The Cobbler

How I Disrupted an Industry, Fell from Grace, and Came Back Stronger Than Ever

Steve Madden, Jodi Lipper

• Publisher: Radius Book Group
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781635766912
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito aziendale
• Index: Business

The man behind the iconic shoe brand recounts his rise to the top, struggle with addiction, time in prison, and ultimate recovery in this candid memoir. Everyone knows Steve Madden's shoes, but few are familiar with the man behind the brand. Over the past thirty years, Madden has taken his eponymous shoe company from a fledgling startup he founded with a mere $1, 100 to a global, multibillion-dollar enterprise. But Madden's mistakes, from his battle with addiction to the financial shortcuts that landed him in prison, are as important to his story as his most iconic designs. In this raw, intimate, and ultimately inspiring book, Madden holds nothing back as he shares how he got where he is and the lessons he's learned along the way. From his unconventional hiring strategies to his slavish devotion to product, Madden offers a business perspective that is as unique as his style. In The Cobbler, readers are treated to the wild ride though Madden's meteoric rise, dramatic fall, and stunning comeback. But they will also walk away uplifted by a man who owns up to his mistakes, determined to give back and use his hard-won platform to create positive change.

vamp • the section of upper that covers the front of the foot as far back as the join of the quarter.

“Steve, you’ve got to check out this book.” I was pacing around the Steve Madden booth at the shoe show when a customer named Joe Carvelli approached me. Joe was a buyer for two shoe stores out in the Hamptons, and he was holding out a book. I set down the shoe samples I was holding and glanced at the title: Driven to Distraction.

“Very funny,” I told Joe, looking around to see how buyers were responding to our newest line. The booth was packed, which was always a good sign.

“No, I mean it, Steve,” he said, forcing the book at me. “You could’ve written this book . . . or it could’ve been written about you. Check it out, I’m telling you.”

“Alright, alright!” I tucked the book under my arm just to appease him. But part of me was intrigued. Driven to Distraction was the first popular book about ADHD. Before then, it was something only a few psychologists took seriously and that most people thought was either made up or only affected a few kids. Driven to Distraction shed new light on ADHD as a very real condition that affects many kids and adults too.

I spent that entire night tearing through the book, feeling like I was seeing myself fully for the first time. It was painful and reassuring at once to read the list of symptoms that I’d been blaming myself for my entire life: the sloppiness, the inability to keep track of important items, the temper tantrums, the negative impact that all of this has on relationships . . . check, check, check, check.

Of course, not everyone with ADHD is the same, but that book confirmed that I had a classic, undeniable case. The question wasn’t whether or not I had it but what, if anything, I was going to do about it.

I had started going to therapy at around the time I’d gotten sober, and I asked my therapist, who I still see today, what she thought about the possibility of me being diagnosed with ADHD. She agreed that I exhibited pretty much all the symptoms and arranged for me to get officially tested and diagnosed. But right before the appointment, I cancelled. It was clear to me that I had this thing, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to take medication if they ended up recommending it. So, what was the point of going through all that?

Let’s be clear about something: The meds for ADHD are amphetamines, which are addictive, mood altering, stimulating drugs. Now, I understand that for people with ADHD, amphetamines improve brain function in the cortex—for me it’s more like a vortex—so you can focus. It’s entirely possible that they would have helped me, especially when I was younger. In my efforts to self-medicate I had almost killed myself with drugs and alcohol. But now that I was clean, I didn’t want to take any drugs that might jeopardize my sobriety. Plus, I was keenly aware that ADHD, now that I had a name for it, had helped me just as much as it had hurt me.

Yes, it hurt me, primarily when it came to relationships, but in other ways too. Most of the time, I had trouble following conversations. I lost my concentration easily, missed appointments, and was always terrible at follow-up. Those were clearly all symptoms of ADHD. But on the flip side, I had the ability to hold half a dozen thoughts in my head at once, to follow the plotlines on all four of those screens in my mind. If I cut this down to one screen, maybe I would have been calmer and more focused, but I feared that I’d also be less effective.

Ideas were like fireworks going off in my mind every two seconds, a constant wave of thoughts about who I was going to hire next, how to boost sales, the designs for next year’s line, and on and on. Sure, this influx was frustrating and even debilitating at times. There were moments when I lamented why I had to be this way. But at other times, I saw how it was helping me do so many different things at once.

The market moves fast, and my constant shifting from one idea to the next helped me keep up. It often frustrated my team. As soon as we agreed to focus on wedges, I’d derail the conversation by bringing them a cowboy boot. But this helped us stay ahead of trends and keep up with fickle consumers. We became known for our speed to market, and to a great extent this was thanks to the intense speed of my thoughts and ideas.

