Prepared Speech

Assalamualaikum and a very good morning I bid to Madam Asmad, our English
teacher and all my fellow friends. Today, I am standing in front all of you to give a
speech about person whom I admire.
I am very sure that each of us in this class had our own person whom we admire,
right? As for me, the person who I admire most is non ather than our own Malaysian
citizen who had created some of the most coveted shoes in the world, Dato Jimmy
Choo.
Jimmy Choo Yeang Keat, fashion designer. Born in 1961 in Penang, Malaysia.
The son of a shoe cobbler, Choo was immersed in the world of shoemaking from an
early age. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and by age 11 Choo had
made his first pair of shoes.
After learning from his father about the craft of shoemaking, Choo made his way
to England in the early 1980s to study at the Cordwainers Technical College in
Hackney, where he graduated with honors in 1983. His adventurous life started when
his father could only pay for his first semester and he must find other alternative to
support his studies. Choo has divulged that he worked part-time at restaurants and as a
cleaner at a shoe factory to help fund his college education.
Jimmy Choo traced his beginnings back to his workshop in Hackney, North
London, which he opened in 1986 by renting an old hospital building. It didn't take long
for Choo's reputation to build. Within two years after opening his shop, his
craftsmanship and designs were soon noticed and he came to the verge of international
notability when his creations were featured in a record eight pages in a 1988 issue of
Vogue. Vogue was one of the most popular magazine at that time.
Soon, Choo became the darling of the celebrity world, in particular Princess
Diana, who donned Choo's footwear seemingly everywhere she went. Princess Diana
became Choos permanent buyer and always wore Choos shoes whenever she went.
But it was his relationship with Vogue that would prove to be instrumental in the
rise of the Jimmy Choo brand. Despite the rise of his popularity, Choo was still a small
operation, making just 20 hand-made pairs shoes a week and he never gave up hope.
Tamara Yeardye Mellon, an accessories editor at Vogue, who often hired Choo to make
shoes for fashion shoots, sensed a larger market for Choo's creations. She approached
the shoemaker about partnering to create a line of ready-to-wear footwear.
Together, Choo and Mellon quickly grew the business, keeping the focus on
creating high-end footwear, but no longer relying on the idea that every single pair had
to be made by Choo himself. They contracted with Italian factories and opened their first
boutique shop in London. By the late 1990s, Choo had stores in Los Angeles and New
York and lineup of adoring Hollywood celebrities that included Julia Roberts and Renee
Zellweger.
By the turn of the century, the Choo name was a global brand, with high-end
retail clients that included Harrods and Saks Fifth Avenue carrying Choo footwear. The
Choo brand had also expanded to handbags and other accessories.
But in the background, all was not well. Choo and Mellon were at odds about the
direction of the company. In what would become one of the more fascinating rifts in the
fashion industry, Choo didn't think bigger was better. He questioned the quality of the
shoes the company was making, and seemed to long for the days when he was back at
his shop in Hackney making a small number of pieces of footwear for specific clients.
In 2001, Choo sold his half of the company to Robert Bensoussan of Equinox Luxury
Holdings for $30 million.
Today, Jimmy Choo has returned to his roots at a small shop he opened in London,
which serves as the headquarters for the exclusive Jimmy Choo Couture line. It's here
that Choo crafts a small number of pairs of shoes each week and trains a select group
of students on how to make high-end footwear.