Salvatori Ferragamo didn’t make beautiful shoes, he made shoes that work with the human body beautifully.
Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.
[Rocket Cooling Ad]
Dave Young:
Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here along with Stephen Semple, and we’re talking about businesses and empires and how people grew their business and the decisions they made and all of those things. Hi, Stephen.
Stephen Semple:
Hey, David.
Dave Young:
I’m struggling here because you told me we’re going to talk about Ferragamo.
Stephen Semple:
Yes.
Dave Young:
And you’re not even going to understand this. I think it’s a clothing thing, a fashion thing.
Stephen Semple:
Yep.
Dave Young:
But let me tell you what comes to my mind, my adult 60-plus-year mind.
Stephen Semple:
Oh, this should be entertaining.
Dave Young:
I think back in the ’70s, I think, the University of Nebraska Cornhusker football team had a quarterback named Vince Ferragamo.
Stephen Semple:
Oh, there you go.
Dave Young:
He’s a pretty good guy. Pretty good quarterback. And that’s what I though of when you said Ferragamo.
Stephen Semple:
Okay. Not him.
Dave Young:
Fashion didn’t come into it. So it’s not him.
Stephen Semple:
Not him.
Dave Young:
So there’s another Ferragamo somewhere.
Stephen Semple:
There is, believe it or not.
Dave Young:
Oh, I’m all ears.
Stephen Semple:
Well, here’s the thing that’s kind of interesting about Ferragamo. They’re a pretty big player in the luxury brand space. They mainly do shoes, but it’s not as big as Gucci or Hermes or some of those other ones, but they still do like a billion dollars in sales. They’ve got, call it about 3,500 employees worldwide. They have 450 stores. 85% of their sales are shoes and their shoes for the most part run from about $750 US to about three grand.
Dave Young:
Okay. Are you wearing yours right now?
Stephen Semple:
I do not have a pair.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
Do not have a pair. But what’s really interesting, so the company was founded by Salvatore Ferragamo, who was an Italian immigrant. The company was started in 1923 when he opened the Hollywood Boot Shop in California where he became known as the shoemaker to the stars.
Dave Young:
I was thinking this would be an Italian company, but this is an American immigrant story.
Stephen Semple:
Well, except in 1927 he returned to Italy and he established the company in Florence. And in 1938, he purchased the historic Palazzo Spini Feroni, which remains the company’s headquarters. And this is kind of where my story starts. Dave, as you know, I was recently in Florence where I spent two weeks just wandering the city and I literally came across the Ferragamo headquarters, which is this stunning old building that’s just right off the banks of the Arno River in the center of the city. It’s this beautiful store that on the ground floor, there’s a store on the ground floor, there’s the offices above. It’s all been beautifully restored and a museum in the basement.
Dave Young:
Wow.
Stephen Semple:
So I had to visit the museum.
Dave Young:
And we missed the opportunity for you to just have me fly over and we’d do this live from the plaza.
Stephen Semple:
That’s it. We did miss this opportunity, but it’s always an opportunity for an update. So I had to visit the museum and this is where I learned the story of Salvatore Ferragamo, which actually turned out to be really fascinating. He is a very real Renaissance-style man, or he was. Engineer at heart, studied anatomy, had patents for other industrial machines. And this is what really made him different. In the early 1900s, most shoemakers believed their job was to make attractive shoes. That’s kind of how the industry leaned. And Salvatore believed his job was to make shoes that worked with the human body. So he did something different. He studied anatomy.
Dave Young:
I like this guy already.
Stephen Semple:
He attended classes… Yeah. He attended classes where he learned how the foot carried weight, how the arch functioned and why fashionable shoes were painful. Then he redesigned the shoes based upon what he discovered. And to me, that’s part of the Ferragamo story that’s worth listening to. It’s not just about the shoes, but it’s the moment where he stopped thinking like a shoemaker and started thinking like a customer. Now, this was in the museum, which is kind of a tribute to the business. So how true is that statement?
