Boy Wonder - Profile

South Florida CEO, June, 2002

Grandi continues, "About a year after we met, I kept bumping into Esteban in New York and Miami. I'd see him at Jet East, Tavern ... all these hip places. I said to myself, 'Okay, what's his trick? When I was 12, I was staying home. At nine p.m., I was in bed."'

Cortazar retells it: "I saw Ferdinand a lot at parties, at friends of Michael Capponi's, at friends of my father's. One day he said to me, 'I'd love to see your stuff. Maybe we could do something. We could work together, have a line of clothes.' So we met a year and a half ago, in March, and, until now we've been working to make it happen."

With a full-time staff of five, Esteban Cortazar, Inc. operates out of a small showroom on the edge of downtown Miami. With one show down and more to come, their marketing staff is sending out what are called "look-books" to fashion buyers, private clients, and stores specializing in ready-to-wear couture. The sales effort is just getting underway. "Our show at the Shore Club was a teaser, just something to get a buzz going," says Cortazar, sounding less and less like a 10th grader and more like Swifty Lazar.

In the office showroom, Esteban and Grandi's desks face each other. The two partners make an odd couple - teen mop-head Cortazar in backpack and flip-flops; the preppy, stockier Grandi, who drives a Range Rover. There are moments when their relationship seems almost paternal. (Grandi, married at 28, now divorced from New York fundraiser Claudia Fleming, has two children ages 11 and seven.) So far, it works.

"When you first meet Esteban, you'd never think he'd have a traditional, classical, historical background because he's young, edgy' says Grandi, the kind of businessman who carries no briefcase, only a cell phone and sky pager. "When I saw his designs for the first time, that's when I understood where he comes from. And, that's where we connect, because I, too, am from a very traditional background."

Son of Milan petro-chemical industrialist Armando Grandi and Countess Anna Maria Gonzaga Grandi, Ferdinand Grandi grew up in Buenos Aires until he was 13, followed by prep school at the Lycee Pareto in Lausanne, Switzerland. Already familiar with his father's world of cost sheets and number-crunching, he studied business administration at Babson College in Massachusetts before landing a job in private banking at Bank of America in New York in 1979. That led to a three-year position as vice-president of Commercial Lending at Banca Commerciale Italiana (ECI). In 1987, he became general partner of Founders Court, a leveraged buy-out company in Princeton, N.J., that raised European funds to acquire manufacturing companies in the US.

Five years later, with financial help from his family, Grandi went solo and opened his own leveraged buy-out business. In the mid-Nineties, he bought and sold Summore Plastics, a plastics injection molding company in Tampa, then bought General Surgery, a company in Atlanta that manufactures non-invasive surgical supplies.

Grandi connects the dots: "My background is in finance. I've always been in banking. I know nothing about medical products, zero," he says, laughing. "But, you'd be surprised, when you put your money in, you learn fast." Grandi, a man on the move, also has a New York-based corporation, Consolidated Equities, a holding company for stocks, bonds and real estate, which includes a million-dollar mansion in Palm Beach which recently suffered an accidental fire last Fall.