Sarah Jessica Parker’s entrepreneurial empire: Wine, cocktails and a publishing label, but the shoes no longer fit

“So many shoes and only two feet,” laments Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw in an episode of Sex and the City. Her character’s love/obsession with footwear is a constant in the plot. “I’ve spent $40,000 on shoes and I have no place to live? I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes!” she tells herself in another episode. It is shoes, specifically fancy blue Manolo Blahnik shoes, that her love interest Big proposes with instead of the classic engagement ring. Something, or a fair amount, of Bradshaw rubbed off on Parker when in 2014 she decided to launch her own eponymous shoe brand with George Malkemus — then head of Manolo Blahnik in the U.S. and who died in 2021 — as a partner. “In some silly way, I think it’s what people expected of me because of Carrie Bradshaw,” the actress declared a decade ago, when she announced the launch of the brand. Last August 16, she announced its end: “After 10 colorful years, SJP by Sarah Jessica Parker has made the difficult decision to close its doors this fall,” read a statement released to the media.

The brand’s last remaining U.S. store, located at 385 Bleecker Street in New York, closed on August 25. Meanwhile, it still has physical branches in Dubai, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates and online shopping will remain available until a date yet to be determined. “The SJP Collection team expresses enormous gratitude to all of their loyal customers and supporters, as well as all those they’ve worked alongside,” the company said in its farewell. Since the announcement, the brand has reduced the price of its shoes, which previously sold for around $670 on average, by 25%.

Parker is known for wearing her own shoes on red carpets. In October 2023, for example, she and her husband Matthew Broderick attended an event at the New York City Ballet where the actress wore a Carolina Herrera dress with a pair of sandals from her collection, designed to be worn mismatched: one was black and the other pink. She has also worn shoes from her brand in fiction: in June, for example, she filmed a scene for And Just Like That... — the sequel to Sex and the City — on the streets of New York’s Soho in a pair of SJP’s mismatched black-and-white polka-dotted heels. In fact, Bleecker Street is near Carrie Bradshaw’s fictional apartment, something that made the store a stop for fans taking a tour of the series’ Manhattan filming locations. However, that seems not to have been enough to ensure the survival of the firm, although the reasons for its closure have not been shared at the moment.

“As fans of the original series are well-aware, fashion and specifically footwear have always been a deeply important part of the storytelling, especially for my character,” Parker said in an interview with FootwearNews in 2022. “Knowing Carrie so intimately, I felt privileged to be in a position where I could work with George to design shoes from scratch that were not only beautifully hand-crafted and incredibly comfortable, but true to both her fevered love of footwear and evolution of character,” she added. That entrepreneurial dream has now been cut short. However, Parker has branched out with other ventures, including her beauty, wine, cocktail, and literature brands.

Shoes may be the actress’s most successful business but there are many other aspects to her entrepreneurial side. Her Instagram profile, where she has almost 10 million followers, is a succession of profiles for all her projects. One of them is Invivo X, SJP, the wine brand he launched in 2019. “The sass of New York combined with the best wine regions in the world,” as advertised on social networks, where she has joined the growing trend of celebrities creating their own brand of alcoholic beverages. In fact, she has also teamed up with the American cocktail and liquor brand Thomas Ashbourne to bring out a line of Cosmopolitans — Carrie’s favorite tipple in the series — called The Perfect Cosmo by SJP, which she served for free to customers at her New York shoe store, where she herself sometimes also worked as a salesperson.

Another of her more obscure businesses is SJP Lit publishing, focused on “sweeping, expansive, thought-provoking, and discussion-driven stories that are inclusive of international and underrepresented voices,” as presented on its website. The imprint was launched in 2016, within the independent publishing house Zando. “I’ve always loved reading for the same reason I love acting, out of a belief that other people’s stories are more interesting to me than my own,” she explained to The New York Times at the time.

The actress has also launched products with beauty, cosmetics, perfumes, and fashion brands. In 2018, for example, she partnered with the online store Gilt to release her own bridal collection “for non-traditional modern brides,” like her character in Sex and the City. There’s a lot of Bradshaw in all of Parker’s businesses, at least when it comes to promotion and marketing.

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