It's all about the shoes, stupid

It's true. You can ask any woman sitting near you, next to you or on the end of a phone line: if you intend to succeed in fashion retail, the biggest favour you can do yourself, your shareholders and your staff is simply to position a killer shoe department at the furthest end of your store. Women will find it, return to it and talk about it and, hey presto, business will boom.

It's taken a while, but Stuttafords has finally turned the corner in its makeover. Because, as of a few days ago, slap bang in the middle of its Sandton store's ladies' wear department is a refurbished, restocked and world-class piece of shoe heaven.

It is a quirk of the female make up that when the shoes are good, everything else seems instantly okay. So when you walk into the Stuttafords shoe department and you see the exquisite pair of summer Giuseppe Zanotti gladiator flats in deep, gleaming copper — with a zillion little leather thongs ready to stretch across the bridge of your foot in understated Italian elegance — you know that someone at Stuttafords' head office knows women. Or, in this case, they know a woman who knows women.

For behind the transformation of this shoe department is the statuesque Melissa Weavind.

A former buyer for Edgars, she was brought in as a consultant to cull the dead wood and breathe life into what was left.

One glimpse of Weavind in black patent peep toe platforms and it's clear that she loves shoes as much as life itself.

The result is a glamorous island of beautiful shoes, from affordable to designer, complete with an over sized gold lamé couch that the Barbie in all of us will faint over.

With shops like Spitz and Nina Roche already knee-deep in designer shoes, I wouldn't have thought there was much left for Stuttafords to bag, yet it provides names such as Emilio Pucci, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Costume Nationale, Philosophy di Alberta Ferretti and, of course, the current Hollywood favourite, Giuseppe Zanotti.

We are in the process of a worldwide revival of the shoe as fashion's key must-have item. It is a treat, therefore, that with Stuttafords throwing its hat — or, rather, heels — into the designer shoe game, South African women are going to have access to pretty much most of those desirable shoes. Of course, they're not going to come cheap, but they're also not going to be more expensive than what you would have paid in Paris or Milan.

To some, it may seem cheeky, if not foolish, to launch a range of designer shoes averaging about R3000 a pair in the same week that the rand falls out of bed. But I firmly believe that as long as women know where to find the most beautiful shoes in the world, they will return again and again.

Source: The Times

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