Steve Madden
The chunky platforms and stretch boots that owned the late-'90s teen mall — and a founder's story wild enough for a movie. Steve Madden built a shoe empire from the trunk of a car, then went to federal prison for stock fraud tangled up with the Wolf of Wall Street.
Steve Madden started his company in 1990 with $1,100, selling shoes out of the trunk of his car. Born in Queens in 1958, he had an eye for a look teenage girls would sprint toward: chunky soles, platform slides, and stretchy boots that turned up in every mall through the late '90s. The shoes were affordable, of-the-moment, and everywhere, and the advertising was just as memorable: beginning in 1997 the brand ran its surreal "big head" campaign — models with cartoonishly oversized heads on tiny bodies, posed on city streets, art-directed by illustrator Tommy Kane — which ran into the mid-2000s and became instantly recognizable.
The money behind the growth is where the story turns dark. The brokerage Stratton Oakmont — cofounded by Madden's childhood friend Danny Porush — first lent him expansion capital and then underwrote his company's initial public offering. That connection put Madden inside one of the most notorious securities-fraud operations of the decade. In 2002 he was convicted of stock manipulation, money laundering, and securities fraud, sentenced to 41 months in prison, and forced to resign as CEO and board member. He was released in April 2005.
Remarkably, the label outlived the scandal. Revenue climbed by nearly $100 million in 2006 to $475.1 million, and by 2021 the company reported $1.9 billion in revenue. Madden's saga later reached a wider audience through The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), where he appears — played by Jake Hoffman — in a scene of Jordan Belfort pumping Madden's stock to a room of Stratton Oakmont brokers. The shoes, meanwhile, kept selling.
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