Steve Madden: Steve Madden (2018)

Steve Madden fell in love with the shoe business in the 1970's, when he sold platform shoes at a neighborhood store in Long Island, New York; that was in high school. About 15 years later, he struck out on his own, designing and selling shoes with a high-end look at affordable prices. As his business—and his ambitions—began to grow, he got involved in a securities fraud scheme and wound up serving two and-a-half years in prison. In 2005, he returned to Steve Madden, where he helped the company grow into a business valued at $3 billion. PLUS in our post-script "How You Built That," we check back with "kid-preneur" Gabrielle Goodwin and her mom Rozalynn who invented GaBBY Bows—double snap barrettes that don't slip out of your hair. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Guy Raz?

  And just a quick heads up about today's show. If you stick around to the very end, you will hear a very special clip from the latest episode of Wow in the World, our kids podcast. It's our first ever musical extravaganza. So if you want to know what I sound like when I sing, you will soon find out. So if you've seen the film The Wolf of Wall Street, you might remember there's a scene where a young shoe designer is in a boiler room full of these bro-ish stock traders. And while he's pitching his company, the traders are just being ruthless. They're cracking mean jokes or even throwing things at him. And the guy in that scene, he's playing a real person, a shoe designer named Steve

• 0:47Guy Raz?

  Madden. We're about to hear the story of how Steve wound up in that room, about the price he paid for dealing with those traders, and how, in spite of everything, he built his shoe company into a massively successful brand. It's an incredible story. It first ran in July of 2018. Here you go.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  I'm not one of those entrepreneurs that thought he was going to be super successful. You know, I was just trying to survive. And I'm very negative and very pessimistic, unlike maybe some of the guys that you've done, you know, the shows.

• 1:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  I'm sure they think that, you know, they're going to be...

• 1:28Guy Raz?

  Nothing can get me down.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Nothing can get me down. Me, I think I'm going out of business every other day.

• 1:40Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:52Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Steve Madden took high-end shoe designs, gave them low-end prices, and turned his name into a $3 billion shoe brand.

• 2:10Guy Raz?

  So when I was a kid, if you wanted to wear brand names and you couldn't afford the prices, you'd go to Mervyn's or Marshall's or Ross, and you'd look for things called irregular items. Maybe it was a pair of Guess jeans, missing a zipper, or in a Spree shirt with one arm slightly longer than the other. And it was no big deal because you still got the brand, and you got it at Marshall's prices. But then, starting in the early 1990s, brands like H&M and Zara started to go global, and it meant that, all of a sudden, many more people had access to high-fashion designs, but at a much lower price. And this is the way that Steve Madden not only tapped

• 2:54Guy Raz?

  into, but, in a lot of ways, pioneered, especially when it came to shoes. With Steve Madden's, you could, all of a sudden, buy a pair of black stilettos for 70 bucks that looked suspiciously like a $900 pair of Manolo Blahniks, or a $60 pair of Lego-like heels that were a knockoff of $1,000 Balenciagas. This was the genius of Steve Madden. He managed to carve out a very sweet spot between Nine West and Christian Louboutin. Now, this approach didn't come without consequences. The world of high fashion is an exclusive club, and Steve Madden is largely unwelcome. And one reason? Pedigree.

• 3:38Guy Raz?

  Steve didn't apprentice at one of the great fashion houses. He didn't start out in Milan or Paris. In fact, Steve didn't even study design. And he's also kind of brash, and a bit of a loudmouth. So brash, in fact, that he was willing to break the law to get ahead. Steve spent two and a half years in prison for financial crimes. It's an experience that completely changed his life, and we will get there. But long before that, Steve grew up in Long Island, New York. He was a scrappy, middle-class, half-Irish, half-Jewish kid.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I was sort of a leader-type, charismatic, sort of, always pretty similar to the way I am now. But I was... You know, small and had a big mouth and a little ambitious and a little obnoxious, probably.

• 4:29Guy Raz?

  The kind of kid who would get in trouble at school?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I always got in trouble. I was always in trouble. I had an attention deficit disorder. I didn't know it then.

• 4:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Nobody, nobody knew.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that was the sixties and so they didn't really talk about it then, but I couldn't sit still.

• 4:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  In Yiddish, we'd say, I had shpilkus.

• 4:47Guy Raz?

  Okay, right. Yeah. Yeah. So, school was not your, your forte?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  No. Um, the only difference is that I was, I was a reader. So, and I loved history. And I used to love to read about the moguls. You know, I was obsessed with some, I was drawn to this thing about Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn and these great entrepreneurs that, I mean, at a very young age, you know, I was like drawn to it.

• 5:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Why? Why do you think so?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I don't know why. I mean, you know, I was, I guess it was the, the intersection of art and commerce, you know, was very interesting to me and still is.

• 5:29Guy Raz?

  And those guys came from nothing, most of them?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they were artists, but they were businessmen. So, it was that kind of thing.

• 5:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Your dad was in the textile business. Was, just out of curiosity, was your dad entrepreneurial? Did he have that kind of mind?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yes, my dad was, but you know, he grew up in the depression and you know, he was very limited, filled with fear, uh, because he had seen so much poverty. So, his, he sort of capped his upside.

• 5:55Guy Raz?

  He was not a risk taker?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  He wasn't a great risk taker, but he was a smart man. He was a businessman, but he never really made the big bucks because he was very safe, which in a way I admire him because he stayed in, I mean, it's easy to criticize people like that. Uh, you know, but he was, you know, always provided. We weren't the, we were right in the middle. I mean, we weren't, you know, rich or anything, but we weren't the poorest, but it was like, you know, people got a 10-speed bike and they got schwinn. I never got a schwinn.

• 6:29Guy Raz?