To compensate for the downsides of my ADHD, I had found people who were amazing at handling the things that completely sidelined me. Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you to hire around your weaknesses, and I’d been doing this for years without even realizing it. I’d also created little workarounds so I could do my own job as effectively as possible.

I saw now that my cash payroll way back before Arvind properly organized the company was actually a coping mechanism for ADHD. That’s why I could never pay my bills. And my terrible driving record was in part due to distraction, even when I was sober. Hiring people like David to handle the driving, Arvind to manage our finances, and Wendy to organize the rest of the company took the pressure off of me and allowed me to focus exclusively on the ideas exploding in my mind.

Now that we had the capital we needed, I prioritized hiring more talented people so I was free to obsess over our products. One of these people was Rachelle Watts, a shoe designer who quickly became my chief collaborator and is still with the company. I first met Rachelle when she came to our booth at the shoe show. At the time, she worked for a company that accumulated information about hot shoes and then took that intel to Payless or J. C. Penney to sell them to a bigger market—a shoe spy.

I didn’t suspect anything because Rachelle fit right in with the other young women who worked for me with her downtown, rock-and-roll clothes and brassy dyed-red hair. She joined us for a cigarette right in the middle of our suite in the Plaza. “I love your energy,” she told me. “Your shoes are so cutting edge, and they’re my personal taste. I’d give anything to work for you.”

I hired Rachelle, and we quickly got in synch and began designing some great shoes together. We would sketch out an idea in the office, make the shoe right there in the Long Island City factory, and then place it in the SoHo store almost immediately. This allowed us to market-test our designs and see how the buyers reacted to the shoes before launching a larger-scale production.

Other times, I’d call Rachelle from the SoHo store and describe an idea I had for a shoe—something I had dreamed up or a twist on a style I had seen a young woman wear into the store. Then Rachelle sketched it out based on my description, had a sample made in the factory, and brought it to me at the store. I’d either love it or hate it. Over time, she got better at interpreting my harried descriptions, and the shoes she brought to the store more closely matched my initial vision. Our speed to the market became even more important later as the business grew, and it gave us an edge even in those early days of 1994.

Despite the benefits of having our own factory, I knew we could expand more quickly if we started importing shoes. I hired a consultant to help me find the right person to make this happen. “I need someone who really understands the import business,” I told him over steak frites at Barolo, an Italian restaurant on West Broadway right near the store. “Someone like John Basile.” John was a few years older than me and had been working at L. J. Simone for the past few years, rapidly expanding their import business after I’d left.

The consultant, Steve Drescher, earned his entire fee with his next sentence: “Then why not hire John Basile?” It had never occurred to me that I could do that! As much of a hustler as I was, I was still stuck thinking small in so many ways. The fear of poverty that I’d grown up with lived deep in my bones, and I often caught myself running around like Chicken Little, thinking the sky was about to fall.

My constant worry kept me on my toes and prevented me from making careless moves with the company. I was cautious, and that was a good thing, but it would have held us back if I didn’t have people around me to help me think bigger.

Hiring John Basile to run our wholesale business was one of the best decisions I ever made. We quickly rose to a new level as a company, and he was the main force behind this progress. But we argued constantly. I was a hard driver, but I still wanted to take conservative bets instead of placing large orders. John was the opposite. He was the kind of guy who could make a company huge or put it out of business in a single day. We were like the turtle and the hare, going to the mat almost on a daily basis about whether slow and steady or fast and furious would end up winning the race.

I admit that my conservative approach sometimes made it more difficult for us to be taken seriously. John traveled to Brazil and Mexico to find factories and set up accounts with them. Rachelle and I continued to design shoes in Long Island City, and then we sent our designs to those factories and imported the shoes they made. But when we went through the whole process of making a deal with a new factory and then placed an order for something like only sixty pairs of shoes, they were pissed off. And rightfully so. We did our best to sell them on the dream that eventually we would become the preeminent shoe designer for young people in the United States. But until that happened, we often had to jump from factory to factory when they got sick of our small runs.

It was worth it, though, to have our shoes made overseas, because their factories produced shoes in much higher quantities than we could make ourselves. This meant losing the bespoke nature of the shoes, which I found difficult at first. The shoes we made domestically had a rough, handmade feel that I thought was cool. When we got our first shoes in from overseas, they felt too perfect and uniform to me. But I knew that if we wanted to grow, we had no choice but to produce our shoes in bulk. I embraced it, and once I got used to the mass-produced shoes, I realized that this was how they were always meant to look.

Plus, producing shoes overseas made the entire transaction so much cleaner. Instead of worrying about paying for individual materials and labor and insurance, we just bought shoes and sold shoes. Simple.

