Chris Donovan’s Path from Telephone Repairman to Shoe Designer

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Here’s an inspiring story if there ever was one…Chris Donovan has had a lifetime passion for shoes, but never really knew how to turn that love into a career. After spending most of his life in blue collar jobs, his partner finally convinced him to pursue his dream and design shoes. He tells The Daily how he went from repairing phones to a career in luxury footwear. 

Hi Chris, How are you?
I’m doing great! I just found out recently that I’m a finalist for the Rising Star award at FGI.

Congratulations! How does that feel?
My God, it’s very affirming. It’s funny when you come from a place like I did. My whole history before this, and then trying something new, and then getting to the point where, wow,  I’m pretty good! It’s very exciting. I’m very happy about it. You can’t do it alone.

You have such an interesting background. Tell us what you were doing before designing shoes.
I was a telephone repairman about 25 years, and before that, I had a stint of being a bartender for eight years. And that whole time, I was always sketching shoes.

Where were you a bartender and what was your least favorite drink to make?
A mudslide, because when you work in a fast bar, it’s really sticky. I worked at a big club. There was one in Boston called The Metro. I was bartending there at night. It was the busiest bar in town, so it was a lot of fun. I actually got to be fashionable.

How did you telephone repair job come about?
When I left high school, I went into college at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. I was majoring in religious studies, and I ran out of money. Then I realized that the phone company did tuition reimbursement. I started out as a telephone operator—worst job in the world—and from there I moved up to phone repairs. But once I got into it, I kind of just
got really comfortable with it. The money was good, and they paid for my education, so I finished my degree.

Why was telephone operating the worst job in the world?
Being brand new, I was basically stuck in the night shift. 11PM to 7AM. This was before 9/11. We had emergency calls and drunk people. During the daytime, it was just business people and nighttime was a completely different group. It was really stressful.

How did you find the time to sketch shoes when you were doing repairs?
I had a bunch of different offices that I would travel to between repair, so when I was at my desk, I always had a sheet of paper out and I was drawing on my break or on my lunch hour. I have a drawer full of shoe sketches from that time. Any time I was on a conference call, to make the time go by, I would sit there and draw pages full of shoes.

What is it about shoes that you are so drawn to?
When I was in high school—the first time I even noticed shoes was in the 1970s—a girl walked in and she had the highest pair of platforms I’d ever seen. At first, I was like, ‘How in the world can you walk in those?!’ And I suddenly realized it’s a piece of sculpture. It’s a piece of art. I started sketching in my notebooks. Then thoughts started running through my mind. ‘How much of the sole has to touch the floor? How much of the foot has to be encased in the shoe?’ It just kept going!

How did you transition from the phone company to designing shoes?
When I was in the phone company, I met my now-husband, Steve. He was a pole climber…romantic! He noticed right from the start that when we were at dinner or places like that that I’d be drawing shoes on the back of my napkin. He said ‘You seem to be obsessed with it, I think you should do something with it.’ And I was like, ‘What?! How do you even become a fashion designer?’ Over the years, he kept on prodding me, and then at one point I started taking courses at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]. They didn’t have anything in fashion, but I figured color theory was a way to get me involved. Then I got diagnosed with cancer, which was detected very early and was cured. So I needed to find out how to do this. I found a course in New York that was over two days. A professor from Europe came over to teach it, whose name was Aki Choklat.

How did it go?
He would be the first person in fashion that ever saw my shoes and I was really nervous. I brought some sketches, and the whole first day was exercises in sketching, and it was rapid fire. We had 15 seconds to do a shoe, and he would challenge us through the whole day just through sketching. And by the end of the day, he came over to me and he said, ‘You were born to do this.’ [Begins tearing up.] Sorry! He said, ‘You have to go to Europe to do a Masters.’ I’m like, ‘Europe?!!’ It felt great that he loved my stuff, but I had no idea how to pull that off.

What did you do next?
I called Steve and told him [the professor] loves my stuff. He asked me what he suggested I do. I told him he wants me to go to Europe for a Masters degree. The first thing Steve said to me was, ‘We’ll sell the house if we have to.’ He was totally willing to do that. We didn’t get the kitchen we wanted, but we didn’t have to. I ended up leaving the phone company and got accept to Polimoda [the fashion school] in Florence and spent a year over there getting my Masters. I graduated at the top of my class, too.

Of course you did!
I don’t mean to brag….or do I! I do mean to brag!

Chris Donovan

What was the experience like being in school?
It’s quite complicated. I was going to Italy for the first time and I didn’t know the language. The school had a universal program, so they taught in English. For the first three months, I was really just leaning the basics. One of the big moments that turned everything around was when I was sketching something, and the teacher came over to me, and she looked at me, and she says, ‘God that’s awful!’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’ She said, ‘You’re trying to be fashion?’ She looked around at the 20-years-olds in the room and said they are fashion students. She asked me, ‘What were you?’ I told her I was a repairman. She said I should ‘Do me.’ I didn’t take offense to it—she meant don’t forget where I came from. As soon as she told me that, everything changed. My designs changed. I started being myself and then they started to fall in love with what I was doing. It focused me on where I needed to go with it.

Your peers were kids in their twenties. Were you like Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Back to School?
They all thought I was a janitor.

That’s funny.
They would come up to me and tell me, ‘There’s a mess in there, can you clean up the spill?’ And I was like no, no, I can’t. I was the oldest student they ever had.