  And you wanted to be the kind of person who could buy that stuff one day?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  I did. I always did. Yeah, I always wanted to fly first class, you know, like I'd be riding in coach. You know, I was like, get me in the front of this plane, you know, kind of thing.

• 6:50Guy Raz?

  How'd you end up working at a shoe store at age 16?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  So I worked in a shoe store in high school. You know, the neighborhood, sort of cool shoe store. The guy that started the store went to high school with my brother, John.

• 7:04Guy Raz?

  So it was a job? It wasn't like, hey, I want to go work in shoes. It was just a job?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Just sort of fell into it. Yeah. But I fell in love with it right away.

• 7:11Guy Raz?

  What did you fall in love with?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So it's hard to explain, but at that moment in the shoe business, you know, it was a very exciting time because...

• 7:18Guy Raz?

  This is like the early to mid 70s?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, like '74. Before I even started, platform shoes were very big for men.

• 7:27Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  It was a really wild time in the shoe business. Big platforms. And so it was just very interesting, you know? I was into it. I was into the creative sort of vibe of the whole thing.

• 7:39Guy Raz?

  What do you remember about working in that store?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  I remember working very hard, very motivated, even in a young age.

• 7:48Guy Raz?

  And was that, I mean, when you were there, were you thinking, shoes, this is me, this is my calling? Or was it more like, I like selling stuff?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  I love selling stuff.

• 7:59Guy Raz?

  You did.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  I do. But I also like creating stuff. And I like creating stuff to sell. It's always been sort of a core sort of philosophy of mine. I've never been like, oh, that's creative, but, you know, nobody wants to buy it. And then, on the other hand, you know, just to sell without any kind of creativity is boring to me, too.

• 8:21Guy Raz?

  So you were working, so you're in the store. The store, by the way, is called Toulouse?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Toulouse, yeah.

• 8:25Guy Raz?

  And who was the guy who ran it?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  So, yeah, there was this great guy. His name was Lance Rubin. And I really, most of what I know, I got from this guy.

• 8:35Guy Raz?

  You were 16 and he was in his 30s?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  27.

• 8:38Guy Raz?

  Wow, he owned that store at 27?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the thing about this guy was so interesting because he was a young man who was successful and creative. And I never saw that. Usually, the people that I thought of as businessmen were like my father. You know, they rode the railroad and they wore those long coats with the hats, like Don Draper.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  But anyway, Lance came along. He was this artist and he designed these shoes. And also, the wholesalers that sold him would be asking him for input on designs.

• 9:09Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, because he was an up and comer, you know, like a young gun.

• 9:14Guy Raz?

  So you are a high school student working at the shoe store, but you have plans to go to college, right? You were going to go to college.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I went to the University of Miami in Florida.

• 9:24Guy Raz?

  To study what?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  To study golf and suntans.

• 9:30Guy Raz?

  I did too. You did well.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  I did good. I did well, yeah. I mean, I love learning, but it was, I was on my own and it was too much.

• 9:39Guy Raz?

  How long did you last there?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  You know, it's a bit of a blur, but I think it was about 18 months.

• 9:45Guy Raz?

  And it wasn't for you, basically?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  It wasn't for me. My dad did me the biggest favor by pulling me out of school. When I say pulled me out of school, he refused to pay another 50 cents for me to fool around in college. So I went to work.

• 9:59Guy Raz?

  You went back to Long Island?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I went back to Long Island.

• 10:02Guy Raz?

  And back to a shoe store?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Went to work in another shoe store.

• 10:05Guy Raz?

  And shoes because you had experience doing that and you liked it?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  That's right. I had experience, so. It was kind of a famous store in Long Island called Jildor, which most people know in New York.

• 10:17Guy Raz?

  So you are, and there you're also a sales guy, just dealing with customers in the store?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just a sales guy on the floor.

• 10:25Guy Raz?

  And so you're out of your sort of a college dropout, you're working at this shoe store selling shoes. And I don't know, was your dad or your mom, were they saying, Steve, what are you, you know, you're not going to work at a shoe store your whole life? Did they say that at all? Or did they kind of just leave you alone?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  There are people that said that to me. Guys my own age, you know, making fun of me for working in a shoe store, for sure. You know, my father did not make fun of me. My father recognized that good, hard work was good.

• 10:56Guy Raz?

  So you're working in a shoe store and I guess at a certain point you go to the city, to New York City to work at another shoe store.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Well, the guy that owned Toulouse, Lance, opened up a wholesale company called LJ Simone.

• 11:08Guy Raz?

  And he calls you out of the blue?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yes, pretty much, yeah.

• 11:11Guy Raz?

  And he says?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Come to work, come sell. So that's what I did. It's like a little wholesale company.

• 11:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  And what happened was I went to work there and we blew it up, man.

• 11:21Guy Raz?

  Well, how did you blow it up?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  You know, I went to work for them and it was like boom, we made a nice company out of it.

• 11:26Guy Raz?

  And he was sourcing his shoes from shoe factories and then what?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was designing the shoes and I was selling them.

• 11:31Guy Raz?

  So he would design them, they would be made, and then you would go from store to store?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would sell them. And he taught me how to design shoes.

• 11:40Guy Raz?

  How?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, there's certain tricks of the trade and knowing what people like and working with different constructions.

• 11:48Guy Raz?

  And it was just the two of you at the beginning?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  There was a few guys involved, but you know, I was one, I was at the beginning and it got very successful.

• 11:56Guy Raz?

  Who were you selling to?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  We'd sell to Macy's and department stores and we sold to the bootlegger. I don't know if anybody's from Washington. I don't know, anybody remember the bootlegger? We sold all over the country.

• 12:09Guy Raz?

  And was it at that point where you started to think about maybe doing this for yourself? Or did you think, this is great, I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna, this is, I'm gonna just ride this train?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  You know, at some point I thought about doing it for myself. I was very happy there. You know, but at some point I thought, you know, I could do this.

