1. Taryn Rose
38, CEO and designer
Taryn Rose International, Los Angeles, California
Fashion Feat
When most orthopedic surgery residents finish a 36-hour shift, there’s nothing they want more than a good night’s sleep. Not Taryn Rose. “I was known to leave the hospital, go straight to Neiman Marcus, and speed shop the last 15 minutes they were open,” says the surgeon turned shoe designer, now CEO of her own $20 million company. Rose loved wearing heels to the hospital but searched fruitlessly for stylish shoes that wouldn’t destroy her feet.
Toward the end of her residency, Rose began to see her fashion quandary as a market opportunity. At first, she fretted about what her peers and family would think. She hailed not only from a conservative field but from a conservative family, which expected her to follow in the footsteps of her physician father. But Rose felt she was onto something. “I feared regret more than I feared failure,” she recalls.
Rose turned first to a favorite salesclerk at Barneys who had friends in the shoe industry in Italy. She then applied for, and got, a $200,000 Small Business Administration loan in 1998. Rose used the loan and the industry connection to produce her first line of foot-friendly, high-fashion shoes.
During the first year, Rose wore out a lot of her own shoe leather. She personally called on high-end independent shoe stores as well as a buyer at a Nordstrom store in Costa Mesa, California, to sell her wares. “Nordstrom was not as centralized as they are now, so the local buyer could say, ‘Sure, I’ll try it,’ ” Rose says. In 2001, she says, Neiman Marcus agreed to carry her shoes in five of its stores, requesting she meet certain sell-through rates and margins. Rose’s shoes (typical price: $400 per pair) blew through those targets, and she’s now in 36 Neiman Marcus locations.
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