Gourmet

HS: What’s interesting for me is how you’ve gone, as far as footwear is concerned, from a rather limited offering to a much broader scope. How does that work as you project the growth of Gourmet or as you apply more influences to the design process?

Jon: I guess when we first started, our main goal... well not even goal, we were starting a clothing company. The emphasis, or story, behind the clothing company was three Italians from the East Coast coming together to start a clothing brand, but he key ingredient to the recipe was that we were going to make all the clothing in Italy.

Greg: So, it would be an Italian American version of a high fashion brand.

Jon: It’s our interpretation as Italian American’s of doing a high fashion line. We pulled it off for the first couple seasons, but it was bad time.

Greg: Very expensive.

Jon: Very expensive. Making $400 sweatpants and $1200 sweatshirts. It just didn’t make sense where the market was going. We had some success and some failures. When we introduced the fall of 2008 collection, we introduced a few shoes... the ones kind of inspired by the Jordan's. We came with those really just as an accessory. We had the capabilities of a factory to make that type of shoe. We put out a few colors and it kind of went crazy. Unfortunately, the quality wasn’t as high as our clothing. Obviously the message behind the shoe was there and we got some notoriety.

Greg: From that point, with the success of the shoe, it was kind of like lightning in a bottle. People either loved us or hated us. We just felt like it was a better direction to go into shoes and perfect that than to try and offer both [clothing and footwear]. At that point on, based on the success of that shoe, we decided to move forward as a brand with footwear only. At that point we also picked up a whole new team as far as manufacturing the shoe and the back-end. We have a great team that allows us to work with our strong suits and we’re more of a complete business now.