How A Poor Malaysian Boy Created Jimmy Choo

The year is 1996. A woman walks into a cramped workshop tucked inside a converted Victorian hospital in East London. The hallway smells of old stone and new leather. The floors creak with every step. Scraps of silk, calfskin and suede are piled on every surface like treasure that has not been sorted yet. The windows are small and high, the kind that let in light but not much of the world outside. And behind a workbench so worn it might have come with the building sits a small, quiet Malaysian man, moving a needle through leather with the focus precision of someone who has been doing exactly this since he was 11 years old. That man's name is Jimmy Choo. And the woman who just walked through the door is about to change his life forever, though not entirely in the way he will imagine. Here is what you need to know before we go any further. In the years that follow this meeting, the name Jimmy Choo will become one of the most recognisable luxury brands on earth. It will be worn by Princess Diana. It will appear on Oscar night, on red carpets from Los Angeles to Cannes, on the feet of Madonna and Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez. It will be referenced in a Kanye West song. It will be the centrepiece of a scene in Sex and the City, so powerful that an entire generation of women will absorb Jimmy Choo as shorthand for a certain kind of aspiration. Beautiful, expensive, slightly dangerous. The brand that starts in this hospital workshop will eventually sell for 1.35 billion dollars. But here is the part that nobody leads with. The man whose name is on every single shoebox, the craftsman who built this art form with his own bare hands, who stitched leather in Hackney when nobody was watching, who earned the trust of the Princess of Wales one handmade pair at a time, will not be the one who gets to keep the company. He will sell his stake. He will watch his name become a holding company asset. He will spend years as a footnote in the story of his own brand. And yet, that is not the end of his story, not even close. How does a boy born into poverty in a small Malaysian island city, the son of a cobbler who ran his trade from the front room of a modest shop house, end up dressing the most photographed woman on the planet? How does he lose control of a billion-dollar empire that bears his name and still manage to leave a legacy that outlasts the acquisition? And what does it mean? What does it really mean when the thing you built becomes bigger than you are? This is the story of Jimmy Choo. And it starts, as so many extraordinary stories do, not with money or opportunity or a single brilliant idea, but with a child watching a parent work. Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia. The 1950s. The city sits on the northeastern tip of Penang Island, separated from the Malaysian peninsula by a narrow strait that has made it a crossroads for centuries. Arab traders came here. The British made it a crown colony. Chinese merchants built their shop houses in rows along streets that still carry their names. Indian workers brought temples and spices. The result is a city of layered cultures, layered flavors, layered histories. A place where you can hear three languages in a single street market and eat food that reflects the migrations of two centuries in a single sitting. It is not a wealthy city by any measure that the outside world would recognize. But it is alive in a particular way, alive with craft, with commerce, with the particular energy of a place that has always had to make something out of what it has. Chu Kae Fik ran a shoe shop from the front room of the family home. He was a cobbler and a shoemaker both. Someone who repaired what existed and also created what did not. Every morning he opened the shutters. Every morning he sat at his workbench with his tools arranged around him, and he began. There was nothing romantic about it, not in the way the word artisan has come to mean something romantic in a later age. This was work. This was the work that fed the family. This was what a man with skill and no other options did with his days. Jimmy Chu Yang Keat was born on November the 15th, 1948, the second of 11 children. The family was not destitute, but they were careful. Money was allocated, not spent freely. Education was valued, but not guaranteed. When necessity called, school could wait. The world Jimmy grew up in was one where everyone contributed what they could, where skills were not optional extras, but economic necessities, where the ability to make something with your hands was not a hobby, but a form of survival. Every afternoon after school, the young Jimmy came home not to play, not to rest, but to watch. He positioned himself at the edge of his father's workbench, and he observed. The way a piece of leather was selected, held up to the light to check for flaws, run between the fingers to assess its weight and softness. The way, alas, the wooden form shaped like a foot, gave the shoe its structure before the leather was even touched. The way a pattern was measured and cut, how the pieces would be assembled, how stitches were placed and spaced and tensioned so that the finished shoe would hold its shape for years. His father did not narrate any of this. He worked. Jimmy watched. When I first started, my father wouldn't let me make a shoe, Jimmy would recall decades later in an interview. Instead he said, sit and watch, sit and watch. For months and months I did that. There is a whole philosophy of education in this instruction. You do not