For the third time in just over a decade, Stuart Weitzman is under new ownership. Re-establishing a good relationship with partner manufacturers in Spain could be the key to Caleres making a success of its acquisition of the high-end women’s footwear brand.

Footwear group Caleres has completed its acquisition of high-end women’s footwear brand Stuart Weitzman. It took the brand over from previous owner, Tapestry, on August 4. The groups signed a definitive agreement about the Stuart Weitzman brand in February, with Caleres committing to pay $105 million for the deal, “subject to customary adjustments”.

Chief executive of Caleres, Jay Schmidt, said he had long admired Stuart Weitzman for the brand’s “pivotal role in shaping the footwear industry”. He said Caleres was committed to preserving the brand’s legacy of craftsmanship, quality and fit, “while driving it forward”. His counterpart at Tapestry, Joanne Crevoiserat, said the Stuart Weitzman brand and its teams had added “to the passion, creativity and craftsmanship of our organisation over the last decade”. But she added that Tapestry wanted to “maintain a sharp focus” on its largest value-creation opportunities and that this sale would allow the group “to sustain Coach’s leadership and momentum, while reinvigorating Kate Spade”.

Tapestry reported full-year revenues of $215.1 million for Stuart Weitzman for the period ending June 28, 2025. This represents a fall of 11% compared to the previous year. The brand’s new owner said the acquisition of Stuart Weitzman would cement its “leadership position in women’s fashion footwear, particularly in the contemporary segment of the market”. It described it as a brand with “unique meaning and resonance with consumers” and one of the most iconic names in luxury footwear.

Elegance and modernity

Mr Schmidt says the brand’s original designs “have embodied elegance and modernity for decades” and that Caleres is committed to preserving the artistry, quality and reputation for fit that the brand has. One star customer, singer Beyoncé, once said she had been able to “dance a thousand miles in his [Stuart Weitzman’s] beautiful shoes”.

Jonathan Lelonek, who joined Stuart Weitzman in 2012 and was most recently its senior vice-president for global wholesale, will become brand president under Caleres’s ownership. Earlier in his career, Mr Lelonek held senior roles in sales and merchandising at Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo and Paul Frank.

Stuart Weitzman himself retired from the business in 2017, becoming chairman emeritus. Before that, his company became part of the Jones Apparel Group in 2012; from there, Sycamore Partners, the private equity fund that owns Jones Apparel, sold the brand in 2015 for $574 million, with the buyer, Coach, beating bids from other private equity firms and from shoe companies. The Coach parent group renamed itself Tapestry in 2017.

Serendipity strikes

Shoes were not part of Stuart Weitzman’s original plans when he was nearing the end of a course in business at the Wharton School in Philadelphia in 1963. His family were footwear manufacturers in New York and Massachusetts, but he wanted to work on Wall Street and, in his words “break the bank”. Goldman Sachs had offered him a position and he had agreed to start there after completing his studies. He says serendipity stepped into his path.

How serendipity did this was through an invitation from his college room-mate during their senior year to draw some sketches of shoe designs for his (the room-mate’s) own family footwear firm. He had seen Mr Weitzman produce some art for university theatre productions and said he thought a transition to drawing shoes would be possible and, potentially, of interest to his father, who often bought designs of women’s shoes from freelancers. Stuart Weitzman looked at the company’s current catalogue and produced 20 sketches of shoe designs that he thought would tie in well. His friend’s father bought the drawings.

When the academic year ended, the would-be Wall Street broker went home to New York for the summer. One June day, walking in Manhattan, he went past the famous show-people’s shoe store, I.Miller. In the window there was a pair of one of the shoes he had drawn a few months earlier. He went into the store to check that his eyes were not deceiving him. An assistant confirmed the shoes had come from his friend’s father’s firm and added that they were selling so well I.Miller had already placed a repeat order. Thrilled, Mr Weitzman’s reaction was to call Goldman Sachs to tell them he changed his mind and would not be taking up the job offer after all. He started looking for a job in footwear design right away.

