#70: Fashion Icon Tamara Mellon on How to Turn Setbacks into Success

What do you do when you’re stuck with a broken business model? You dig deep and reach into an inner reserve of resilience, grit, and perseverance to pioneer a new range of solutions to make your struggling business thrive.

World-renowned fashion icon Tamara Mellon has become a paragon of such business tenacity and savvy. A co-founder of the luxury shoe brand Jimmy Choo back in 1996, Tamara left the company in 2011 with a reported $135 million payout. In 2013, she started her own self-named luxury label in New York, which sold through brick-and-mortar retailers like Neiman Marcus. After realizing that her new venture was using an outdated model of luxury, Tamara filed for bankruptcy and relaunched her eponymous brand in Los Angeles in 2016. The new chapter of Tamara Mellon brings the same top quality, Italian handcrafted shoes to women, but does so in a disruptive, direct-to-consumer model, selling only from her website for a fraction of the price of competing brands.

Tamara joins The IVY Podcast to reflect on her rollercoaster journey to founding her own brand, revealing it’s sometimes necessary to break rules and defy expectations to succeed in a competitive industry.