Jimmy Choo

Jimmy Choo is a British luxury fashion house founded in London in 1996, known for shoes, handbags and accessories, and present in beauty through a licensed fragrance line. Since November 2017 it has been wholly owned by Capri Holdings Limited, which also owns Versace and Michael Kors, so the company no longer trades as an independent business [7]. In beauty retail, Jimmy Choo appears specifically as a fragrance brand; its footwear and leather goods fall outside beauty.

The company describes itself as an accessories house that began as a small East London atelier and grew into a global operation while keeping hand-craft at the centre of its work. Its collections are conceived by creative director Sandra Choi, who trained under her uncle, the shoemaker Jimmy Choo, and have been made by master artisans in the brand's London studio.

The business was founded in May 1996 by the Malaysian-born couture shoe designer Jimmy Choo and Tamara Mellon, then an accessories editor at British Vogue [2]. The venture was funded by Mellon's parents, Tom and Ann Yeardye, and built on the workshop that Jimmy Choo had set up in the late 1980s in a converted hospital building in the East End of London. The brand reached a wide audience after a 1998 mention in the HBO series Sex and the City, which the company links to the start of a celebrity-driven approach to selling its shoes.

Jimmy Choo has passed through a long series of owners. Phoenix Equity Partners took a majority stake in 2001, followed by Lion Capital in 2004 at a valuation of about £101 million [2]. In 2007 the company was sold to TowerBrook Capital Partners and Gala Capital, and in 2011 it was acquired by Labelux for £525.5 million; Labelux was later folded into JAB Holding Company in 2014 [2]. After a period as a company listed on the London Stock Exchange, Jimmy Choo was acquired in 2017 by Michael Kors Holdings — renamed Capri Holdings Limited the following year — for roughly £896 million, with the deal completing on 1 November 2017 [7]. It remains a wholly owned brand within Capri.

According to the company, its aesthetic is grounded in "modern glamour," combining artisanal craft with a contemporary luxury identity. Jimmy Choo positions itself at the luxury end of the accessories market, with design led from its London studio under Sandra Choi, who has been with the brand since its founding.

Jimmy Choo's beauty presence rests entirely on a fragrance licence held by Inter Parfums, which holds the worldwide rights to develop and sell perfume and certain cosmetic products under the Jimmy Choo name. The first fragrance, Jimmy Choo Eau de Parfum, launched in February 2011 as a women's scent composed by perfumer Olivier Polge and described as a fruity chypre [4]. The line has since grown to include the men's Jimmy Choo Man range, the flanker Jimmy Choo L'Eau, and I Want Choo, a women's fragrance introduced in 2020 [5].

Trade sources differ on when the underlying licence began. A widely cited account places the twelve-year agreement between J Choo Limited and Inter Parfums as taking effect on 1 January 2010 [8], while Cosmetics Business dates the original licence to 2009 [3] — most likely a difference between the announcement or signing year and the effective date. The first product reached shops in 2011 in either case. The partnership has been commercially significant: Jimmy Choo fragrance sales reached nearly €79 million in 2017, up 24% year on year, and the licence was extended through 31 December 2031 [3].

Jimmy Choo received the British Fashion Council's Designer Brand Award in 2008, and in 2019 Sandra Choi was inducted into the Footwear News Hall of Fame [2]. The company has also stated that Diana, Princess of Wales, was among its customers from the early 1990s.

Jimmy Choo is an active, trading luxury fashion house, but it is no longer independent: it has been a wholly owned brand of Capri Holdings since the 2017 acquisition. As of 2025 the brand continued to operate within the group, and its licensed fragrance business — the part relevant to beauty — remains in force under Inter Parfums through 2031.