Best foot forward: Singaporean teacher-turned-shoe designer appears on US talk show

SINGAPORE – A Singaporean teacher-turned-shoe designer had a “pinch me” moment in March when she appeared on national television in the United States.

Yvonne Liao, 44, was a guest on daytime talk show Tamron Hall (2019 to present), having been invited to receive advice from co-founder of luxury goods consultancy The Good Six, Mr Roger Joseph, on how to grow her two-year-old footwear brand.

In the brief segment, Liao introduced her namesake label’s clutch of maximalist shoes: patent leather heels in cherry red with a paper heart-like detail on the toes, rhinestone-studded mesh ballet flats and silver spangled Mary Janes.

Mr Joseph, whose firm has showrooms in New York and Paris, bade Liao to keep her brand storytelling strong and focus on building a community.

She wore homeland colours – red and white – for the occasion.

“If you’re Singaporean, you instantly understand that choice and that felt really special to me,” she says.

Liao is based in New York, that restless city fuelled by ambition, where go-getters seem a dime a dozen.

But speaking to The Straits Times over Zoom, she tells a more familiar – and Singaporean – tale of her winding path to entrepreneurship. Hers was a journey of incremental gains.

“Not the typical ‘overnight stuff’,” she says.

Beginnings

It began in girlhood, when a teenage Liao growing up in 1990s Singapore found the setting too conservative for statement dressing but permissive of outlandish shoes. She seized on the loophole, amassing such a collection of footwear, her father converted half the family storeroom into a shoe closet for her.

A pair of white kitten heels from Guess, then a fancy imported brand from the US, were her dearest.

She says: “I loved shoes because it was harder to wear something revealing. People would look at you. But shoes could be outrageous, in different colours, and nobody would bat an eye.”

Though she had been an artistic child, she went down the “usual route” of university (National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) and a job in the civil service as a teacher.

Some three years into teaching upper secondary English, Social Studies and Geography, she began to feel stifled, certain that her calling lay elsewhere.

So, she took up fashion-related classes after work and on weekends, dipping her toes into the fundaments of the rag trade.

But it was not until her late 20s and sixth year of being a teacher that she made her first big move, enrolling in the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia in the US in 2011.

It was an immense decision, but Liao had hedged her bet slightly – and relatably – by enrolling as an undergraduate in fashion marketing instead of applying for the Master of Arts in luxury and fashion management that she really wanted.

She re-applied successfully to her desired programme six months later after a roommate talked her into it.

After graduating in 2012, she moved to New York City, where she married her American husband and worked in small apparel companies doing marketing, sales and production.

Learning the craft

It was only in 2018 that Liao picked up shoe-making. Foot pains caused by decades of avid running, and her weariness of the identikit black, grey and brown styles favoured in the Big Apple, pushed her to sign up for a class in the hope of creating a fun but comfortable pair for herself.

One class turned into two, which turned into private lessons with the instructor, where she came with her own sketches, says Liao. “Before I knew it, I had made a mini collection.”

In 2024, she made her first sale at a Thanksgiving pop-up event. Those shoes, the Yulia Mesh Flats (US$169 or S$215), are still an important pair in her catalogue.

“It was quite a nice feeling,” says Liao, laughing. She had cold-called the venue, a local boutique, with samples of her shoes in tow. That same moxie also helped get her on TV.

Liao had kept in touch with a producer on Tamron Hall after being rejected for the programme’s Up & Coming Designer Series around 2023. Backstage at the taping, the same producer told Liao her persistence had paid off.

Says Liao: “When you come to New York and you want to work and live here, you definitely need that New Yorker mentality, like you are here because there is a goal to achieve.”

She has pumped in US$10,000 into her brand. Though she has yet to break even, her shoes – priced in the low hundreds – are now stocked in three boutiques in upstate New York, Texas and Connecticut. They are also available online at yvonneliaonyc.com

Of the years it took to start her business, she says: “It was a learning process. I still have a lot of fear. (That) start-and-stop feeling.

“Obviously, people are like, ‘Well, you jumped halfway across the world, you should be fearless, right?’ But I think fear is part of human nature. When you are trying and learning, it can take years sometimes to make the leap.”

Her father’s death in 2020 also made her realise life is short, she says.

Liao, who runs her brand solo, is grateful for the time she spent teaching.

She says: “I didn’t appreciate it when I was younger and in that situation, but when I left the service and came to the US to study, I felt like teaching had given me a very strong foundation.”

It taught her meticulousness, logistics management and even how to source for vendors, she adds.

So, take it from a former teacher, those who teach can certainly do.