Gain in Spain

When his father died in 1965, Stuart Weitzman helped run the family firm. He continued to create designs for it when new owners bought the company at the start of the 1970s. Those new owners transferred some of the company’s production to Spain, specifically to the Elda-Petrer shoe manufacturing hub in the province of Alicante. Through this, the designer formed strong ties to footwear producers there and these partners became a fundamental part of his own set-up when he established the Stuart Weitzman brand in the mid-1980s. In the decades that followed, in spite of the changes in ownership of the company, those relationships with skilled Spanish manufacturers remained strong. Until recently, at least.

In 2024, Stuart Weitzman spoke about this in a talk at his alma mater, the Wharton School. He said he saw opportunities in Spain, even if there might have been more prestige in choosing to work with manufacturing partners in Italy instead. Tipping his hat to a famous poem by Robert Frost, he said he was pleased now to have taken the road less travelled. As in the closing line of the poem, for Stuart Weitzman, taking the road less travelled ended up making all the difference.

“The sourcing of your product is as important as what you end up creating,” he says. “We were a big shot in a small world, whereas in Italy we would have been a little shot in a big world. There was less competition for workers in Spain, and there was a real discipline in that society, which is still there. In 46 years, we had no strikes in any of our factories. There was no confrontation between owners and workers. We worked together and it paid off.”

Adopted son

He remains extremely proud of having been named in 2008 as an ‘adopted son’ of the town of Elda, an honour he describes as being the equivalent of receiving the keys of the city. At the time of his nomination, the authorities in Elda described Mr Weitzman as employing, directly or indirectly, 3,000 people in Elda and Petrer and being responsible for employing 40% of the area’s footwear industry workers. Fifteen local factories were making Stuart Weitzman shoes at the time, some of them working exclusively for the New York-based brand. One of these, SW Creations, was 50% owned by the brand.

As a relatively big shot in a relatively small world, the brand was able to decide its own the values and, according to the founder, its manufacturing partners shared them. Value number-one was that there could never, under any circumstances, be any compromise on product quality, which included comfort. “I didn’t want to put a shoe on anyone’s foot if it was going to give them a blister,” the designer says now. “She would tell her friend, who would tell another friend and I would end up losing eight customers over it. And I know from carrying out analysis of our marketing campaigns that it cost, on average, $8,000 to bring in one new customer. Spain worked out because, having that discipline in the factory, the DNA of Stuart Weitzman became ‘fashion and function’, not just one or the other.”

Bonds under strain

The connection to Spain continues. Shoes in the brand’s most recent collections include styles as diverse as the Babette Mary Jane slingback, the Sovinnie flat in patent leather, the Stuart Power Boot 85 in snakeskin, and the Hudson shearling chukka boot. All of these products are made in Spain. As suggested above, though, things have changed. The bond between the brand and the manufacturing partners it worked particularly closely with for decades seems all-but broken.

Major shifts in the dynamic began not long after the ‘adopted son’ accolade the town of Elda bestowed on the US designer. What is now described as a real-estate bubble left Spain fiercely exposed by the 2008 global financial crisis. In the first quarter of 2008, the official unemployment rate was 9.6%. By the first quarter of 2009, this figure had increased to 17.25%. It continued to rise until reaching a level of close to 27% at the start of 2013. At times during this period, the unemployment rate for people under the age of 25 was frequently reported to be around 50%.

Some of the factories that made shoes for Stuart Weitzman in Elda and Petrer closed around 2010, but a recovery began in 2014 and, by the time the brand’s founder retired in 2017, other operators had become part of the Weitzman world. In total, 14 factories in the area were producing shoes for the brand when the founder stepped away. A group of seven of these companies were long-term, Elda-based suppliers that produced shoes only for Stuart Weitzman. The brand also had its own team of around 45 people in a central office located between Elda and Petrer. Some production was taking place there and other members of the team worked in product development, material sourcing and in an in-house technical support department. In addition, the number of people in the area working indirectly in the 14 manufacturing sites was still in the thousands.

