Down at heel idea made me so well heeled

How I Made It: Glenys Berd, Founder of Lovethoseshoes.com

BOREDOM can be a great motivator – if you don’t enjoy what you are doing it can give you the incentive to change direction.

In Glenys Berd’s case, boredom drove her to move from working for a soft-furnishings company to interior design and then to selling shoes. “I was bored and thought, what can I do now? I wanted something else to fulfil me.”

After leaving grammar school, Berd studied journalism in Manchester but quit to join her then boyfriend in his soft-furnishings business. “I was doing his books at night, and I thought it would be far more interesting to go into that and build it up,” she said. “We turned the company into an interior-design business rather than just selling soft furnishings in the shop.”

They married and Berd and her husband found themselves working on show homes for builders across the country. Unfortunately, the partnership didn’t last long. They divorced and Berd took over the reins.

But it was not long before boredom set in again and Berd began to look in other directions. It was then that the idea of using the internet came to her.

She said: “This was back in 1997 when the internet was very new. My older brother was working in computers and he gave me his old laptop and I was fascinated by it.”

Determined to find out more, she called Cable & Wireless, which put her in touch with internet expert Nick Evans. “I drove him mad and asked him a million questions,” said Berd. Inspired by Evans’s assurance that you could do business online, Berd launched LadyBwear, a clothing firm.

She invested £5,000 to start up the business – and so did Evans, who continued to give advice while remaining in his full-time job after being headhunted by NTL.

Thanks to her interior-design firm, Berd already had the facilities and the manpower to start a new venture. “I had all my workrooms and all my machinists, and one of my girls had been a tailor.”

The LadyBwear website was launched in November 1998, and by that December Berd had taken $3,000 (£1,500) in sales. The business became successful and soon Berd had 29 machinists churning out 50 styles of clothing.

Berd puts the growth of the company down to its large range of sizes. “We made clothes for everyone, from little Japanese girls to supersize Americans. And we built up a large worldwide audience by marketing through the websites.”

But clothes were not to be the end of the line. One day Berd was in a waiting room flicking through an old magazine when she came across an article on shoes that were made with inverse heels to improve the wearer’s posture.

Berd was captivated by the idea and after some research she was able to find the American company, Earth, that produced the shoes, in which the heel is set lower than the rest of the foot. Earth was not interested in selling its products outside America so Berd convinced it to send her some samples and she put together a website to sell them.

She decided to call her business Lovethoseshoes because someone had already trademarked her first choice, Loveyourfeet.

When the shoes were mentioned in a British magazine, the trickle of orders turned into a flood and the new company took off. Since the first sale in 2003 Berd has grown the company, with a little help from celebrity fans including Gwyneth Paltrow, and expects sales to reach £3.5m this year. She recently closed LadyBwear to concentrate on her shoe business. But she has not finished yet and has started her third venture, Lovethosepictures, a digital photo-frame business.

Berd said she simply relies on ideas popping up. “You can’t plan things. I think all good ideas drop from the sky and, if you’ve got your hand out, you catch them,” she said. Now in her forties, she thinks the secret of her success is determination: “People say that I am driven. My business partner says it is as if I have a little sergeant on my shoulder with a clipboard, ticking off my ideas.”