start by doing, you start by seeing, really seeing, with full attention, until what you are observing begins to live in your hands without you having to think about it. It is an ancient method, it is also a profoundly effective one. By the time Jimmy Chew was 11 years old, he had made his first complete pair of shoes, not practice pieces, not an exercise. A real pair, leather slippers, hand-stitched, cut and shaped to fit the feet of his mother. He presented them to her, she put them on. His father looked at the work without saying much, but the nod that followed was worth more than any formal assessment. In that household, being seen was its own form of praise. But Penang in the late 1950s and through the 1960s was not a place that could hold Jimmy Chew's ambition indefinitely. The family's financial pressures were real and constant. School became a luxury that could not always be afforded. Jimmy dropped out before completing his primary education, not because he was uninterested, not because he was incapable, but because the circumstances of his life simply did not allow for the conventional path. This is worth pausing on. The man who would go on to receive an honorary doctorate and open his own fashion academy in Mayfair, the man who would be awarded an Order of the British Empire by the Queen and honoured with the title of Dato by the Malaysian royalty, never finished primary school. When people speak about barriers to success, they sometimes mean structural disadvantages that make the climb harder. Jimmy Chew was not climbing with a lighter pack, he was climbing without shoes. And yet, something in him was already formed in a way that formal education cannot easily shape. He understood craft from the inside out. He understood what it meant to take a raw material and transform it into something that served a human body, something fitted and functional and, if you were very skilled, beautiful. He knew the difference between a well-made shoe and a poorly made one, in a way that most people never learn, because most people never have to. It was in his hands, it was in his eyes, it was the inheritance his father had given him. Sitting in that front room workshop in Georgetown, saying nothing, just working. He was going to need it all. In the early 1980s, Jimmy Chew arrived in London. He was in his early 30s, his English was limited, his savings were thin. The city received him the way London has always received young people who arrive with ambition and no connections, with complete indifference. Nobody in the fashion industry was waiting for him, nobody was holding a door open. But he had a destination. Cordwainers Technical College, in the East End, in Hackney. It was, and remains, one of the most prestigious shoemaking and design schools in the world, though its reputation operates in a relatively narrow professional circle. The name comes from the medieval guild of Cordwainers, craftsmen who worked with new leather to make shoes, not cobblers who repaired existing footwear. Cordwainers made things that had never existed before. The distinction was ancient and intentional, and it mattered to Jimmy Chew in a way that was almost personal. He enrolled in 1980, and almost immediately, something shifted in him. For the first time in his life, he had access to industrial machinery, to a range of materials he had never been able to afford or source in Malaysia, to teachers who understood the technical vocabulary of his craft at the highest level. The college gave him what Penang could not, not the will to make shoes, which he already had, but the technical knowledge to make them at a level where the world would take notice. Without the Cordwainers, I would not be here talking to you today, he said years later. It is a statement so plain and direct that it is easy to miss how much it contains. This is a man who had made his first pair of shoes at 11, who had spent years watching a master craftsman work, who had a lifetime of practical knowledge already woven into his muscle memory. And he still credits the college as the turning point, because craft at the level he was reaching for requires more than inherited skill, it requires understanding why things work, not just that they do. He graduated in 1983, and then he did something that almost nobody in his position would have had the confidence to do. He opened his own shop. Most graduates look for employment. Most people who arrive in a foreign country with limited language and limited capital look for the safety of a salary. Jimmy Choo looked for space. In 1986, he found it in the most unlikely of places. The Metropolitan Free Hospital in Hackney, a Victorian institution that had closed its wards and been converted into studio and workshop space for artists and craftspeople, had a room available. It was not glamorous. There were no aspirations of glamour in it. It was four walls, high ceilings, cold floors, and enough room for a workbench. He rented it. He set up his tools. He opened for business. His operation was entirely bespoke from the beginning. Custom shoes, made entirely by hand, fitted personally to each client. There was no ready-to-wear component, no off-the-shelf product, nothing that could be replicated without Jimmy Choo sitting down with you and learning the shape of your foot. Every pair was a different problem. Every client was a different conversation. This was the opposite of scale, and he knew it, and he did not care. He was making the kind of shoes he believed in. Word began to spread, the quiet, persistent word of mouth that moves through networks of discerning