It comes as no surprise that Sophia Webster used to be a competitive freestyle disco dancer. She has the lust for shimmery pastels, the poise and determination. There’s a reggae DJ father in the mix, too. And a mother, who is a principal of a London secondary school and had different ideas for her daughter’s future. Instead of stage school, Webster attended Camberwell College of Arts where she found herself repeatedly sketching the model’s shoes in the life-drawing classes. Her tutor told her about Cordwainers, the world-renowned footwear design course, at the London College of Fashion. Her current HQ in East London speaks to the showgirl and the serious shoe designer (she really can make shoes, having practised when she worked for Georgina Goodman and the upscale Italian shoe label Casadei).
Sophia Webster, centre, receiving the British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund prize from Caroline Rush, chief executive of the fashion council and Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue
It’s a quaint Victorian, two-and-a-half storey, narrow brick building, on a back street that, only a few years ago, was more shabby than chic. Webster’s interiors are part Dickensian, part Legally Blonde. Or maybe Hans Christian Andersen. From the waist up, she looks like The Little Mermaid and sounds like The Little Match Girl. A wooden mezzanine, where she designs, juts out over 30 employees, beavering away on orders, designs and marketing. The walls and shelves are garlanded with racks of different heel shapes, pom-poms, pictures of Hello Kitty-styled as Frida Kahlo — two of her idols.
In case that’s not sufficiently girly, there is a sign hanging from the mezzanine spelling out her name in pink neon. Next door, they are noisily constructing a Nobu Hotel, a development that seems appropriate to Webster’s own meteoric rise. Arguably she’s doing well enough not to need the pounds 200,000 that the BFC/Vogue Fashion Fund offers to its winning finalist. However, the money isn’t awarded to the candidate most in need but the one who the panel — which comprised of 10 industry experts, including Vogue’s editor-in-chief Alexandra Shulman, Victoria Beckham, Joan Burstein, the founder of Browns boutique and one journalist, me — believes is at a stage where it will be most helpful to the expansion of their business.
An affinity for the whimsical
Her ascent seems seamless, but it’s the result of slog and talent. After Cordwainers, she was accepted onto the Royal College of Art’s prestigious MA. While still a student there, she designed a collection for River Island, interned at Nicholas Kirkwood and, at the age of 27, launched her own company. Kirkwood was so struck by her sales pitch, he let her use part of his studio to work from. He also, semi-formally, vetted her then boyfriend, Bobby Stockley, a former electrician whom she married in 2013 and who now helps run the business from the basement.
“I tried it up on the mezzanine,” he says. “But there was too much chat.” It’s not hard to see why Kirkwood was impressed with the pair of them. Webster is one of the clearest-sighted nascent brand builders you could meet. Even when shoes took a turn for the clompily androgynous recently, she stuck to her first principles, introducing flatform-lace-ups that looked about as masculine as frosted fairy cakes. Having set herself the task of designing a fresh pair of shoes every day when she was at college, she always knew exactly what she wanted her line to look like — and when to debut.
“I started with a ‘pre-collection’ rather than a ‘main’ because that’s the one retailers have the biggest budgets for,” she says. Webster’s whimsical styles — with their butterfly winged backs, flower-encrusted straps, ruffled crests, sherbet-colour patchworks and neon trims — were so distinctive they immediately carved out a niche in a market that until that point seemed saturated with whimsical, distinctive designs. She was that still relatively rare spark: a young female shoe designer making high-impact shoes with lots of detail for “girls like me, from ordinary backgrounds, who had been brought up on the glamour of Sex And The City shoes but were never going to spend pounds 600 on a pair”.
She likes a challenge
Pricing was key. They were not going to be cheap but something between high-end high street and luxury. Aspirational, distinctive, something she could imagine her friends saving up for. She considered manufacturing in China, “where contrary to what people think, there are some incredible factories”. But she fancied a tan, so she has spent the last four years flying back and forth to Brazil — on one occasion, when she was pregnant with her daughter Bibi, now almost two, for one day. “It was definitely challenging,” she muses. “There were lots of things I could have got made in Italy that Brazil wasn’t geared up to do.”
But Italy would have made the shoes too expensive for her market. She adds: “The limitations were good for me because I had to work out other methods. They didn’t do 3D printing, for instance, so that meant a lot of the effects I had in my head had to go. But out of that came all the colour combinations.” Those sugar almonds and acid mixes became a signature — although not without some macho resistance from the factory. “There was a lot of ‘Oh my God’ when they saw some of my colour palettes,” she says. “But on the other hand, they were willing to take me and my very small orders on. At the start, they would happily make just 12 pairs of some styles, if that’s all I needed.”
Last year, Webster sold 60,000 pairs of shoes — she retails in 200 shops around the world including Harvey Nichols and Selfridges — and turned over pounds 9 million. This year, she will sell 85,000 and has just launched a range of instantly identifiable handbags. By 2018, she is on target to do pounds 20 million. Bobby is the pragmatic one who tells her, not unreasonably, they need some flats in the collection, based on his sound observation that most women are currently wearing flats — including his wife, who is in a pair of Webster trainers when we meet. As a token of her appreciation, she has named a shoe after him, and also after their daughter. You sense that in the Webster/Stockley household, there is no higher honour.
