My new freind Lili and me….she doesn’t work in shoes, but she wears them!

I am having a great time in NYC so far this week. To me the best Ffany show is this one. June is beautiful in this city….except for the rain today (booo).  However, it’s only Tuesday and I have already visited with so many great people, including my friends at Brown Shoe who have been very nice to me. J Yesterday, I spent time with Christos Dovas in his showroom talking to him about the future of his line, and then had lunch with my homegirl Heather Brady (we took a new pic, so no more security photo!) , who is going to be sharing a great story about a design contest that Brown does every year. I then hung out with my friends Geoff Green, Browns VP of Talent and Erin Conroy who is their PR Manager. I am going to be talking to her tomorrow about her comedy routine, so stay tuned for that!!  I ended the day meeting with George Sokolowski, who is a shoe industry vet spending more than 10 years in an executive role at TJX. He had a lot of great insight on the industry and running a great company.

Today, I started off by meeting with the VP of Marketing for Kenneth Cole where we spoke about what their non-profit entity Awareness, which is awesome. I will have more on that at a later date as well! My most recent meeting was with Morgan Williams who is the Creative Director for the cool website www.runningwithheels.com. What a great person!! We shared an equal enthusiasm for the industry and I knew right away that we will be able to do some fun collaborations…..starting tomorrow!

The show officially kicks off tomorrow… I will try and do my best to keep you updated on what is going on. I am going to be visiting several awesome people and cannot wait to launch the new site and share it all with you!!

At let me just give a big ole’ thank you to Jorge the Intern!! He has only been in Miami one week and he is already managing the site for me while I am away, styling photoshoots, visiting stores, booking models, interviewing new people we want to feature and much much more. Jorge is nothing short of awesome and I feel incredibly fortunate to have him spending the summer as the Pearl&Co/Shoebizness.com intern!!

Xoxo

Julia