CORPORATIONS: For Comfort & Profit

Into a small, smart shop on London’s Bond Street strolled two women. One was a $24-a-week typist, the other a peeress. In turn, each one plunked down 49 shillings ($9.80), and walked out smiling with a new pair of Joyce playshoes. In similar shops in Manhattan and Melbourne, Los Angeles and Lima, Sydney and Santiago, other women were doing the same thing last week. In a single day, in eight countries around the world, some 16,000 pairs of Joyce shoes are sold.

At the Pasadena, Calif, headquarters of Joyce, Inc., all this global shoe-fitting last year added up to a thumping gross of $8.4 million. This year’s sales are so good that Joyce, already the world’s largest maker of wedgie playshoes for women, expects its overall gross to approach $20 million.

Despite this mushrooming, Joyce’s founder and president, handsome William Henry Joyce Jr., 49, is taking no chances. For the past month, he has been skittering around Europe building his business. Last week, fast-moving Bill Joyce flew into London from Paris, announced that he was completing a deal to introduce Joyce shoes in France this fall. Like other foreign licensees, the French company will make the shoes according to Joyce specifications, pay a percentage on every pair sold.

To Brooklyn and Back. Bill Joyce was working for a West Coast finance company when he decided to be his own boss. After a look at 100 different businesses, he picked shoes. He lined up pledges of $150,000 in venture capital to buy a small Brooklyn shoe factory, arrived in New York to close the deal just as the stock market crashed in 1929. His pledges soon evaporated.

With only $10 left in his pocket, Joyce sat up for six nights on a day coach back to Pasadena. There he borrowed $250 from his father, rented space above a drugstore, hired a $20-a-week seamstress, and began turning out cheap ($1), soft-soled rehearsal shoes for the theater trade. Working a 16-hour daily grind, Joyce cut the leather soles at night; by day, while his seamstress sewed on the uppers, Joyce wore out his own shoes trying to sell the sandals.

Risking $15 of his scanty capital on an ad in a theatrical magazine, he was happily surprised to get quite a few orders from it. It seemed that housewives as well as actresses would buy his comfortable sandals. The first year he grossed $8,700.

Chinese Jackpot. In 1933, with his factory grown to ten employees in bigger quarters adjoining the drugstore, Joyce decided to take a fling at playshoes. The trouble with playshoes, he thought, was that their flat soles made women look dumpy. He copied the elevated, platform-type slipper which the Chinese had worn for centuries, and brought out “wedgies.” This time he hit the jackpot.

Sales zoomed so fast that he had to raise $22,000 (from friends) to finance his supply inventories. Within five years Joyce’s sales crossed the $1,000,000-a-year mark. In 1938 Bill Joyce hired (at $25 a week), and shortly afterward married, pert, raven-haired Faie Jarmel, onetime designer at Macy’s. She put smart styling into Joyce shoes.

Dollars from Britain. A year after their marriage Faie and Bill Joyce went to England, and made the first of their international deals that now include licensing arrangements in England, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Peru. The home office delivers the design, advertising and selling campaigns—and production know-how. Joyce’s British partners, for example, after training at his Pasadena plant, managed to boost their own man-hour output by 50%. The result: Joyce footwear that sells in the U.S. for $2.95 to $10.95 sells for only a little more in Britain, which is about half the price of competing models of equal quality. By combining quality and economy, Joyce has built his foreign income until it accounts for about one-third of his gross, by shrewd arrangements collects it in dollars. “What I am exporting,” says Joyce, “is technique.”