“Elegant, timeless, and comfortable.”
This is how SMU alum Kimberly Scott describes her luxury shoe brand, Skinny Leg Tribe. Skinny Leg, launched in 2020, is taking a stand against a constricting yet overlooked beauty standard in the fashion industry: ankle sizes.
Scott’s startup brand offers an oasis for women globally whom the fashion industry deemed too niche to tailor to and too expensive to design for.
“What I was trying to bring about [from the company] was creating a community of support for body positivity and self-acceptance,” Scott said. “Skinny leg girls get bullied a lot.”
Scott has felt the pains of bullying herself. She also knows how hard her mother tried to protect her from it.
“She would take my Go-Go boots to the cobbler to have them tailored,” Scott said. “She wanted to give me that fit; she wanted to give me what I wanted.”
Scott’s mother’s love served as the inspiration and genesis for the Skinny Leg Tribe. In 2020, Scott finally decided she and her tribe deserved better after seeing a false advertisement for narrow cap boots.
“During the pandemic, I was online shopping, and I noticed some stores were advertising narrow cap boots,” she said. “So I convinced my son to go with me to the mall during lockdown so that I could try these boots on at Northpark, so I get there and I try them on and they’re way bigger than the normal boots. I asked the gentleman, ‘Did you bring me the right boots,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, no, these are the narrow caps.’”
“That’s when I knew it was time,” Scott said.
Since then, Scott has slowly been moving away from her job in financing and investment and is closer to fully realizing her dream. Unlike other entrepreneurs, Scott had the unique advantage of understanding how to play the financial side of her business venture.
“Maybe because I’ve always been in finance and investments, It was kind of a no-brainer,” she said. “I kind of stashed [money] here and there, and then once I made that decision, I just gathered all my finances because as you will know, there is no financing for startup companies. So I’ve been self-funding my company.”
Thus far, Scott has realized her dream that the rest of the fashion industry has written off. She receives messages every day from grateful customers who have shoes that are both chic and cozy.
Part of what makes Scott’s brand so successful is her commitment to details. From using only the finest, authentic Italian leathers to following a made-to-measure (otherwise known as demi-couture) model that allows adjustments for each woman, Scott has accounted for every luxurious detail of her product.
“If you want a tighter size, you can get a smaller size, and if you want a looser fit, you can get a larger size,” she said. “So it’s not custom, but it’s the closest thing to custom.”
Scott hopes her company’s success will show the fashion industry that inclusion and representation are profitable.
“The fashion industry creates based on ease of production and minimal cost. And that is not what the skinny leg tribe is doing,” Scott said. “They’re not really willing to take a risk only on the niche, right?”
However, Scott has had to build her burgeoning empire through her blood, sweat, and data collection.
“I would just say that making [the fashion industry] more aware of this underserved market has been my greatest challenge,” she said. “There’s limited data that is actually available on women with skinny legs, so I had to create market surveys to collect that information.”
Despite the lack of available data, the future’s looking bright for Skinny Leg.
“What I’m envisioning is an expansion of the Skinny Leg Tribe to be inclusive of a summer collection of shoes, as well as things like skinny leg pants, and things that are actually applicable to people within legs,” she said. “[As well as] looking to introduce handbags to go along with the boots.”
