Kenneth Cole’s father had a company in New York called El Greco, which became famous for its creation of Candies shoes for women.  Kenneth Cole went to Emory University in pursuit of becoming a lawyer.  Before beginning law school, however, he took a summer break to assist his father.  Kenneth Cole was captivated by the shoe and fashion industry.

In 1982, Kenneth Cole began his own shoe company called Kenneth Cole Inc.  His designs were to debut at the Hilton showrooms, but Cole got creative and rented a 40-foot trailer instead.  He parked the trailer on the streets of New York outside of the Hilton shoe show.  Cole avoided being ticketed and towed through the guise of Kenneth Cole Productions Inc. shooting the movie “The Birth of a Shoe Company.”  Cole sold 40,000 pairs of shoes in less than three days.  Cole uses the same ingeniousness in his ad campaign bringing light to various social issues from AIDS to abortion.  He built lucrative clothing, accessory, fragrance and eyewear lines on his successful shoe empire.