Birth of A Shoe Company
Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc. is an American fashion house founded in 1982 by Kenneth Cole. Wanting to preview his line of shoes at Market Week at the New York Hilton, but unable to afford the purchase of a hotel room or showroom to display his items, Kenneth Cole inquired about parking a trailer two blocks from the Hilton Hotel. When discovering that permits for trailers were only granted to utility and production companies, Cole changed the name of his company from Kenneth Cole Incorporated to Kenneth Cole Productions, and applied for a permit to film the full-length film, "The Birth of a Shoe Company". In two and a half days, Kenneth Cole Productions sold forty thousand pairs of shoes, while chronicling the beginning of the company on film.
In 1994, Kenneth Cole went public, and has been included on Forbes annual list of 200 Best Small Companies four times.
Kenneth Cole designs men's and women's footwear, men's and women's clothing, and also accessories under the Kenneth Cole Reaction Line. Overall, Kenneth Cole Productions sells clothing and accessories under the following lines: Kenneth Cole New York, Kenneth Cole Reaction, and Unlisted. The company now operates over 90 retail and outlet stores worldwide, and sells in catalogs and websites. Kenneth Cole controls almost all of the voting rights and 45% of the company.
Read more about this topic: Kenneth Cole (designer)
Famous quotes containing the words birth of, birth, shoe and/or company:
“A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, forseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.”
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“Now it is time to call attention
to our bed, a forest of skin
where seeds burst like bullets.
We are in our room. We are in
a shoe box. We are in a blood box.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“We noticed several other sandy tracts in our voyage; and the course of the Merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by its yellow sand-banks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. Lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. Railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)