• 12:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How much revenue were they doing? And when you were working for him, how much money were they making?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  I would say they were doing maybe 40 million a year.

• 12:34Guy Raz?

  Wow. So it was big?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is like big. You know, they were, yeah, we, maybe something like that, yeah.

• 12:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and so what happened? Why did you leave?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  You know, I had taken it as far as I could take it and I just didn't want to have a boss anymore. It was just time. You know, it was ready for me to sort of chart my own course. And I was like thirty.

• 12:58Guy Raz?

  You were thirty, so you were there for a long time.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like thirty-one.

• 13:02Guy Raz?

  And just to, just to be clear, at this point, you were single. You're not married, no kids at that time, right?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yes, single.

• 13:08Guy Raz?

  And you were probably paid pretty well by Lance. You're probably making a decent living.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was. I made a lot of money with him, you know, relative to the time.

• 13:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and you weren't worried at all about risking, risking all that?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  I'm still worried about it.

• 13:23Guy Raz?

  Okay, but then, you were, you had this really good salary.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I'm worried, I was, I'm a worrier, you know, I'm a worrier. So, yes, but I just wanted to do it on my own.

• 13:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah. This was also, I mean, it's kind of a wild time, right? I mean, you were, you were drinking heavily, you were...

• 13:39Speaker 01

  I was, started using drugs and drinking. I was pretty much, pretty inebriated most of my twenties.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  You know, they say when an alcoholic hits bottom, you know, they keep, there's another level of bottom to go. So, yeah, it was pretty bad.

• 13:58Guy Raz?

  How bad did it get?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I could tell you a lot of stories about it.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  But basically, I couldn't stop and, you know, I was embarrassing myself. And it was starting to affect my work and I had to stop or die.

• 14:17Guy Raz?

  Was that bad?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Drugs and drink, yes. Cocaine, everything, you know. And I would work, you know, it went, I worked. I'd work, work, work and then get stoned at night, you know, hammered.

• 14:33Guy Raz?

  Because you were working so hard, it was just like the thing you did, you just...

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you thought you deserved it or you could justify it somehow.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  But, oh, I was a mess. I was a mess.

• 14:47Guy Raz?

  When, when did you, how did you, how did you get out of that?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  I had some friends, you know, that pointed me towards a place where I could get sober.

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  Did you go to AA or did you go to a clinic?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I did, I went to AA.

• 15:00Guy Raz?

  And that helped?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  It saved my life.

• 15:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Guy Raz?

  So I'm assuming it was after you recovered that you started Steve Madden?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was sober when I started Steve Madden. I mean, it was just a miracle. You know, I started, I got sober, I started this company and, you know, my life completely changed.

• 15:26Guy Raz?

  And when you started the company, did you, did you have the cash to do it, to launch it?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  You know, I scraped together a little money, but basically, no.

• 15:35Guy Raz?

  Your own money?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:36Guy Raz?

  And what was, what was the idea? What was the first idea? The idea was to basically do the same thing, design and sell your own shoes?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  It was exactly the same idea.

• 15:45Guy Raz?

  And what was your first shoe?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  My first shoe was a clog, was a backless clog that I made.

• 15:52Guy Raz?

  And who did you think would be your customer?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. At the time, you know, I would say it would be my contemporaries. You know, so I was like 32, you know?

• 16:05Guy Raz?

  So a 32-year-old woman?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say, because I didn't really think about it. I just wanted to make shoes, you know? It wasn't something that I thought. But what happened was, I ended up making shoes for the Gen X customer. Those would be people around 40 today.

• 16:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Right after, I guess that's right after the baby boomers, right?

• 16:22Guy Raz?

  So they were, they were teens at that point?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I discovered this market by accident. There was, they were very ill-served. You know, basically, we stepped into that at Steve Madden.

• 16:35Guy Raz?

  And how many did you make?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  So, you know, the way it was, you know, we made, we made some shoes and, you know, we just got this fabulous reaction, but not from the people I thought I was going to get a reaction from, which were my contemporaries, which was from the younger kids that were like, the phone was ringing, like, where did you get that shoe and all that stuff? So we knew that something was going on here. So that's the track that we went on.

• 17:02Guy Raz?

  When you, so when you decided to start Steve Madden, did you have an office or were you working out of your apartment?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  No, I worked in a shoe factory.

• 17:09Guy Raz?

  A shoe factory. So you found a factory in New York?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  In Brooklyn.

• 17:12Guy Raz?

  And, and you worked with them and then you made, I guess, some shoes. And then what did you do? Did you go to your former contacts that you had from?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, Macy's and anybody that carried shoes, I sold. And then I would go to the national shows and sell them all over the country.

• 17:30Guy Raz?

  But in that first, in that first year, 1990?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:34Guy Raz?

  Like you would go to shoe stores and they would take 10 pairs?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  You'd go with your, you'd go with your sample case and you'd lay your shoes out and people would buy them. And that was it.

• 17:47Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  So what was happening?

• 17:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Was the market that I was selling to, everybody in the shoe business walked away from it. The teenagers, you know, and stuff like that, the young and it was a different generation, you know? And so they had their own thing, their own music and their own style. And we just tapped into that whole thing.

• 18:08Guy Raz?

  And this was a market, explain this, some market at the time that was essentially abandoned by most shoe makers?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  You know, it seems like it, they just abandoned, I mean, Nine West, it was a company called Nine West that was dominating the industry. Of course, there was Nike and Reebok, but nobody was like making like funky little shoes. It was kind of a throwback to the seventies, you know, from that other era. So I kind of brought that back and I was just in the right place at the right time.

• 18:35Guy Raz?

  Were they, were they designed to be like cool, but also affordable and expensive?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I've always been sort of democratic with my shoes.

• 18:46Guy Raz?

