The Wisdom Wall

“So being public is not, you know, a desirable place to be unless you need public markets to finance and or run your business.”

“We needed to get smaller to get bigger. We needed to shrink the business step back. And we couldn't do that as a public company, partially because of my personal visibility, but as a private company, you can do those things.”

“And I also learned early on in my career that my goal is not to tell them what they should wear. It's to understand what they want and give it to them, but not how they expect it.”

“I often say in the, in the shoe business, everything you wear affects how you look, but shoes uniquely also affect disproportionately how you feel.”

“Nordstrom's, by the way, is very sophisticated in that regard. They're very careful. They're not going to build a following and then just hand it off to the vendor. If they can avoid it, they will.”

“you almost have to be prepared to write it off to look at it as a marketing and branding and initiative.”

“And then it became very clear that in that sort of a business model, if you do a lot of business, you, you make a ton of money. If you do a little bit, you make less, but you don't have all the overhead that we had in a, in a domestic shoe factory.”

“it's much easier to get credit from a factory that needs business in Italy than from an American bank that doesn't.”

“I couldn't take the chance of, of a made-up name, and finding out many, many months or years later whether it was acceptable or not through the trademark process, because we didn't have Google in those days. But I also knew you can usually get away with your own name, as long as it's your name.”

“and at the time I think 60 plus percent of businesses, probably even more today, Startup businesses fail in the first year, because people underestimate the amount of time it takes before there's a return on that investment.”

“So, and then in tough times, I've always said are the greatest opportunities because people, you know, when things are good, people want to just do what they're doing and do more of it. And it's only when things are difficult that they, that they looking to kind of re, um, reinvent and, uh, re-engage.”

“If every shoe store in America closed its doors tomorrow at 12 o'clock, hardly an American would go barefoot for 15 years.”

“But there were other designs, and if you don't see my designs, like a tree in the forest, I'm only as good as you know me to be. And if I'm not out there, then I don't exist.”

“I don't think people buy price. They buy value, and people learned a long time ago, you pay a dollar for something, you never wear it, you pay too much.”

“people don't buy brands today, I don't believe. I think people recognize today that they are their own brands, and every day they wake up and they curate their own brands on their social media. And they don't just curate the content, they also curate the audience. So, and I'm just an accessory, I'm just, I co-brand…”