Cuban Shoe-In

A little more than ten years ago, David Egozi and Eugene Ramos fled their native Cuba to avoid jail after Fidel Castro's regime found them guilty of being "capitalistic." That charge was, and is, eminently justified.

Within months after their arrival in Miami, the two friends, barely able to speak English, decided to take their chances in the field they knew best: shoes. The dapper Egozi had been a top salesman for his father's shoe company, which Castro confiscated; Ramos had been a shoe manufacturer. The pair pooled $30,000 they had smuggled out of Cuba, borrowed another $25,000 from Egozi's father, leased a small garage in Miami and started the Suave Shoe Corp. Almost from the beginning the firm flourished by pricing low and selling hard. This year Suave is expected to earn about $5 million on sales of more than $50 million, a 20% leap over the year before.

Fighting Imports. Compared with the down-at-the-heels state of the U.S. shoe industry, which is beset by cut-rate foreign rivals, Suave's performance is all the more remarkable. The firm concentrates on producing low-priced leisure footwear like sneakers and slippers for such chain stores as Woolworth's and K mart to sell under private labels. Prices of Suave products, most made of vinyl, range between $1.60 and $6 and are easily competitive with imports. The firm manages this by using only the most modern and efficient equipment and paying its nearly 2,000 workers (all but 25 of them Cubans) an average of $2.30 per hour v. the $2.80 averaged by shoe workers in Massachusetts. Suave also benefits from its highly motivated salesmen, many of them also Cuban. "We look for young, hungry men who want to make money," says President Egozi, who insists that a heavy accent can be a selling advantage. "If a salesman has one eye or one arm or can't talk good English, you remember him," he says.

As demand grew, Suave opened one small plant or warehouse after another; eventually the firm was spread over 17 locations. To raise money for consolidating the facilities, Suave went public in 1969. Last August it moved to a new $7.5 million complex in the suburban Miami Lakes Industrial Park, and it is already in need of more space.

Egozi, now 38, lives in a $200,000 house fronting on Skylake outside of Miami and often spends weekends with his wife and three children horseback riding around his 25-acre ranch in Fort Lauderdale. He broods about his early days in the U.S., when to be a Cuban "was a very degrading thing," and finds irony in the fact that he is now welcome anywhere. "It doesn't matter what you are if you have money," he says. Egozi should know. He reckons his personal wealth at about $8,000,000.

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