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
So the next day I’m standing in line to climb the 458 stairs to the top of the Duomo in Florence. So while standing in line, often what happens, people get talking about where are you from? How long you’ve been? What have you seen? And the lady in front of me, Susan, asked an interesting question, “Have you seen anything that has surprised you?” And I told her about the Ferragamo Museum. I said, “That surprised me. It was really cool, really, really well done.” And she immediately told me they were her favorite shoes and she had a couple pair.
Dave Young:
All right.
Stephen Semple:
I then asked her an important question. I said, “Susan, are they comfortable?” He said, “Surprisingly so.”
Dave Young:
All right, there you go.
Stephen Semple:
So I was in that moment sold, need to tell the story. In fact, went back to the museum, took more notes.
Dave Young:
Gotcha.
Stephen Semple:
So Salvatore Ferragamo was born in June 5th, 1898 in Bonito, which is just outside [inaudible 00:06:31], he was the 11th of 14 children.
Dave Young:
Wow.
Stephen Semple:
His parents were poor farmers with a small piece of land and much of the older children immigrated to the United States. So Salvatore’s sisters were being confirmed and by tradition in confirmation, you’re required to wear white shoes, which the Ferragamo family couldn’t afford. So Salvatore worked basically through the night making shoes for his little sisters. And he was like nine at the time. So basically a shoemaker was born.
Dave Young:
That’s amazing.
Stephen Semple:
So when his father died in 1912, the family situation got worse and shortly afterwards, Salvatore went to Naples to learn as much as he could about shoemaking. And when he returned to Bonito, he opened a small shoemaking business with six people, but his aspirations were larger than that. And he decided to do what many Italians at the time did, join his siblings in America. So March 24th, 1915, he basically sailed to New York where he landed at Ellis Island on April 7th. And from New York, Salvatore moved to Boston where he started working for the… God, the name of this company, you’re going to love the name of this company. The Thomas G. Plant Queen Quality Shoemaking Company.
Dave Young:
Amen.
Stephen Semple:
But they were doing these machine-made shoes and they didn’t have the same quality as the ones produced by hand. So he wasn’t really loving it, but he learned something. So he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where his brothers Alfonso, Girolamo and Secondino had settled. So in Santa Barbara, he opened his first custom shoe repair shop on 1033 State Street. And he was introduced to the world of cinema by his brother Girolamo, who ironed clothes for the American film company, and his cousin Jerry, who is a character actor in the serial, The Diamond from the Sky.
So through his brother, Salvatore got a boot order for early Western movies and this opened the doors to Hollywood. But in 1916, Salvatore attended anatomy classes. We talked about the anatomy classes at the University of Southern California where he discovered the secret of comfortable shoe was supporting the arch of the foot, all about the arch of the foot.
Now, life-changing thing happens for him. February 4th, 1920, he’s driving his car and he gets in a serious accident. His brother Alino dies and he actually almost lost his own leg. At Bard Memorial Hospital in Ventura, he decided to apply his learning of anatomy to designing a machine for limb traction to help-
Dave Young:
Really?
Stephen Semple:
Yes, to help in his own recovery. And this shapes his thinking. 1923, he transferred his business to Hollywood where he acquired the lease of the Hollywood Boot Shop at 6687 Hollywood Boulevard, just across from the Grauman’s Egyptian Theater. 1923, film director Cecil B. DeMille commissions Ferragamo to make footwear for The Ten Commandments. Other directors start to hire him for doing footwear and he starts collaborating with other directors such as David Wark Griffins, James Cruze, a whole bunch of them.
But February 1926, Ferragamo received an American citizenship and a passport. So he’s now an American citizen. And he decides, here’s what he wants to do. He wanted to expand production but maintain quality and style. And he decided he was going to handcraft shoes in Italy and distribute them through the Hollywood store to these American clientele that he was developing, because this also opened up him doing work with the movie stars, right?
So in 1926, he sets up Ferragamo Inc. And he leaves the United States and basically takes a liner to Rome and basically settles in Florence. And he gives birth to a company doing like 360 pairs of shoes a day thanks to 750 shoemakers. But here’s what he did. So remember he was working with the place that was manufacturing shoes?