people who know each other. One satisfied client mentioned him to another. A tailor recommended him. A stylist noted his name. The quality was visible, undeniable, the kind that creates its own reputation without any assistance from press or advertising. Then came 1988. Vogue magazine, the British edition, the definitive bible of fashion in that country, and one of the most influential publications in the world, ran an eight-page spread featuring Jimmy Choo's work. Eight pages, in Vogue. For a one-man operation working out of a disused hospital in East London, this was not an opportunity. It was a seismic event. It was the moment when the fashion world collectively looked at Jimmy Choo and decided he was real. The orders began to come in from a different level of client entirely, and somewhere in the early 1990s, a woman named Diana, the Princess of Wales, the most photographed person on the planet, started to pay attention to his shoes. Princess Diana wore Jimmy Choo to her first public performance as a royal. Pale blue satin slingbacks. She had found him through the networks of high society that operate in London's elite circles, and she kept finding him because he gave her exactly what she was looking for. Shoes that were extraordinary without being theatrical. Shoes that understood the weight of public life. Shoes that fitted perfectly because they were made for her feet and no one else's. Jimmy Choo visited Kensington Palace to discuss designs. He sat with the princess and talked through her schedule. A state visit here, a hospital opening there. An international trip where the photographs would be studied by a billion people. She was, he has consistently said, unlike any expectation. Extraordinarily down to earth. She never complained about fit. She never said a shoe was too tight or too uncomfortable, which, from someone who wore shoes in front of the world's cameras for hours at a time, was itself a testament to the quality of the fit. She sent him handwritten thank you notes after his visits to the palace. Princess Diana wasn't like other royals, Jimmy Choo has recalled. She'd try and carry my things for me. That image, the Princess of Wales reaching for a shoemaker's bag, contains everything about why the relationship between them worked. She was interested in the human being, not just the product, and he brought to her the same interest in return. The shoes they made together spanned nearly a decade. Black velvet flats with a bow at the toe, two-tone heels in green and navy, pale satin for evenings, practical elegance for days when the cameras would find her, and she needed to be completely, quietly right. Each pair was a conversation between a craftsman, who understood what shoes could do, and a woman who understood better than almost anyone alive what it meant to be looked at. In the summer of 1997, Diana placed her final order with Jimmy Choo. Flat pumps in V-cut Italian silk file, the fabric sourced from Joel & Sons, the Queen's own fabric supplier, ordered in especially for the commission. Jimmy Choo had the shoes finished. They were waiting. Diana died in Paris on August 31st, 1997. The shoes were never collected. That pair of shoes has stayed with Jimmy Choo for nearly 30 years. He has spoken about them in interviews with a quiet directness that does not reach for meaning. He simply states the fact and leaves the listener to feel its weight. It is a small, intimate grief wrapped inside a much larger one, the last thing she never received. But even as this was unfolding, something else was already in motion, something that would prove, in its own way to be a different kind of loss. The woman who walked into Jimmy Choo's Hackney workshop in 1996 was Tamara Mellon. She was 27 years old, the daughter of Tom Yeardie, a former Hollywood stuntman who had co-founded the Vidal Sassoon empire, and she worked as an accessories editor at British Vogue. She had access, through her position, to everything that was interesting in fashion, and she had decided that what was most interesting was the man making shoes in a converted hospital in East London. Mellon's proposition was clear and commercially sound. Jimmy Choo was producing extraordinary work, but the operation was fundamentally limited by its bespoke nature. Every pair required his personal time, his personal attention, his personal presence at the fitting. There was no way to grow it without multiplying him, which was obviously impossible. What she proposed was a ready-to-wear line, manufactured in Italian factories to a standard that would justify the Jimmy Choo name, sold in retail boutiques, priced at the upper end of the accessible luxury market. Her father provided the initial capital. Sandra Choi, who was Jimmy Choo's niece by marriage and had been working alongside him since 1989, would join the new company and eventually take on the design direction for the ready-to-wear line. The brand would carry Jimmy Choo's name, his story, his identity as a craftsman. The operation would be Tamara Mellon's. The first boutique opened in May 1996 on Motcombe Street in Belgravia, a neighborhood where the architecture and the rents both communicate a clear message about who is expected to shop there. The shoes sold. They sold well. Within a remarkably short time, the brand was accelerating in ways that neither the Hackney workshop nor any bespoke operation could ever match. But underneath the acceleration, something was becoming clear that had perhaps not been fully examined at the outset. This was Tamara Mellon's machine. The creative direction, the retail strategy, the investor relationships, the brand positioning. These were her domain. Jimmy Choo, the craftsman, the man who had spent 40 years learning to make shoes by hand with the patience of a medieval guild member, was not built for this world. The boardroom was not his workbench. The investor presentations were not his vocabulary. By 2001, five years into the partnership, something had broken. The specifics of what happened between the two partners in those years are not fully on the public record. What is on the public record is the outcome. In November 2001, Jimmy Choo sold his 50% stake in the company. The reported figure was 30 million dollars. 