  Do you remember how many, how much revenue you did in, in, in the first year?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  I probably did.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I don't know, 500,000.

• 18:55Guy Raz?

  So it's pretty good, pretty good first year?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:57Guy Raz?

  And you named it Steve Madden because it seemed like the obvious thing to do?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  It seemed like an easy name.

• 19:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah. Did you ever think about using like a French name or like a European sounding?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny because it was originally, the first couple of shoes were called Soulier.

• 19:13Guy Raz?

  All right.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  It's very good.

• 19:15Guy Raz?

  Like soul, like the?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a French word for slipper.

• 19:17Guy Raz?

  Uh huh.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  And so, you know, there was some dispute about that brand. Or maybe I just wanted to call it Steve Madden. I can't remember, but I switched it pretty quickly.

• 19:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because you worked for?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  There was one guy that called me up, how dare you? I bought Soulier, I don't want Steve Madden. Who do you think you are?

• 19:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I always, and the guy is still, he's still in the shoe business, that guy. And I always torture him when I see him.

• 19:41Guy Raz?

  All right, so you've got this pretty good business going. And year one, what are you thinking? Are you thinking, okay, I mean, did you have ambitions at that point already to make this into something huge?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  So where I'm at is I started the business and, you know, I'm just not really, don't have much money. I'm just sort of working hand to mouth. And a friend of mine who I grew up with went to work for this brokerage firm. And they were raising money for small companies.

• 20:10Guy Raz?

  This is Danny Porash.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Danny Porash.

• 20:11Guy Raz?

  Danny Porash.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, we're going to raise you, we're going to get you, we'll raise you 600 grand and then we'll get you 6 million.

• 20:19Guy Raz?

  He was working for a brokerage house?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, he worked, he was a senior guy. And?

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  And he said to you, hey, you need to expand your money?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  You're really talented. I've known you my whole life. You know, what would you do if you got 600,000?

• 20:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  You know, 600,000 was like 600 million to me.

• 20:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  And then he said, well, not only will I get you 600 grand, but I'm going to get you 6 million dollars when I take you public. And I laughed at him, you know, because I probably had 30,000 dollars in my, to my name.

• 20:49Guy Raz?

  And so, of course, you're like, what, 33, 32?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Something like that, yeah.

• 20:54Guy Raz?

  And you're thinking, you can raise me 600,000 bucks. Let's do it.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 20:58Guy Raz?

  So he, so, so Danny helped you go public?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he helped me go public and his firm was called Stratonokma.

• 21:07Guy Raz?

  A very famous name for anybody who's seen Wolf of Wall Street.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  It was a pretty good movie, actually.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  My name is Jordan Belfort. The year I turned 26, I made $49 million, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week.

• 21:24Guy Raz?

  I guess we should explain. Stratton Oakmont was just like called a pump and dump firm.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they used to call them boiler rooms.

• 21:29Guy Raz?

  Right, and they would basically sell, they would sell really crappy companies. They would jack up, get the stock price jacked up. And then they would sell all the shares and make tons of money and people would lose their shirts. And so they basically wanted to do this with Steve Madden, right?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  They wanted to do it with Steve Madden. I was the perfect guy for them.

• 21:45Guy Raz?

  Because?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Because, you know, I had a company and it was small and they could do their thing with it, you know? It fit the profile.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  For those of you who don't know me, my name's Steve Madden.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, we know who you are. Name is on the box. So that scene with me talking in front of the, it was very accurate.

• 22:07Guy Raz?

  We should explain the scene for people who haven't seen it. You go up in front of all these, these like traders in this boiler room.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started talking about my shoes, thinking that they would actually be interested. But they really weren't. I was just a piece of, it was just a piece of paper and a piece of meat that they could sell.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Believe it or not, though, the Mary Lou is actually the same as the Mary Jane, but it's black leather.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  I want to, just to digress for a moment. Because when people are listening to this, budding entrepreneurs, I'm not one of those entrepreneurs that, that thought he was going to be super successful. You know, I was just trying to survive. And I'm very negative and very pessimistic. Unlike maybe some of the guys that you've done, you know, the shows.

• 22:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah, totally.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  I'm sure they think that, you know, they're gonna be.

• 22:56Guy Raz?

  Nothing can get me down.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Nothing can get me down. Me, I think I'm going out of business every other day.

• 23:02Guy Raz?

  So at that time, this is like 93, I guess, when.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, 92, 93. So we went public.

• 23:08Guy Raz?

  Went public, and how did the stock do?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Well, they were totally manipulated, the stocks. They went up and it, you know, it was a pump, it was a classic pump and dump. Only Steve Madden was a real company.

• 23:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  So if you kept that stock.

• 23:22Guy Raz?

  You would make a lot of money.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  On that day, in 1993, and you own 10,000 shares, I haven't really done the math, but I think you would be worth

• 23:31Guy Raz?

  A lot of money.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Millions and millions of dollars today.

• 23:38Guy Raz?

  So the Stratton sale, the company goes public. Stratton takes you public.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:42Guy Raz?

  All of a sudden, it raises how much money for you?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  I think the public offering was about 7 million bucks.

• 23:48Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  And we used it. I took it and in very short period of time, from a half a million bucks, I was doing 40 million a year, 50 million a year.

• 23:58Guy Raz?

  And what did that money?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Within 36 months.

• 24:01Guy Raz?

  Incredible. So, OK, you get all this cash from the initial public offering.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:08Guy Raz?

  And at that point, I mean, did you ask any questions? I mean, these guys were, they were totally breaking the law. I mean, at that point, they were artificially inflating your stocks. Did you, like, were you suspicious at all about Danny and about Stratton? I mean, did you, did you think, hey, yo, what are these guys doing?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  I knew it was too good to be true.

