By Design : The Pair Behind Well-Heeled Designs
While her peers obsessed over their thighs or budding breasts, a teen-aged Else Anita Soffar was concerned about her feet.
“I had such a small foot, my mom had to take me to the kids’ department. When I was finally a Size 5, I was so excited to get these wonderful women’s shoes, I just started buying and collecting them,” says Soffar, who is now a Size 8, with shoes by the dozen--the lion’s share designed by her--in her Granada Hills closet.
Combining everything she ever wanted in footwear--height, sex appeal, comfort, power, shock value--has brought Soffar, 38, a following of like-minded entertainers, designers and magazine editors. They use her six-inch platform stiletto shoes and boots to reach staggering heights on the stage or the page.
John Scher, one of six New York designers who used Soffar’s ankle-strap heels on the runway last week, describes them as “a young take on a classic shoe. It’s a very sexy look. She constantly does new shapes . . . beautiful shapes that always look good on the foot.”
The outrageous and quasi-hooker designs by Jungle Shoes, as the Granada Hills company is known, might look like props. But they are sold in Japan, England, Canada, Germany and in specialty stores nationwide, including the Shoe Collection and XTC in Los Angeles. To “confident women,” Soffar says. “You have to be confident, because you get noticed.” Such notoriety costs $70 to $500.
Sitting in a poolside den, Soffar flips through a fat book of press clippings that includes shots of Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Elle MacPherson, RuPaul and Barbie in Jungle shoes. To her right is Randy, 37, her husband, business partner and a guitarist. On the floor is 8-month-old Shannen, who already has 20 pairs of shoes from such places as the Gap.
Just a few days earlier, Jungle Shoes had moved from the adjoining garage to a nearby industrial park. It was another sign that the company, born in Southern California eight years ago but spawned on the Texas club scene, is upwardly mobile.
At 24, Else Anita was a New Jersey transplant in Houston. She taught first grade and wore a different pair of high heels each day as a way of teaching colors. She met Randy, a Houston native, in a club. “Oh, it’s so cliche,” she says with a bubbly laugh. “Can’t we make up a different story?”
The couple moved to Los Angeles, married and decided that club-going women in thigh-high stockings and heels needed a shoe and a stocking in one. While Else Anita worked as a marketing coordinator for Calvin Klein, Randy took a year off from music to develop the product. “I thought I would get a hammer and nails and put it together,” he says.
Instead, they paid a manufacturer $20,000 for a prototype. Bullock’s ordered 300 pairs in black and brown. But two days before delivery, Else Anita tried the stocking shoes and discovered: “They were terrible.” She canceled the order. “We could have delivered them,” she says, “but we wanted to build a name.”
That’s when the company became Jungle Shoes, named more for the streets of New York than for their it’s-a-jungle-out-there experience.
Eventually, the couple developed the perfect Lycra stocking to go atop a suede leather pump. It didn’t run or cut off circulation, and it could be washed. Louis Dell’Olio copied the concept three years later. His version lasted a season. Jungle Shoes’ is still going, for about $100, in new fabrics that include stretch lace and sequins.
The Soffars, who decline to discuss the company’s earnings, keep reworking their lines, adding at least 30 styles each season in fabrics ranging from patent leather and vinyl to faux leopard, silver and gold glitter. Inspiration comes from their “gut instincts, the street, the general public, the economy,” Randy says.
And now from Shannen, says Else Anita: “When you have a baby, you look at life through their eyes. And everything is so fresh and so new. Just the way that they look at a bird in a tree is wonderful. You do look at life differently.”
