Steve Madden launched his shoe business with just $1,100 in 1990; by 2026, the brand had become a global fashion name

Steve Madden started his shoe business in 1990 with $1,100 in the bank. By 2026, the brand was sold in more than 80 countries and had stores around the world.

A late-1990s profile of the company shows how it got there. It describes a designer who picked up ideas wherever he found them and moved faster than most of his competitors.

How Steve Madden built a global shoe brand from Queens

Madden dropped out of the University of Miami in 1976. He ended up selling shoes at a store on Long Island and eventually tried designing. In 1990 he went out on his own.

He had $1,100. The doorman at his Manhattan apartment building drove him from shoe store to shoe store, where he sold the platforms that became his trademark. The company’s own history places the start in a factory in Queens.

At the time of the profile, Madden was a recovering alcoholic who had been sober for a decade.

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Madden was in a Long Island shoe store when he noticed a 15-year-old shopper wearing a pair of his shoes. She had added a higher platform to the sole. “I immediately stole the idea,” he says.

Ideas came from odd places. During the interview he was distracted by a singer’s feet in an MTV video and asked whether she was wearing his shoes. Elevated loafers and similar styles, he says, gave the company a major lift over the previous three years. Sales for fiscal 1998 were $86 million.

Madden pushed out 10 to 15 new styles a week. About 55% of his products used the same basic sole, and new fabrics and colors changed the look.

Samples were made in a small factory at headquarters and tested in the company’s own stores. Only the fast sellers moved on to the assembly line.

The payoff was time. A new shoe reached stores in 40 days, against a usual manufacturing cycle of six months. That’s roughly a quarter of the time.

The company also turned its inventory eight times a year, while the industry managed four. In plain terms, stock sat for about 45 days instead of about 90.

What went wrong in 1995

That year the company failed to keep up with department store demands. It was hit with costly chargebacks and markdowns. Chargebacks are charges a retailer deducts from what it pays a supplier, usually over late or incorrect shipments. Markdowns are price cuts on stock that isn’t selling.

Earnings in 1996 fell 71%.

Madden hired a chief operating officer to set things right. By the time of the profile, he sold through 2,500 department and specialty stores and 45 of his own shops.

The company expected sales of $133 million, up 55%. That matches the $86 million from fiscal 1998.

Expected earnings were $9 million, up 65% from 1998, which implies about $5.5 million the year before. Sales is the total money coming in. Earnings is what’s left after costs. Nine million on $133 million works out to about 7 cents per dollar of sales, up from roughly 6 cents the year before.

The stock had doubled in 12 months to $13. It had dipped as low as $4 during the market slump of October 1998.

Teenagers, celebrities and fans who wrote about him

The designs ranged from pink-and-leopard-spotted platform sandals with five-inch heels to fat-soled canvas sneakers priced between $29 and $100. Teenage girls were the core buyers. The Dixie Chicks and actress Neve Campbell wore the shoes too, and MTV veejay Ananda Lewis said she owned 20 pairs.

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Fans built web pages about him. Some girls asked him to autograph their feet. His own site offered fashion tips, company-sponsored talent shows, a list of his appearances and, of course, shoes for sale.

Madden’s friends call him Chicken Little. He constantly questions his fashion decisions and revises ideas.

In the late 1990s he moved into accessories, outerwear and a line of licensed jeans. Revenues were small, but he saw the lines as a way to keep the brand cool. “I never think it’s going to be good enough,” he says.

Over the years the company has added apparel, handbags and fragrances. It has also done collaborations with Sydney Sweeney, Cardi B, and Kendall and Kylie Jenner.

Steve Madden’s memoir and documentary

Madden’s memoir, The Cobbler, and the Netflix documentary Maddman tell the story of his rise, fall and comeback.

The documentary Maddman: The Steve Madden Story runs 77 minutes and made its digital debut on December 1, 2017. The memoir, The Cobbler, came out three years later.

The Wolf of Wall Street came out in 2013 and set the documentary in motion. Madden said he had been waiting to tell his part of that story. He wanted to do it while he could still remember the facts.

The director, Ben Patterson, already knew the company. He had done marketing and advertising work for it since 2009.

About the film

It begins with his college partying and the drug use that followed. Then it moves through his early jobs at Jildor and LJ Simone, where he learned the trade. After that come the $1,100 start-up and two hit styles, the Marilyn and the Marylou.

The company went public with a single store, in SoHo. Stratton Oakmont sold the stock, pitching it on the strength of his Mary Lou shoe. The offering brought Stratton’s illegal dealings to the FBI’s attention, and Madden was indicted.

The film has its own explanation. It blames his naivety and his trust in a childhood friend connected to Stratton Oakmont. That’s Madden’s account, not a court finding.

He served time at Coleman penitentiary. Patterson had no footage from inside, so the team used crudely drawn animation.

According to the film, Madden’s business instincts came with him. He became a kingpin in the “mackerel economy,” where inmates traded the fish like cash.

Work officially began in 2014 and kept stopping and starting around his schedule. During that time, his mother and brother died, and his marriage ended.

Patterson says one conversation sits at the center of the film. Madden admitted he still feels like a fraud and fears the day someone tells him he’s failed.

He also built a new network after prison. He worked with former inmates through the Doe Fund. One of them, Vern Neely, appears in the film and now runs his South Florida operations.

The memoir

Madden wrote The Cobbler in 2019. It was released in 2020, at the height of COVID-19. The Radius Book Group edition is dated October 13, 2020, and runs 236 pages.

Jodi Lipper, a ghostwriter and book consultant, is credited as co-author. Madden narrates the audiobook himself.

A later edition adds a prologue and epilogue about how he and the company got through the pandemic and recovered a second time.

The publisher says his addiction and the financial shortcuts that sent him to prison are as important to the story as his best-known designs. It also points to business lessons, including his unusual hiring methods and his intense focus on the product.

That’s the publisher’s description.

The film, by Patterson’s own account, is closer to a portrait of a tycoon who happens to sell shoes.

The documentary reached Netflix on January 1, 2018.