PROFILES IN BUSINESS: Joe Famolare and the Foreign Trade Zone

Vermont Business Magazine, Feb 01, 2004 by Marcel, Joyce

Joe Famolare is a colorful guy who's lived a colorfiil life. The shoe magnate whose current project is turning the entire town of Brattleboro into a foreign trade zone - is an animated and convivial man who talks with his hands and looks like a slightly scruffy Roman emperor. Although he's enjoyed a glamorous fife in the fast lane of fashion, he's always tried to do some good while he was doing well. He's the quintessential entrepreneur, says James Cramer, the president of World Learning, Inc. and the School for International Training, who sits on the board of Famolare's Brattleboro Foreign Trade Zone, LLC.

"Joe's never seen an obstacle he couldn't overcome," Cramer said. "His enthusiasm is infectious. He's a great story teller. It's a pleasure to be around him because he's just so much fun. I find him irrepressible. You could throw Joe Famolare into the bowels of hell and he would see an opportunity to do something good for mankind."

Joseph P. Famolare, Jr., 72, was born in Boston and raised in the well-to-do neighborhood of Chestnut Hill, where the second and third generations of successful immigrant families, grateful for the opportunities they had found in America, demanded even greater success from their children.

"America was like next to God," says Bob Russo of Natick, MA, who has been Famolare's friend since public school. "Everything you could dream up about what was wonderful about America - that's where we grew up. Wonderful neighborhood. Fine schools. We were living the American dream. But we had the pressure. The pressure was, you had to do better. You weren't supposed to sit back and enjoy it."

In 1934, Famolare's father had founded a successful company which provided patterns and engineering to the shoe industry. Famolare started working in the family business when he was 12. Then, as a shoe designer, pattern-maker and executive himself, he took his talents to a far higher level. For Capezio, Inc he designed the dance shoes for the original Broadway production of "West Side Story," for example, as well as for the Bolshoi Ballet. Some of his designs are still in use today.

Then Famolare became the designer and executive vice president of an international shoe company, Marx & Newman, a division of the giant United States Shoe Corp. Living in Italy and New York City, he designed and manufactured shoes in Italy and sold them around the world. When that paled, in 1969 he started his own company, Famolare, Inc., which eventually had offices in the U.S., Italy, Switzerland and Brazil.

At its height, the company was importing 30,000 pairs of men's, women's, and children's shoes a day and selling $90 million worth of shoes a year.

Pictures of Famolare's fashionable shoes, sometimes perched on the tip of his nose, appeared frequently in Vogue. He won the prestigious Coty Award for fashion designers in 1973 and was inducted into the Fashion Association Hall of Fame in 1995.

He owns the patent on a four-wave sole which helps posture and makes walking comfortable. His designs are on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. and in the permanent collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Cincinnati Museum of Art in Ohio.

In the end, his success made his father proud.

"He was surprised, but proud," Famolare said, "My father and I became friends when I was 26 or 27. Until that time, he was a working man and I was a kid getting into trouble. But by then we were in the same business and we could talk to each other. That's the way it was in those days. A man was a working man. He wasn't learning how to be a father. He was supplying the money. That's what he was supposed to do."

In 1989, Famolare licensed his company and retired to Vermont. But he grew restless and turned a long-dormant Brattleboro farm into the now-flourishing Vermont Agricultural, Business, Education Center (VABEC). VABEC is the home of the state forester, two forest land trust companies, a University of Vermont extension program, the Thompson School of Practical Nursing, Vermont College and several of Famolare's own companies.

He is currently developing there the most advanced video conferencing center in New England.

But Famolare's biggest project, the town-wide foreign trade zone (FTZ) - has its origins in a fear he shares with just about everyone else in Vermont: the everescalating property taxes.

In the past few years, Brattleboro has suffered the disappearance of several major companies, including Quebecor Printing Book Press, Inc, Northeast Cooperatives, the Georgia-Pacific, Corp paper company and the American Stratford Corp. Apart from the lost jobs, the town has suddenly found itself with vast amounts of empty warehouse space.

Afraid of what this dwindling economic base would do to the property tax structure, Famolare came up with the idea of turning the entire town into a multiplesite FTZ.

An FTZ is an administrative "island" inside the U.S. which is managed by U.S. customs. It can receive imported goods without paying U.S. tariffs; it only pays them when the goods are shipped out.