.
As one who used her contacts and her high-profile lifestyle to promote her business in the media, and who became the image of her own brand, she then suffered unwanted scrutiny when things turned sour.
"Once it starts you can't control it and there is nothing you can do and you have to not care and realise that your friends and family know the truth," she says with feeling.
On the subject of Kate Moss, she believes the model will ride out the recent storm. "It could be a blessing in disguise. Her career is not over. So many people have addiction problems. I think the press loves to see the fall from grace because she is an icon and so beautiful. It's the politics of envy."
Moss figures on the cover of a book Yeardye-Mellon has just produced for Elton John's Aids charity. The book is called 4 Inches and in it well-known women, including the Duchess of York, Serena Williams and Yasmin Le Bon, were persuaded to pose naked, apart from Jimmy Choo shoes and Cartier diamonds, for female photographers. She included herself but declined to allow the photograph be reproduced to accompany this article.
"Creatively, we said you do exactly what you want, use props, you don't have to show a thing if you don't want to, but we ended up showing a lot more skin than we would have with a male photographer." Her experience at Vogue "going to fabulous locations with top models and photographers" was a lot of fun, she recalls, even if at times, she felt "like a glorified donkey lugging trunks of clothes around the world".
Contacts from that world and her own circle of celebrity friends helped to shoehorn Jimmy Choo heels into even higher reaches. Initially, she just made lists of stores where she wanted her shoes to sell such as Bergdorf Goodman and Saks in New York. "I just rang them up and they got extremely high sell-through results". Hollywood endorsement was the killer factor. "We were lucky because young Hollywood took Jimmy Choo under its wing. It was the right fit, the right look and since everybody wants to know everything about their favourite stars, what they wear, how they live, that type of publicity spin off is global."
Yeardye-Mellon's fascination with fashion started at an early age; she remembers wanting a pair of cowboy boots at the age of four on a school outing with older girls to Paris. Her mother Ann, a former Chanel model, wore Charles Jourdan and Gucci shoes, "which I wished she had kept for me", and her father Tommie Yeardye, son of an Irish immigrant, was a co-founder of the Vidal Sassoon empire. So she inherited the entrepreneurial spirit of her father, "my mentor" and the fashion nous of her mother, growing up in Los Angeles where the family moved when she was eight. "I really believe in the American dream that anybody can do anything and if you want to succeed you can do it." Wasn't she more privileged than most, I venture. The first hint of coldness comes in the well-rehearsed reply. "Taking money from my father caused me great anxiety because to lose your family money is not any easier than losing someone else's." Her two young brothers "have respect for what I have done".
She relishes the challenge of seeing the business grow. "Manolo [ Blahnik] had been going for 30 years and we have a lot of aspirant young clients whose mothers wear Manolos and want something different. Jimmy Choo is probably a bit younger, has a bit more sense of fun and is more fashion forward, and no matter where we open, in Hong Kong, China, New Delhi, the customer has the same attitude."
Her goal is to have 50 shops in the next couple of years. "There is a lot of potential left and we are a very young team. We are now looking also to branch out into sunglasses, swimwear, and jewellery. There are so many options."
A global business to manage, a divorce to sort out and a child to raise on her own, at present anyhow, will test her resilience in the years to come, but you get the feeling she can take it all in her well-heeled stride. The interview over, she jumps up with relief, shakes hands, throws on a black fox fur gilet and turning quickly on her high heels, disappears out the door to an overdue lunch date.