• 24:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  I knew it. So, you know, I lied to myself and I told myself that it was a gray area. You know, the trading in these stocks and the flipping. They would sell me the stocks and I would sell them back to them.

• 24:49Guy Raz?

  Just Steve Madden stocks?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  No, all the other deals.

• 24:51Guy Raz?

  So they brought you into other deals?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  They brought me into other deals. So I lied to myself. You know, everybody's doing it, you know, like that. But I knew in my heart that it was illegal and it was wrong.

• 25:06Guy Raz?

  Was a part of it thrilling, that you were getting away with it?

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Well, making that much money is certainly thrilling, for sure.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  But I wish that I hadn't done it. And, but you know, more than wishing I hadn't done it, because that's sort of an empty thing to say.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  I wish that I didn't feel compelled to do it. I wish that I didn't have that feeling that money was everything, because it's not. It's not everything. So I was greedy and foolish.

• 25:43Guy Raz?

  Here's what I'm trying to figure out. You are this creative guy.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:47Guy Raz?

  You create shoes, you design shoes, and you've got a really successful and growing business. And then on the side, you're doing these weird stock trades that are shady and ultimately illegal. Why would you even do that stuff on the side if you already had the creativity in the business?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  I know, because you just, you know, you just get caught up, you just get caught up in this thing.

• 26:16Guy Raz?

  But at a certain point, it can't be about money. It has to be about fulfillment. And weren't you fulfilled by just the creation of your shoes and seeing your shoes out in the world?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Well, that's a very heavy question. How one gets fulfilled? I'm still grappling with that today, you know? So there are moments where I'm very fulfilled, you know? And there are moments when I'm not. I was raised to think that money was everything, you know? Money is the center of the universe. And if that's what your core belief is, you'll do anything and you'll break the law, you know? Money's like a drug, you know? And we got in trouble.

• 27:09Guy Raz?

  In just a minute, how Steve Madden pays and pays hard for his crimes. And eventually, how he comes back to the company he started to make it even bigger. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 27:50Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's 2002, and after being implicated in a stock manipulation scheme, Steve Madden goes on trial. He's convicted and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. So in the space of just a few years, he goes from being one of the most famous and successful shoe designers in America to sitting in a prison cell. What did you think? I mean, did you think I'm finished? My life is over?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much. You know, I thought I was, could have, my goose was cooked. But I did have the sense that I could get through it.

• 28:35Guy Raz?

  Were there people who knew you, who didn't like you, who were just feeling like, ah, he got his comeuppance?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Yeah, I had made such a success in the shoe business, and I was a bit of a rebel. So now people are going, aha, see? That's what happens when you do that.

• 28:54Guy Raz?

  Where did you?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  In Florida.

• 28:55Guy Raz?

  You were sent to a minimum-security prison?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, what they call a camp.

• 29:00Guy Raz?

  And what was your, what was your living situation like there?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  We lived in a barracks. You know, it was like a military barracks.

• 29:06Guy Raz?

  You had your own room?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  I lived in a cube. I lived in a cube and with another guy or two.

• 29:15Guy Raz?

  How did you pass the time?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Well, read a lot, exercised a lot, and I taught some classes when I was there.

• 29:23Guy Raz?

  Did you, when you got there and you knew that you were going to be there for at least, you were there for 31 months, but 41, I think, was your sentence?

• 29:30Speaker 01

  31 months.

• 29:31Guy Raz?

  31 months.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:33Guy Raz?

  Did you ever get depressed? Did you ever think, I don't know how I'm going to stay here for 31 months?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, my first night, I looked up at the ceiling, and I said, how the heck am I going to do this? How am I going to get through this?

• 29:47Guy Raz?

  Did it go by faster than you expected?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  It seemed like 31 years.

• 29:52Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  But I quickly ascertained early on that whining and moaning would not do me any good and running around saying I was innocent would not do me any good. So I would try to get through this, try to better myself, if it sounds corny, but exercise and read and learn and, you know, that kind of thing. And so I did.

• 30:22Guy Raz?

  When you went to jail, Steve Madden was doing very well, right?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  When I went to jail, it was doing well.

• 30:28Guy Raz?

  Were you worried about the brand, that the name, your name was the brand, that your...

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Well, I had great people working for me. I was, I was really worried about surviving and getting through it.

• 30:39Guy Raz?

  You personally or the company?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  The prison. I was really more focused on getting through that experience.

• 30:45Guy Raz?

  Did you think that you would ever go back to Steve Madden, you're the company you built?

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:53Guy Raz?

  So you had that horizon to look forward to.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did.

• 30:56Guy Raz?

  Do you think, this is a really weird question, but I'm curious to hear your take on it. If you could trade the time you were in prison for, you know, just continuing on and not, not, not having that experience, would you, would you do it? Or do you think that, strangely enough, that, that time being incarcerated was important for your development as a person?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I'm a very big believer in, you know, destiny and your path and all that corny stuff. I just believe it viscerally. So I'm so grateful for my life. After prison, I married a great girl. I had great kids.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  I don't know that I would have had children had I not gone to prison. So I regret some of my choices, you know, shortcuts that I took or, you know, thinking that money was the most important thing. I regret decisions like that. But I don't regret a day in prison. It was an amazing experience. It was very painful. I mean, the only thing I can, I've tried to describe it to people. Your heart gets broke every day.

• 32:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  When you're in prison. Your heart breaks every day. The living in prison part is not as terrible as one might think.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  But, you know, your heart's breaking because you're not with the people you love. That, that's the difficult part of prison.

• 32:27Guy Raz?

  It, it sounds like you became a much more empathetic person when, when you were there and you saw people who were unlike you, who did not grow up like you, who came from different backgrounds, who had, who kind of ended up there because of circumstances.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Well, particularly the, the African American experience really touched me and young men dealing drugs, getting huge sentences, unfair drug laws that really were biased against black people. So that was, you know, to see problems in those communities, you know, to talk to young black men and it's a very complicated, you know, issue.