Dave Young:
Uh-huh.
Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
[Using Stories To Sell]
Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.
Stephen Semple:
And he gives birth to a company doing like 360 pairs of shoes a day thanks to 750 shoemakers. But here’s what he did. So remember he was working with the place that was manufacturing shoes?
Dave Young:
Uh-huh.
Stephen Semple:
Well, he looked at that manufacturing process and he went, “Well, you could do the same thing but still handcraft them or you break everything into…
Dave Young:
Into pieces.
Stephen Semple:
… to pieces.
Dave Young:
This is the production line story.
Stephen Semple:
The production line story except applying it to craftsmen. Still a handcrafted, small run of shoes.
Dave Young:
Yeah, I love it.
Stephen Semple:
Because when they make their shoes, they don’t make 5,000 pairs. They make a small run of the shoes. But this human chain came from production. So he applied the assembly line approach he learned in America for making machine-made shoes and applied them to handmade shoes. 1920s onward Ferragamo experiments with all sorts of different materials. He was this real artisan who experimented with fish skin and straw and cork. And he patented lots of footwear such as the wedge. All sorts of different designs he comes up with. And in 1938, he rents a few rooms in the building he’s in today, establishes the workshop, and later he’s able to purchase the entire palace, which has been the headquarters ever since. And basically the Salvatore Ferragamo became a symbol of Italy’s reconstruction after the war through design and production.
And they did a lot of inventions, the invisible sandal where the upper’s made of nylon thread, which in 1947 he received the Neiman Marcus Award, which is basically one of the Oscars of the fashion industry. And it was the first time it was awarded to an Italian for footwear. They basically did big innovations with stiletto heels, all sorts of things.
Now there’s no question there weren’t setbacks along the way. 1929, the market crash hurt the company. ’33, they had to declare bankruptcy, but they came back. And he was a real Renaissance man. Among the patents held by Ferragamo, there’s many that have nothing to do with footwear, such as he has a patent on an offensive and defensive anti-aircraft system.
Dave Young:
Really?
Stephen Semple:
And a patent on the construction of Navy forts and a patent on a multiple launch torpedo.
Dave Young:
Holy cow. That’s amazing.
Stephen Semple:
Right? But the big thing that he talked about in his memoirs was he loved feet. He had this fascination with feet. He wrote in his memoirs, “I love feet. They talk to me. As I take them in my hands, I feel their strengths, their weaknesses, their vitality, or their failings. A good foot, its muscles firm, it’s arch strong is a delight to touch. A masterpiece of divine workmanship.” He doesn’t sound like an engineer, does he?
Dave Young:
No, but recognizing that there’s engineering going on, especially in your foot, it’s one of the most complicated parts of your body.
Stephen Semple:
Another thing he wrote in his memoirs was, “When I began studying human anatomy, I found my first clue to the problem in the distribution of weight of the body over the joints of the foot. I discovered the interesting fact that the weight of our bodies when we are standing erect drops straight down on the arch of the foot.” So when he studied foot mechanics, he was looking at the laws governing the way we walk, the architecture of the skeleton and how muscles function. And what he understood was how important weight distribution is between the center of the plantar arch and the ends of the foot, the heel and the toes, especially in motion, like that the foot provides joints and swivels and does all of this other stuff. So to support this complex structure, Ferragamo created this special steel shank inside of the shoe that allows the foot to move like an inverted pendulum is how he described it.
Dave Young:
Oh, wow.
Stephen Semple:
So he looked at how architects and builders of cathedrals use plumb lines to find the medial line and he applied that to the body to create this axis of equilibrium that sits right on the center of the plantar arch.
Dave Young:
Oh, that’s amazing. Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
And he had books and books and books on this in terms of how he was studying how the foot moves in standing and walking and things along that line. And his list of innovations went on and on and on and on. It was just really, really crazy. And as I said, when I looked at it, I went, “This guy is… He’s a Renaissance man. He’s an engineer. He’s an artist. He’s a philosopher.” He even had things where he talked about how there was these different personalities of women and how they interacted with their footwear.
Dave Young:
Sure.
