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This is the time of year when all of us in the UAE start looking forward to the Emirates Airline Literature Festival. The festival will be held at Dubai’s InterContinental Festival City and Mohammed Bin Rashid Library from January 31st to February 6th this year. You will once again have the opportunity to hear from national and international authors, including entrepreneurs who have decided to share their experiences in the business field with the whole world.
One notable author is British designer Sophia Webster. She promises to talk about her entrepreneurial journey as a shoe designer and the owner of her business. But unlike many women leaders in business, Webster doesn’t talk about her self-limiting beliefs. “These are not so much my personal experiences,” Webster explains. “My inner voice has always been very loud, and I tend to go forward with ideas with a fair amount of conviction, and I tend not to be afraid of failure. I think it’s about fighting against self-inhibiting kinds of emotions. It’s so important to document your story authentically, so you create an archive of what you’ve done and own it 100%. No one can take your history away from you. .”
What should be clear here is that it is based on this confidence that Webster shares her own story in her first book. Oh my goodness, I love your shoes!, she plans to promote the work at this year’s Emirates Airline Literature Festival. This book describes how her eponymous brand became internationally renowned for its unique, creative and uplifting designs, making Webster the first woman to win the prestigious Vogue Fashion Fund. Detailed explanation of what led me to become a shoe designer. All of this serves as unique proof of her confidence that Webster clearly has. After all, that led her to building a brand that eventually included Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and the Kardashians among her clients. But before she goes into detail about how she built her eponymous line of shoes, Webster shares the specific moment when her hard work and her determination finally paid off. remember. “When I stood in my first retail showroom after launching my brand at the age of 26, I remembered working as a waitress serving canapés at a Stella McCartney event just a few years earlier, and I wanted to be just like her. “I wanted to run a company,” Webster said. “As soon as I found out my shoes were in stores, I made sure to go to the Net-a-Porter website, scroll down the list of designers, and find my name. It was right next door! It was a really big moment for me.”
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Webster works with her husband and business partner Bobby Stockley to distribute the brand through more than 200 retail stores around the world.
After receiving degrees from the London College of Fashion (Cordwainers College) and the Royal College of Art, Webster worked for various shoe companies, eventually working with British shoe designer Nicholas Kirke. She worked as Wood’s assistant designer for two years before launching her own brand. “Before starting the company, I grew up in the workforce at a time when the fashion industry was unchecked and a hustle culture was the norm,” Webster says. “But owning a business and taking on responsibility means I’ve had to abandon some of these ways of working while interning and working as a design assistant. We had to think not only about how we could achieve our goals, but also how we could achieve them. Collectively, we had to think about how things could be operationally effective and where the team felt like they were part of something bigger. We were able to do this with our team in a sustainable way.”
The Sophia Webster brand is characterized by designs that emphasize femininity, including a wide variety of shoes from heels to flats, as well as handbags and accessories.
“When someone unboxes my shoes and puts them on, I want them to smile,” Webster says. “When I launched in 2012, a minimalist aesthetic was prevalent in the fashion world. What I wanted to offer was completely different. Color, storytelling, and above all, joy. I think the market was ready for that. “I’ve matured. I still really aim to bring a smile to the person who wears them, but I’m also trying to make shoes easier to accessorize. .The fun and detail may be in the texture and embellishments, but now it’s more often the color of the shoes.”The shoes will be solid. ”
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The brand’s shoes are synonymous with fairy tale-inspired details such as patent leather butterflies, velvet bows and glitter soles.
Another hallmark of the Sophia Webster brand is that its shoes are made with fairy tale-inspired details such as patent leather butterflies, velvet ribbons, and glitter soles. For Webster, it’s her signature Chiara silhouette, her 3D butterfly-winged sandals, that her brand paved the way for her success. “I had a desire to start my own brand, so I knew I had to come up with a silhouette that was really memorable. And when I ended up selling this shoe in a really bright color, it was a huge hit on social media. It became a hot topic, probably because it is very photogenic and Instagrammable,” she explains. “Over time, we’ve evolved butterfly wings in all sorts of ways. I’ve used angel wings, ballet shoes with wings on either toe, heels, handbags, and butterfly motifs. We designed “mini-me” children’s shoes. The product naturally gathers its own fans, and I think that’s because the butterfly is such an iconic creature. ”
Webster is also known for keeping up with trends, including introducing two new collections to the series in 2020 that focus on positive impact and audience diversity. These include an upcycled collection, which repurposes surplus material from past seasons to create new shoes, and an extended size collection, which includes creating a selection of key styles up to his EU46/US15.5/UK13 sizes. It is included. Therefore, with the latter, Sophia His Webster became the first luxury shoe brand to introduce this wide size range. Webster says he works very closely with the design and communications teams on the process of building the collection. “I give creative direction to her four designers, who create shoes, handbags and children’s products. Usually a season she makes three drops, plus special projects,” she says. says. “When it comes to product, I regularly talk to the product development and merchandising teams, but I often work with the communications team to plan, create, and oversee content.”
Webster works with her husband and business partner, Bobby Stockley, to distribute the brand through more than 200 retail stores around the world. “I sell worldwide through e-commerce platforms, and our direct-to-consumer market has grown significantly over the last few years to almost the same size as our wholesale market,” Webster explained. Masu. “Our largest sales region is the US, where we stock Bloomingdale’s, Saks and Neiman’s. In the UK, we stock Selfridges and Harrods. The Middle East is also a very important market for the US. We also have stores in the Rebel Shoe District, as well as Bloomingdale’s and Harvey Nichols.”
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Sophia Webster will be on a panel at the Emirates Airline Literature Festival on Saturday 3 February.
In her book Oh my goodness, I love your shoes!, Webster describes her entrepreneurial journey through 365 sketches of her favorite designs, each evoking a unique memory. However, Webster admits that in her role as an entrepreneur and designer, she has also faced difficult times. For one, during the course of the COVID-19 crisis, she had to abandon her previously well-organized work flow and change to working mostly alone from her home. It’s time. “It was like her early days when she was doing everything herself,” she says. “In terms of leadership, the pandemic has really strengthened our search for purpose and appreciation for what we have. Bobby has already done a lot of work on our company culture. , we were trying to clarify what we were doing.”
Another troubled period for Webster occurred in 2017, when her father was assaulted and suffered a brain injury, which had a “huge knock-on effect on her business.” she added. “He’s remained in the hospital ever since. Needless to say it was a huge burden on the family, but from a business standpoint, I just wanted to be insulated. I’ve added personal information to my feed. But while this episode happened six years ago, and Webster has since found his rhythm again, it still contains an important lesson. and she wants to share it with fellow entrepreneurs. “Be aware that things can change quickly,” she says. “Recently, I have a different perspective and have been able to get through the little things more easily.”
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