But John and I were butting heads too often. My solution was to hire a young guy named Mark Jankowski who worked for one of our biggest clients in St. Louis, a company called Edison Brothers that no longer exists. Mark was a kindred spirit, one of the few guys my age I had met in the shoe business who could match my intense energy level. I knew he’d be a good fit for the company.

The problem was that I had to find a way to poach Mark from his employer without pissing them off and losing their business. Somehow, I convinced Mark to quit his job, assuring him that, after a few months, I would call his former employer and explain that he hadn’t been able to find a new job and that I wanted to help him out by offering him a position. I had every intention of following through, but I was actually surprised when Mark agreed to this plan.

Mark went ahead and quit. Soon after, before I officially hired him, he came with John and me on a scouting trip to Italy. We often went to Europe and South America, and my eyes were on the ground the entire time, looking at women’s shoes. We figured it would be safe for Mark to join us since no one from Edison Brothers would be there, but someone must have seen us together and ratted.

As soon as we got back to the States, I got an angry phone call from the head of Edison Brothers, cancelling all his orders. Edison Brothers was responsible for maybe a third of our profits, and just like that, they were gone. It was a devastating blow for a fledgling company. To this day, I never hesitate to remind Mark of how expensive he was.

Thankfully, another scouting trip soon after helped us recoup those lost profits, and then some. On one trip to northern Italy in 1994, I noticed a lot of women wearing these great leather penny loafers. Though loafers were a classic style that had been around for ages, there weren’t a lot of women in the United States wearing them at the time. I saw this as an opportunity.

I brought a few pairs of shoes home from Italy, and Rachelle and I immediately started working on adapting the designs to make them more in line with the quintessential Steve Madden style. We added a stacked heel and a slightly pointed, feminine toe that was reminiscent of the Marilyn. Then we sent the design for those penny loafers to our factory in Brazil, and they turned out beautifully.

Thanks to those shoes, over the next year or two we went from a hot shoe brand to the hot shoe brand. Every high school girl across the country had to have a pair of those penny loafers. We were still making shoes for rebel outsiders, but now the popular girls were wearing Steve Madden too. For our next line, we tweaked the style to make it even crazier, with a higher platform, a wider heel, and a big bump toe. It was less streamlined and more grunge. Teenage girls loved those shoes because they gave their school uniforms a big edge, and they went on to define 1990s style when they appeared in Clueless, Friends, and tons of other films and TV shows.

It was thanks to John that we could keep up with the insane demand for our shoes throughout this period. Despite our disagreements, we were equally obsessed with three things: product, speed, and sales. John was like me to another power. He taught me so much about the industry itself, and I was grateful for the opportunity to jump on his shoulders.

I had learned from my experience at L. J. Simone to bring John in and make him a partner. And I compensated him very well for his work and expertise. Yet, from the beginning, my relationship with John was strained beyond just our fights about the size of our orders. No matter how much autonomy or money I gave him, it was my company. There was no way around this, and as time went on, John grew more and more sensitive to this fact. He did all the work to set up an account with a factory, and then I’d insist on placing a more conservative order than he wanted, and he went crazy. But at the end of the day, it was my call.

I’ve dealt with this dynamic a lot in my career. My partners are there every day doing the work and putting in the long hours, and they sometimes resent it when it’s time to make the final call and it doesn’t go their way. I understand this, but at the same time I’m the one taking the risk, so I have to be the one making the calls. There is a plaque on my desk that says, “The Buck Stops Here,” and that is simply the God’s honest truth.

Every company needs a leader, but this doesn’t mean I undermine or micromanage my employees. Letting go has been a thirty-year-plus process. There are just some people who are never going to be comfortable working for a boss. I get it. I was like that too. But I’ve learned that when this dynamic crops up, it is best for that person to move on instead of sticking around being unhappy working for me.

Years later, I took a page out of the Hollywood book. When they fire a big executive from one of the studios, they often give him or her a production deal to stay on the lot and make their own movies. It’s a graceful way to exit and save face. So, I set John up with his own business and bought shoes from him, and we parted ways with no hard feelings.

At the time, though, John’s presence allowed me to keep my eye on the big picture and continue growing the company. Mark never really succeeded in his role of mediator, but he did become a critical team member in other ways.

In 1995, as our platform penny loafers were exploding around the country, we opened our second retail store farther uptown in New York City. Next, we wanted to start opening stores in shopping malls. In the New York area, Roosevelt Field, a shopping mall in East Garden City, was the hottest mall at the time, so of course we wanted to start there. The only problem was that they would not return our calls. Our shoes were hot, but our retail business was still too small for a landlord to be willing to take a bet on us. I had to find another way in.

One of our customers was a chain of stores called the Shoe Box that happened to owe us a ton of money for s...