• 33:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  You know, I just think, I'll give you an example. This is a little thing, but you know, when I grew up, I went to grade school in the sixties, right? We, we learnt that Robert E. Lee was a kindly gentleman. He was, he was called a hero, like he let, he defended his homeland of Virginia. And that's just, that's just complete racism, but we didn't realize it. It's the subtle form of racism. So that's the kind of thing that, you know, those kind of feelings or stuff that came up in prison, you know, that kind of thing. I learnt and read more about it.

• 33:50Guy Raz?

  Okay. So you, I think you get out in, in 2005 and, and do you remember the day that, that you were released?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  You know, that's such an interesting question because. I don't really.

• 34:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  It was a bit of a blur. I, I think of it now. I mean, I thought about that day when I was away for so long, what it was gonna be like. And I can't remember it now. I really can't. My wife picked me up.

• 34:18Guy Raz?

  And we should mention that while you were in prison, you fell in love.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And she picked me up.

• 34:24Guy Raz?

  She was an employee of the company?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  I know that we had sushi. And I just, I, I just can't remember. It was so, it was such a blur. There was so much coming at me. You know, when you're locked up after 30 months. You know, everything is like amazing. Like a slice of pizza is like, oh, my God. Like, this is the greatest thing ever.

• 34:52Guy Raz?

  So you, you're out. You're back, back in, in society. You got your freedom back. Uh, how long did it take you to, to adjust to, to having control of your own schedule? Your day to day schedule?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Well, there's a transition period. You go into a halfway house. But I was fortunate because I had a job and I came right back to work. So it was an amazing time.

• 35:15Guy Raz?

  And what was your position when you came back to, to your company?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Um, the same position I'm in today, which is the founder, which is the chief cheerleader.

• 35:24Guy Raz?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  We have fabulous people running Steve Madden. I wasn't a great CEO.

• 35:31Guy Raz?

  Why weren't you a great CEO?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  You know, I'm just, I'm not detail oriented. And, uh, my talents are suited in other things, you know?

• 35:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah. When did you, when did you realize that you were not cut out to be a CEO?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Well, when it's, the business is small. You can kind of be the CEO.

• 35:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you know, everybody.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  So you know, everybody, you live and breathe it. And then you could be a CEO because you touch everything. But then a business, you know, once a business gets past a certain point, you know, it's impossible for someone like me to, to do that job.

• 36:05Guy Raz?

  But when you came back to the company in 2005, I think within four years, Steve Madden hit revenue of, of over half a billion dollars. So, so what happened in that time? Like, how did the company grow? What, what was the strategy that allowed you to grow so much?

• 36:25Speaker 01

  So our goal was to, you know, make great shoes and, you know, I think that that kind of like won out. At the end of the day, the marketing wasn't super fantastic. It was just great shoes, great prices, great value. And, you know, I think that we just wore everybody out with that. You know, more people were giving us their open to buy. And we opened more stores, you know, and our internet business exploded. But the big thing about Steve Madden, I have to say, and I've said this many times, was the people at Steve Madden is that I've hired so many great people. It starts with recognizing my own limitations. I'm weak at that. So let me get somebody that can do that for

• 37:08Speaker 01

  me. And, you know, that's really the story. It's people.

• 37:12Guy Raz?

  So you come, you come back to the company and you, by the way, you had plenty of money at that point. I mean, you could have, you could have sold your shares, walked away very rich man, and just kind of, I don't know, done something else or focused on yourself. Why, why did you want to go back to the company?

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Well, actually, it's, that's an eternal, that's a, I grapple with that all the time. So I love the idea of making shoes and the people want to buy. And I love seeing my shoes being worn. And I just love all of it. And I love making money. Let me be clear about that. I love it. I love the whole thing.

• 37:53Guy Raz?

  What, because you don't need more of it. So what do you love about it?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Well, okay, that's a good, these are great questions. And I want to ask other entrepreneurs or other people, like, so how do you stay motivated? You know, let's say you've got, you know, a few dollars in the bank and you know that you, the rent is paid and all of that. And so what keeps you going?

• 38:15Guy Raz?

  I, I once asked Haim Saban a similar question. You know who Haim Saban is, right? The media mogul?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:22Guy Raz?

  And, you know, he grew up like dirt poor in Alexandria, Egypt. He came from literally nothing, right? And I said, you know, what, what, what's the big deal? Because he, he, he was waiting to sell his company to Disney for, I don't know, you know, more than a billion dollars.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:38Guy Raz?

  And I said, but, you know, why, why not just take 500? Million, when they offered that to you. He said, because it wasn't worth that. You know, I wanted to be a billionaire. And the point he made was that it wasn't about the actual dollar amount. It was, for him, it was a mark. It was like a, it was like a mark. He could say, OK, I've reached this point. And then I can reach this point. And then it's this point. And it's, it's like a demarcation point of success.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a heavy question. It really is. But of course, it's a luxury that people with money have to be able to talk about this stuff. You know, there's somebody out there that will listen to this and, you know, they've got to pay their rent next Friday. And they'll say, well, listen to this idiot talking about it. You know, and I agree with them.

• 39:21Guy Raz?

  But it's about human, but it's about human motivation, right?

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, the money is the money. But, but it's something I think about a great deal. Because I feel so good. If I have had a great day at work, where I'm inspiring and, and inspired at the same time, it's such an amazing feeling. There's no amount of money that can replicate that.

• 39:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  So I guess that's what I want, you know? Inspire and be inspired.

• 39:52Guy Raz?

  Do you, what was the last shoe that you designed? Just out of curiosity.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  The last shoe I designed was last week.

• 40:00Guy Raz?

  Last week?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  It was a sneaker with studs.

• 40:03Guy Raz?

