Desiree has been a family friend for a long time. How were you able to get in contact with the advisory board? Was it through connections, or cold emailing? How did you get them to pay attention to you?
We started with a capsule collection where we only produced a thousand pairs of shoes. So I found this group of people who believed in me, thought I could really do this, and I went back to Richard with that approach. And then I met Chris West from Marvin Traub and Associates, and then Edgar Huber - he used to be at Kiehl’s and then Juicy and now he’s doing Land’s End.
#SARAH FLINT SHOES FULL#
The first person on my board was Desiree Gruber, who is the CEO of Full Picture and the executive producer of Project Runway. He said, “Okay, if you’re going to do this early, then you need to build a team and find some people who really believe in you and what you’re doing.” And one of the things he taught me was one of the most important things you can do is really collect the best of the best, know what you’re good at and what gaps you need to fill in. My dad is a venture capitalist, so I grew up at the dinner table talking about his ventures and the entrepreneurs he was working with, what they were doing right, what they were doing wrong. I was designing in the morning, picking up the kids in the afternoon. I went back to New York, and I got a job nannying. How did you convince him that you were the real thing? And we talked about the idea of returning to design where it starts with the shape of the last, which is the shoe form that it is built on, and the fit and the integrity of the materials.īut you say Siccardi gets a lot of offers from students to go into business with them. In school, he and I bonded immediately over this idea that a lot of young designers are just going for what’s the craziest and what’s essentially the biggest science experiment. He was able to get me into that factory, which was amazing, because in Italy, they look at young designers and they laugh. My teacher was a man named Richard Siccardi, who had been a pattern-maker at the factory, one of our factories now, that at the time was only Manolo Blahnik but now is Manolo, Oscar de la Renta, and Sarah Flint. So I enrolled Ars Sutoria, an amazing leather goods school, in Milan. And then after school, I felt like I had all of this design background but had never actually seen production. He came from Balenciaga and had a ton of amazing insight to give. I really learned a lot there and got to work with Darren Spaziani, who was their accessories guy. I switched to FIT so that I could just do footwear and I was interning at Proenza Schouler at the time, which was an amazing experience - especially because Jack and Lazaro have such a different aesthetic to my own. My grandmother lived in Paris while I was growing up, so I used to visit her there and make her take me to every shoe store, every atelier - it was amazing. And we lived in a very old colonial house, and she did not want her hardwood floors getting ruined by my tap shoes.
I used to try and wear my tap shoes to school because I loved patent leather. I’ve loved shoes since I was really little. I went to Parsons for a year and then realized I wanted to just do accessories, so I moved to FIT. I was doing buying for them and going to Parsons. Come back in two years.” But I came back in two weeks and kept coming back and badgering them, so eventually they gave me a job and I worked for them for all four years of high school and then into college when I moved to New York. I went in there and was like, “Give me a job, give me a job.” And they were like, “You’re crazy, you’re 15. Actually, when I was 15 I got a job at a luxury store. Well, shoes have been what I’ve wanted to do forever, really. She spoke to the Cut why she decided to launch her own label so early in her career and how she managed to get into the same Italian shoe factory as Manolo Blahnik. Now in her second season, Flint’s collection is already stocked at niche boutiques including Edon Manor in Tribeca, CeCe in New Orleans, and Curve in San Francisco. Her shoes are wearable - and speak, in some way, to how women really want to dress. A kitten heel, for instance, is piped with stingray a pointy-toe flat is decorated with an origami detail instead of a traditional bow. She crafts discreet heels and loafers that offer tiny, luxurious upgrades on the classics. But 25-year-old shoe designer Sarah Flint, who launched her namesake shoe business last year, has quickly amassed a following with her Über-functional designs.įlint’s shoes are a reaction to the overwrought, wildly complicated styles that currently populate the shoe racks at luxury department stores. It’s usually pretty difficult to make your mark as a young designer - especially when it comes to shoes, one of the most difficult items to produce.
0 kommentar(er)