Stephen Semple:
He created what we would call character diamonds where here’s their strength, here’s their weakness. It was amazing.
Dave Young:
Oh, he’s the kind of guy that if you walked past him, he could tell you exactly where your foot hurts, where your back hurts. Right?
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Dave Young:
He can see that anatomy. He can see the forces at work.
Stephen Semple:
Yes.
Dave Young:
Those kinds of people are rare and kind of cool to interact with.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And even his early advertising, much more avant-garde art than commercial advertising. He hired this futuristic artist, Lucio Venna, to create his logo and advertising posters. And if you look at them, they were not typical shoe ads. They were artistic and abstract and in some ways you weren’t even sure… They were really beautiful and cool and inspiring.
Dave Young:
That’s awesome.
Stephen Semple:
So you can now see why when I visited the museum and I’m reading all of this stuff that I got unbelievably fascinated. And then when I meet the woman who was like, “Oh yeah, no, the shoes are surprisingly comfortable.” I’m like, okay, I need to go back.
Dave Young:
I think you’d look fine in a nice wedge.
Stephen Semple:
There you go. There you go. I find the wedges ugly. I was actually disappointed he invented those. And then even afterwards, I went into the store and looked at the shoes and the shoes are absolutely beautiful. Stunning.
Dave Young:
Very cool.
Stephen Semple:
So the thing I found that was interesting to me, there was a couple of lessons here. And I find this is a really common reoccurring theme with a lot of the empires, not thinking like somebody from the industry, but thinking like the customer. And he followed his passion, but his passion was to solve a problem. Yes, he wanted to create beautiful shoes, but lots of people were creating beautiful shoes. What he wanted to create were beautiful shoes that were comfortable. And he applied all that engineering knowledge to fashionable shoes.
Dave Young:
Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
He was thinking like a customer and he changed the way we look at shoes, he changed the way they were engineered. And he also then changed the way handcrafted shoes are made. He looked at that mass manufacturing model, which didn’t appeal to him, but looked at it and said, “I can apply this to handcrafted shoes.”
Dave Young:
All right. What a great story. What’s really strange, it’s a reverse immigrant story. He immigrated to the US, became a citizen, and then went back to Italy to change the world.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Dave Young:
All right.
Stephen Semple:
Everything about this guy was fascinating. And there was even a thing where they were talking about when he passed away, his personal book collection and how it had philosophy in it and religion in it and engineering in it and books on art in it. Just again, all of this very much Renaissance thinking. If you think about people like Leonardo da Vinci, who’s from Florence, that’s what he was. He was an artist and an engineer.
Dave Young:
Yeah. Great story. So I’m going to bring this full circle to the Nebraska quarterback, Vince Ferragamo.
Stephen Semple:
There you go. Okay.
Dave Young:
I did a quick Google search while you were talking to see if they were related.
Stephen Semple:
Yes.
Dave Young:
And I don’t think they are because in 2016, the shoe company sued Vince Ferragamo for a trademark infringement. I don’t know the details. It was behind a paywall, but I got the gist of it from the headline that probably not the same family.
Stephen Semple:
Or from the branch of the family that everybody was like, “Those guys [inaudible 00:20:28].”
Dave Young:
Yeah. The black sheep. The ones that stayed in the US.
Stephen Semple:
Well, we sent them to Nebraska for a reason. They were supposed to just stay there.
Dave Young:
Well, I don’t know where he’s from. He’s probably recruited to Nebraska. Well, I appreciate the Ferragamo story. Great.
Stephen Semple:
I knew you would like it because it was just one of those ones where it was like this guy was a really interesting dude.
Dave Young:
Yeah. We’d loved to have hung out with that guy.
Stephen Semple:
That’s actually the thing. The more I read about it, this would be one of those people that if he were alive today, I would say I would want to sit down and have an espresso with this guy.
Dave Young:
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, trying to think of a good sign-off for a shoe company. Safe walking out there and we’ll see you next time on another episode of the Empire Builders Podcast.
Stephen Semple:
All right, thanks, David.
Dave Young:
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire Building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.