  You designed a shoe last week?

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, we have a factory in Long Island City, just outside the East River in Manhattan. But I'm always fiddling with shoes and thinking about shoes. Of course, I have a great team that does most of the work, and I take most of the credit now.

• 40:20Guy Raz?

  You, but Steve, you, you don't seem to be a super obsessed over your own personal style. You're like, you've got the baseball cap thing going. You got, but you're not wearing like designer, like runway outfits every day.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  No, no. I'm, I look like a garage mechanic some days on that runway. Yeah, I wear T-shirts and jeans. I'm very lucky. That's, I, I don't take that for granted. I'm blessed that I'm, the ability to wear a nice, clean T-shirt every day.

• 40:50Guy Raz?

  Did you ever feel like, I don't know, like some of these fashion folks kind of were snobby about you? That they, I don't know, they didn't let you into their club because you weren't from, you know, Milan or didn't go to art school or, because you wore baseball caps and, and you were, you know, kind of... Kicking their butts with, with, with these sort of shoes that were a fraction of the price.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a bit, there's a bit of that. There was a bit of that. Big time. It's not so much anymore.

• 41:18Guy Raz?

  Hmm. They used to bug you?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it bugged me. Bugged me a lot. You know, I would, or I would go into a high-end department store, like a Barney's, let's say, and they wouldn't carry Steve Madden. They wouldn't dare carry Steve Madden. But all the people working in the store wore Steve Madden. It would just drive me crazy.

• 41:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. That happened so many times. And still to this day, there's a bit of that going on.

• 41:42Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Um, it's frustrating.

• 41:46Guy Raz?

  But if you step away from the balcony, like me looking at this, I would be like, who cares? You crushed them all like so big deal.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Well, I once was upset because they put Puff Daddy in the CFDA.

• 41:58Guy Raz?

  The CFDA is a club for what?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  CFDA, it's a something for designers. CFDA, yeah. Very, very posh.

• 42:05Guy Raz?

  And?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And they put Puffy in there. And I thought to myself, Puffy? He's not designer. What does he have to do?

• 42:11Guy Raz?

  Are you in there?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  I'm not. They won't let me in.

• 42:14Guy Raz?

  Even to this day, they won't let you in. You cannot get into their club?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  I'm not allowed in the building. So, you know, and, and they would say, well, you copy, you know, Balenciaga or whatever it is. You know, whatever the, you know, and we, we definitely are aware of expensive shoes that are out there, you know, but Steve Madden.

• 42:30Guy Raz?

  But I mean, in some ways, a lot of these, these high-end designers could make the, you could make the case that, you know, the younger crowd will enter the market by buying Steve Madden shoes. And then there's this aspirational to buy Manolo Blahniks.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  By the way, I, I always say it's a gateway drug of shoes, Steve Madden. They're not buying Louboutins or Manolos without starting with Steve Madden. So Manolo should give me tons of love for that. I reach much, many more people than him.

• 42:57Guy Raz?

  Do you think that there will be a point where you are acknowledged by your peers? Is that important to you?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  I'm acknowledged by a lot of people, probably too much.

• 43:06Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  You know, young men coming up really know and identify with the struggle and the grind and what I've done. So I think there's a different kind of respect going on. Not what I had thought, but another kind of respect. And I feel it all the time. You know, I'm walking down the street and people shout out to me and, you know, it's, it's the real thing.

• 43:32Guy Raz?

  How much of your success do you think is because of your skill and intelligence and hard work and how much of it is because of luck?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it is luck. I do. I think my own sort of philosophy is that the window of opportunity opens for you several times in life, for one. And I think the intelligence comes from knowing when that window is open and, you know, being able to jump through that window. Because you could have all the talent in the world, but sometimes the window is just not open.

• 44:07Guy Raz?

  Besides the, obviously, the stuff that landed you in prison, what are there mistakes that you made early in the business that you would have done differently, knowing what you know now?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Let me just say that mistakes can be a very good thing.

• 44:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  You know, so there were some mistakes that we made, but we did so many great things. And the thing about that is, if you start getting gun shy and start being afraid to make a mistake, you'll never have the brilliant ideas. You'll never have the big ideas. You know, if you just try to hit the safe, the safe ones, you know, then you're doomed, I feel like.

• 44:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  So you need to make mistakes. You need to make mistakes. You need, you need to goof. Because if you're not goofing a few times, it means you're not reaching.

• 45:01Guy Raz?

  That's Steve Madden, founder of Steve Madden Shoes. And by the way, if you want to find out more about Steve's story, he's got a memoir coming out in a few months. It's called "The Cobbler: How I Disrupted an Industry, Fell from Grace, and Came Back Stronger Than Ever." By the way, how many, how many pairs of shoes do you actually own?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  I don't own a lot of shoes.

• 45:25Guy Raz?

  What's the fanciest brand you own?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  I own Johnson and Murphy.

• 45:29Guy Raz?

  That's the fanciest brand you own?

• 45:32Speaker 01

  I do. I own Johnson and Murphy shoes. They're the greatest. Yeah, my dad wore them.

• 45:56Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And today, we're checking back on a story that began about eight years ago in Columbia, South Carolina. Gabby Goodwin was about five at the time, and every day, she went through the same routine.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  My mom would put pigtails in my hair. And for every pigtail that was in my hair, there was plastic barrettes on every single one of them.

• 46:21Guy Raz?

  And usually, she had one of these plastic barrettes in 10 of her pigtails.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  But me, when I was little, I would be running around at school, and my mom would pick me up, and my hair would be a complete mess.

• 46:33Speaker 05

  I would say, you know, Gabby, what happened to your bows? Like, what were you doing?

• 46:38Guy Raz?

  That voice, of course, is Gabby's mom, Rosalyn, who started to get really fed up that her daughter's barrettes kept coming out of her hair. And so one day, Rosalyn actually went on Twitter to complain about it, just to blow off some steam.