30 million dollars is, by any ordinary measure, a life-changing sum. For a man who had arrived in London as a young Malaysian immigrant with almost nothing, who had built his career one bespoke pair at a time, in a room that used to hold patients, it represented a financial transformation that would have been unimaginable to the boy in Penang watching his father work. But the full weight of what happened only becomes clear when you understand what he was selling. He was not selling a shareholding in an abstract financial vehicle. He was selling his name, his identity as a craftsman. The word Jimmy Choo, the specific words, the exact name his parents gave him, the name that had appeared in eight pages of Vogue, that had been on the feet of Princess Diana, that had become synonymous in the minds of a rapidly growing consumer base with the highest level of luxury footwear, those words now belonged to other people. He had sold the right for a succession of private equity firms and eventually a multinational fashion conglomerate to use his identity as their commercial asset. He was 53 years old. He no longer owned himself in that particular way. What happens to a craftsman when the company that bears his name moves on without him? This is not a question that business journalism asks very often, because business journalism tends to follow the money and the money went with the brand. But it is the more interesting question. The brand continued. And it continued at a pace and scale that would have been impossible to predict from that Hackney workshop. In 2001, Phoenix Equity Partners came in. In 2004, Lion Capital acquired a controlling stake. In 2007, Tower Brook Capital Partners bought the company. In 2011, Labolux, a division of JAB Holdings, the Luxembourg investment vehicle behind some of the world's most significant luxury and consumer brands, purchased Jimmy Choo for approximately 500 million pounds. That same year, Tamara Mellon departed, selling her stake for a reported 135 million dollars. In October 2017, Michael Kors Holdings Limited completed its acquisition of Jimmy Choo PLC for $1.35 billion. The company subsequently renamed itself Capri Holdings, a group that now includes Michael Kors, Versace, and Jimmy Choo as his three principal brands. Jimmy Choo alone now generates revenues approaching 600 million dollars annually. The trajectory of those numbers is staggering. A business that started in a rented room in a disused hospital, a business that in its early form was essentially a single craftsman and his workbench, became a billion dollar asset. That does not happen by accident. And it does not happen without foundation. The foundation was Jimmy Choo the man, the story, the craft, the name. Everything that was built on top of that foundation, the Italian manufacturing, the retail rollout, the private equity investment, the Hollywood placements, the marketing, was only worth what it was worth because of the foundation beneath it. Think about what made the Jimmy Choo brand unstoppable in its ascent through the late 1990s and the 2000s. It was not just the shoes. The shoes were good, excellent in fact, but the luxury market has many excellent shoes. What made Jimmy Choo different was a story that nobody could manufacture because nobody had made it up. A boy from Penang, a father's workshop, a Victorian hospital in East London, Princess Diana's feet. That story was realness and its realness gave the brand a gravity that money alone cannot buy. When the brand reached Hollywood, it arrived with that story already attached. The Sex and the City effect, which began in the early 2000s, was not an accident of casting. The writers used Jimmy Choo's shoes as shorthand for a particular kind of aspiration because the brand had already established in the cultural imagination what that aspiration looked like. Carrie Bradshaw didn't just want shoes, she wanted the idea that those shoes carried, the idea of a craftsman in East London, a pair of hands that made things perfect, a name that meant something beyond commerce. Princess Diana's connection to the brand continued to In 2017, as the biopic Spencer entered cultural conversation, and Diana's image was reassessed by a new generation, the connection between her and Jimmy Choo was rediscovered and amplified. Journalists wrote about the pale blue satin slingbacks, about the unfinished shoes in Italian silk veil, about the handwritten notes she sent to a workshop in Hackney. These were not press releases, these were true stories that no amount of marketing spend could have produced, because they had happened between two real people a quarter of a century earlier. Meanwhile, Jimmy Choo himself was not disappearing, he was doing what he had always done, working. After selling his stake in 2001, he continued for a time to contribute to the brand he had helped launch. But increasingly, his energy went back to its original form. Bespoke couture