"They have a very European look: heavy bottoms, lug soles. They're colorful. They translate well -- funky utility sneakers with chunky soles." That's how Andrea Hersh, head buyer for Chernin's Shoes, a Chicago-area chain of 13 shoe stores, describes Rebels shoes. Rebels, bright and whimsical, offer Hersh something else: vital "sell-through." The shoes move off the shelf.
Mothers buy their young daughters a pair and then start wondering if the line has something for them. Teen daughters come clomping home in a pair, and mothers ask, "Where did you get those?" One style of women's shoe three years ago has multiplied into more than 20 children's styles alone for Rebels, in multiple colors. (Rebels now sells about 40 styles of women's and children's shoes.) There are boots and sandals. Boys' shoes are coming this fall.
Balle and McCormack now travel to shoe shows in Europe twice a year to see what's hot -- right now it's flowers and animal prints, as in leopards and zebras -- on the theory that styles emerging there today will be au courant in Los Angeles and New York next year. That way, they get a jump on the U.S. market. They have a designer in Italy who regularly cruises the shows. If he sees something, he faxes a sketch over. If Balle and McCormack like it, they fax it to their manufacturers in Israel or Italy. Within a few weeks Rebels has samples to show customers. In six weeks the company can have shoes in the stores.
* * *
First step. Balle came back from Israel with a sample pair of the shoes, women's size 7. McCormack slipped them on and began making the rounds of local boutiques. "I knew I could sell these off my feet," she says. Adds Balle, "The look was just emerging from Europe. It was a look everyone was starting to chase. And we had the product."
By the time the first shipment arrived, six weeks later, in November 1993, McCormack had the shoes sold. They retailed for $35 a pair, well under the pricey $100 Palladiums. Rebels first went after local boutiques, where McCormack had connections. Boutiques, she says, see shoes as a fashion accessory, so one style will do. Shoe stores and department stores expect a line of shoes, which Rebels lacked. Balle and McCormack had one style of shoe, and it came in three colors: black, white, and natural. Recalls McCormack, "I suffered a lot of rejection trying to sell jewelry to these stores, but with the shoes that never happened."
* * *
Earthquake. The business started in Balle's bedroom. It soon marched into the living room and from there invaded the garage. "The car went out on the street, and the shoes went into the garage," says Balle. UPS started making regular deliveries, which "stressed" Balle's landlady. This is a quiet neighborhood, she told him. It was time to move.
But Balle was cautious. He sensed that getting overextended could kill a promising start-up. And besides, he had no idea if Rebels was a promising start-up.
"I was still hesitating; this didn't feel right," he recalls. "I didn't want to commit to a warehouse. This was a fashion item we were selling, and fashions change all the time." Warehouse owners wanted five-year leases.
He settled on Public Storage as his landlord. Conveniently, lockers there rented monthly, but there was no phone. In a good month Balle could rent two lockers. When things slowed down, he could cut back to one.
Soon there were more and bigger trucks, 18-wheelers pulling up to the Public Storage lockers. Balle and McCormack usually figured someone was moving a household from across the country. Then the door would open, revealing a wall of shoe boxes needing to be unloaded.
The locker grew so full that only the svelte McCormack could wriggle her way to the back with a flashlight to fish out a couple of size 6's for that little boutique out in Pasadena. When the big earthquake hit in January 1994, the locker was packed so tightly, nothing moved.
* * *
The odd couple. In his wire-rimmed glasses, Balle looks vaguely owlish. A shock of dark hair and Groucho-like eyebrows frame his face. He is wryer than he realizes, with his off-center syntax. "If you don't like to swim with sharks, then don't go to the water," he will say. Nothing seems to faze him, perhaps owing to his service in the Lebanon war, an experience he describes as "guerrillas popping out of bushes."
McCormack is blond, with chiseled cheekbones and almond eyes. Some people passing her on the street doubtless do a memory scan for a recent Hollywood film. It's an odd duo, an inscrutable relationship. Boyfriend, girlfriend. But separate apartments. Opposites attracting. Design and accounting. The look and the hustle. His is a hardscrabble immigrant's story. She's from the Valley.
Maybe what binds them together is the knack -- the rush from selling all those shoes. They often work until 8 or 9 at night. Meals seem an afterthought, interludes between faxes to Italy or Israel. Each afternoon in those early days they jammed shoes into the rear of McCormack's two-door Volvo. (If packed just right, it would take 17 cases.) They made deliveries, arriving breathless at the local boutiques after fighting freeway traffic. The final stop was always at UPS to drop off out-of-town shipments minutes before the doors closed at 6 p.m. "We would beg them to let us in," McCormack recalls. The woman behind the counter had gotten used to Balle and McCormack's straggling in late, looking beat. Finally, one day she suggested, "Why don't you open an account? You know we do pick up."
Balle and McCormack looked at each other, startled by this smack-on-the-forehead revelation. "That's how little we knew," says McCormack. "We didn't know UPS picked up. We just thought they delivered."
* * *
Bagging Nordstrom's. Balle and McCormack can act cooler now. On a breezy spring day, with the sky a milky Mediterranean blue, Balle eases his shiny late-model foreign car into a parking space amid a sea of other equally shiny expensive-looking cars. The Nordstrom's West Side Pavilion store in Los Angeles rises like the facade of a cathedral.
Balle and McCormack head for the front door, which opens into the women's shoe department. No Rebels here. "This store had a change in buyers, and we had a problem," says McCormack. Translation: Nordstrom's makes buying decisions on a store-by-store basis. If a buyer leaves, you have to sell to the replacement.