• 46:51Speaker 05

  I didn't think anybody would respond. I got off Twitter, came back on probably in about an hour, and had all of these responses from moms who felt the same way.

• 47:00Guy Raz?

  All these moms saying, yes, our daughter's barrettes are falling out too. And we're wasting tons of money replacing them. But Rosalyn wasn't necessarily looking to solve this problem. She was working full time as a healthcare lobbyist, and she had no interest in starting a business.

• 47:17Speaker 05

  But a couple of weeks later, as I was styling Gabrielle's hair, I mumbled under my breath, somebody needs to make a bow. And she jumped out of the seat and said, Mommy, are we gonna make a bow?

• 47:29Guy Raz?

  And so every single day after that, Gabby would ask Rosalyn.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  When are my bows coming?

• 47:34Speaker 04

  When are my bows coming?

• 47:35Speaker 05

  When are we gonna make my bows?

• 47:36Speaker 04

  When are my bows coming?

• 47:38Guy Raz?

  So Rosalyn figured, OK, since Gabby is so into it, maybe we could just do this as a kind of science project. We'll work on a design for a barrette, and see if we can make just one, just one barrette. So first, they drew out a design with two faces. So you could see a pretty decoration, no matter which way the barrette was turned.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  And each face has teeth and craters to trap and gather the hair. So you're basically creating this sandwiching mechanism to make sure the hair, it doesn't slip out of the hair.

• 48:11Guy Raz?

  So Rosalyn looks at this design and she's thinking, hey, you know, this isn't half bad. Maybe, maybe we can make a prototype. So she gets the number of a couple of engineers and she calls them up.

• 48:23Speaker 05

  And you could just kind of hear them sigh, like, oh, God. And they said, ma'am, listen, you've got 15 minutes.

• 48:29Guy Raz?

  So she goes to meet with these guys in North Carolina. And at first, things do not go well. The engineers are looking at this design of a hair clip and they're just not getting it.

• 48:39Speaker 05

  And I said, well, you know what? I'm going to run to my car. I promise you, there's a standard barrette that has fallen off of Gabrielle's hair. And sure enough, I dug in the backseat of my car, found a standard barrette, brought that back in.

• 48:52Guy Raz?

  And at that point, Rosalyn used a mannequin to demonstrate how a standard barrette could just fall out of your hair and how her and Gabby's design worked a lot better.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  And as soon as I did that, the light bulb went off. And they said, ma'am, we think you're on to something.

• 49:09Guy Raz?

  So these two engineers agreed to help her make the prototype. They found a manufacturer in China. They made an initial run of 500 bows. And in early 2014, Rosalyn and Gabby put them up for sale on their website.

• 49:23Speaker 05

  We get our first sale and we're like, this is actually happening. Like, oh, my God, we're in business.

• 49:29Guy Raz?

  They sold out of the first 500 pretty quickly. So Rosalyn and her husband took out a few loans to fulfill more orders. And when we last checked in with Gabby, the company had just become profitable. And now, her bows are in 74 targets in 22 states.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  Anybody can be a kid for no as long as you have the courage to run a business. You can be four years old and have a business.

• 49:53Guy Raz?

  That's Gabrielle Goodwin and her mom, Rosalyn, founders of Gabby bows. If you want to learn more about the company or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org.

• 50:12Guy Raz?

  And we're gonna close out the show a little differently this week because some of you may know I also co-host a kids and family podcast about science called "Wow in the World." And if you happen to know a kid between 5 and 12 years old, please play it for them. It's an adventure show where me and my co-host, Mindy Thomas, go back and forth in time, inside the human body, and into space. And every episode is rooted in real science, like from real, peer-reviewed, scientific journals. Anyway, our latest episode is out, and this is a special one. It's our first-ever "Wow in the World" musical with four original songs performed by Mindy and me. So I thought I'd play you an excerpt.

• 50:54Speaker 06

  This, Guy Raz, is my latest, greatest musical invention.

• 51:00Guy Raz?

  Musical invention? What does it do?

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Well, I could tell you...

• 51:07Guy Raz?

  Uh-oh.

• 51:08Speaker 06

  Or...

• 51:09Guy Raz?

  Mindy!

• 51:11Speaker 06

  I could... Or I could...

• 51:19Speaker 06

  Or I could...

• 51:23Speaker 06

  I could show you books and charts and a laundry list of parts, but where's the fun?

• 51:28Guy Raz?

  Well, it may not be fun, but it'll be informative.

• 51:30Speaker 06

  So let's start a new adventure, and I'm very confident you're gonna thank me when we're done.

• 51:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that sounds fine, but we both know how this goes. Anything for science.

• 51:43Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 51:43Guy Raz?

  Next thing, I'm wearing crazy clothes. Just this once, how about we try a new approach before I wind up as a flamingo or an oversized cockroach?

• 51:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's true, that did happen. Guy Raz, let me show you my incredible contraption. You gotta see this thing in action. It turns the whole world into sun.

• 52:12Guy Raz?

  Come on, Mindy, I know you. You love to put me in danger. Things start out strange and then get stranger. Then something always goes wrong.

• 52:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a valid point. But there's nothing like the feeling of the universe revealing all its secrets face to face.

• 52:36Guy Raz?

  That's true.

• 52:37Speaker 06

  Ride a wow machine or pigeon, you'll get more than just a smidgen of a thrill no book can replace. Smidgen? So if you really wanna know, and you want your brain to grow. You know, I do, Mindy, but we've got so much to go through. Can't you just tell me? You know, I could, Guy Raz, but like the song says, I'd rather Show you.

• 53:04Guy Raz?

  That's from the latest episode of our kids' science podcast, Wow in the World. You can download the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. And thanks for listening.