Efficiency drive

More change was on the way, though. In November 2017, a new production director, José Alfredo Flores, arrived from Tempe, the footwear sourcing and manufacturing group of Inditex. An Elda native, he was a seasoned shoe industry professional, but with the added experience of working as part of a large fashion organisation (few are larger than Inditex). Across two spells, he worked for Tempe for more than 12 years. This gave Mr Flores an understanding of the way Tapestry wanted its ownership of the prestigious shoe brand to work following the founder’s departure.

At a formal meeting in 2018 between the company’s New York-based management team and the seven traditional Elda partners, things came to a head. The discussion focused on how the world had changed and the shift towards online shopping with delivery to the customer’s home, plus the growing preference of many consumers for more informal footwear. The Tapestry team asked for detailed cost and quality analyses of the products its Elda-Petrer partners were making. This exercise flagged up a need for change. Around this time, Tapestry also moved some production of Stuart Weitzman shoes to a large, modern factory in Elche, 30 kilometres away. It said the Elche factory was able to offer it a cost-saving of between 15% and 20% compared to its near neighbours, using exactly the same materials.

Turbulent twenties

Covid-19, plus all the other macroeconomic and geopolitical crises of the turbulent 2020s added to the challenge of maintaining smooth working relationships between the brand’s leadership and its manufacturing partners. The footwear industry in Elda and Petrer has had more bad years than good years so far this decade. Perhaps a little too late, even those manufacturers that only produced for Stuart Weitzman began trying to find new customers.

By the time of the announcement in February this year that Caleres wanted to become the new owner of Stuart Weitzman, only a handful of smaller operators in the area were still supplying shoes to the brand. Orders were limited and optimism was in short supply. The last of the traditional seven Elda manufacturers, SW Creaciones, had just begun formal negotiations with its employees over a redundancy and factory-closure programme. This programme is now complete and the facility has closed its doors.

Caleres has not responded to our requests for more detail on what its commitment to preserving the brand’s “artistry, quality and reputation for fit” will mean for suppliers. How easy will it be to keep these characteristics in place if it chooses to work with new suppliers in new locations? At the same time, if it is to keep the brand’s ties to Spain in place, it has to work to build the relationships back up again. 

Rebuilding exercise

Hope remains in the wider Spanish footwear sector that there is mileage in this decades-old relationship yet. With the impetus of new owners for the Stuart Weitzman brand and with a more favourable tariff situation than many feared in the spring of this year, ties between the company and partner manufacturers in Elda and Petrer can be rebuilt.

National footwear industry association FICE says the new framework for a trade agreement that the US and the European Union (EU) jointly announced in August gives grounds for optimism. It will mean that exports of shoes from Spain and the rest of the EU to the US will face a tariff of no more than 15%. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has said a single 15% tariff rate for the vast majority of EU exports will give “much-needed clarity” for consumers and for businesses. This should give Caleres some reassurance that the supply chain model it has inherited for Stuart Weitzman can still work well.

FICE says the brand’s founder “fell in love with Spain” and came to look on the province of Alicante as a home from home. The organisation describes Mr Weitzman as “a great, master shoemaker”, who came to rely on ‘Made In Spain’ for the production of his high-end shoes. It says he found in the manufacturing hub of the province of Alicante the ideal manufacturing partners for developing his brand.

“We remain convinced,” FICE continues, “that Alicante, and in particular the area of Elda-Petrer, can still provide the best production set-up that Caleres will find for Stuart Weitzman shoes. It should continue to make those shoes here.” Stuart Weitzman took the road less travelled. He is not the only person hoping the brand that bears his name has not reached the end of that road yet.

Shoe designer Stuart Weitzman at Wharton School in Philadelphia in 2024.
Credit: The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania

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