work, handmade shoes, clients who came to him specifically because they wanted something that a factory, however skilled, could not produce. He operated his personal couture line, making shoes the way his father had taught him to make them, with full attention and full hands. In 2002, the year after he sold his stake in the company, Queen Elizabeth II awarded him an Order of the British Empire, an OBE, for services to the fashion industry. The timing is worth noting. He had just divested from the commercial empire that bore his name, and the British state chose that moment to formally recognize what he had contributed. The honor was not for the business transaction, it was for the craft. Malaysia recognized him too. The Sultan of Pahang had conferred the title of Datuk on him in 2000. The Penang state government followed with its own Dato Award, acknowledging a son of the island who had walked out into the world and made the world look at Penang differently. A boy who had left without much and returned, not in person, but in reputation, having put his hometown on the map of international fashion. In 2021, Jimmy Choo opened the JCA London Fashion Academy in Mayfair, his own institution, a school for young designers, with a particular focus on the handmade, on the technical, on the kind of knowledge that cannot be learned from a screen or a manual. But only from a teacher who has the skill living in their hands. He also opened a Hounslow outpost specifically to reach emerging talent who might not have access to the resources that Mayfair represents. He became ambassador for footwear education at the London College of Fashion, the institution that now encompasses Cordwainers, the school that had formed him 40 years earlier. He had gone from student who barely spoke the language to ambassador of the institution. The circularity of this is not lost on him. In 2023, a prestigious scholarship for MA students at the London College of Fashion was named the Cordwainers Dato Jimmy Choo MA Awards, his name attached to the opportunity that he himself had once needed and been fortunate enough to find. If you've learned a craft from your parents and mentors, even studied abroad, he said in a 2024 interview, it would be a waste not to pass it on. This is not a man performing generosity for the cameras. This is a man who understood from childhood that knowledge only has value if it moves forward, that the chain from his father's workbench to his own hands, to the students in his academy, is the real story of what he has built. If you don't create something new and not love what you do, he has said in numerous interviews over the years, it is very difficult to succeed. He has been saying this in different forms for decades because he has tested it against his own life from every possible angle, At 77, he is still at the workbench, still teaching, still making, still in conversation with the materials and tools that have been his language since he was a child in Georgetown, watching his father's hands move. Consider what this story actually contains. A boy in Penang in the 1950s learns a craft by watching, in silence, for months. He drops out of school. He crosses the world with almost nothing. He builds something extraordinary in an East London workshop that nobody visits on purpose. He earns the trust of the most photographed woman in the world, one handmade pair at a time. He co-founds a company that becomes a global luxury brand. He loses control of it. He watches his name sell for 1.35 billion dollars. And then, and this is the part that deserves the most attention, he keeps going. He keeps making shoes. He keeps teaching. He opens a school. He returns to the institution that once gave him the chance he needed. And he gives it back. He does not fade into wealthy retirement. He does not become bitter. He does not spend his remaining years explaining to interviewers how he was wronged. He does what craftsmen do. He continues the work. In an industry that is permanently chasing the next thing, that forgets its own history, with an efficiency bordering on contempt, Jimmy Choo is something genuinely rare. A reminder that the thing underneath the brand, the actual craft, the actual skill, the actual human knowledge carried in the hands of a specific person, is the irreplaceable thing. The brand can be sold. The name can be trademarked. The boutiques can be opened and closed and refitted. But the knowledge of how to make a perfect shoe, the knowledge that begins with a child watching a parent work and ends only when the craftsman stops, cannot be acquired by any company at any price. There is a pair of shoes in Italian silk faille, V-cut, flat sold, made for a woman who never came to collect them. They represent something that no financial transaction has ever quite captured about Jimmy Choo. The care, the completeness, the fact that he finished them anyway, even though no one would see them. Because that is what you do when the work matters to you. You finish it. The boy from Penang sat and watched until he understood. Then he picked up the tools. Then he built something that the world recognized as beautiful. Then he lost the building and kept the tools. Then he kept building. That is the legacy of Jimmy Choo. Not the billion dollar sale price. Not the red carpet appearances. Not the brand that now operates out of Capri Holdings executive offices. The legacy is simpler and more durable than any of that. The idea that mastery, built slowly and honestly, is a form of wealth that no market can fully price and no acquisition can take away.