Steve Madden, which bought Kurt Geiger for $360 million in 2025, has reportedly hired advisors at Solomon Partners to sell off the company’s prominent luxury footwear concessions business.
According to a new report from Sky News in the U.K., Madden is looking to offload the business within Kurt Geiger which manages the shoe departments at Harrods and Selfridges in London. Sources told Sky News that the process “was at an early stage.”
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FN has reached out to Steve Madden and Kurt Geiger for comment.
It’s a move that would dramatically shake up the high-end footwear landscape in London, which has been intertwined with Kurt Geiger for decades. Many luxury designers have both benefited from and bemoaned the company’s powerful status in the market and ability to determine the fate of brands.
The speculation comes as Kurt Geiger focuses on its more accessible namesake brand, which has seen impressive growth in the past several years both at home and abroad. Under Madden, America is a major growth opportunity for Kurt Geiger, with plans in the works for more stores.
The company has been a fixture in the footwear industry since 1963, when it opened its first boutique on Bond Street in London. Since then, the company has landed in the hands of many private owners across multiple decades.
The business was first sold by Mr. Geiger’s widow to the Spitz family in 1972 for an undisclosed sum. David Spitz, the South African-born businessman who founded Carvela shoes, then sold his retailing business and Kurt Geiger to House of Fraser, owned at the time by Mohamed Al Fayed who held onto the brand for 20 years.
In 2005, Al Fayed, who by then owned Harrods and the Paris Ritz hotel, sold Kurt Geiger to a management buyout team for 46 million pounds. The deal was backed by Barclays Private Equity and saw the venture capital firm retain a 72 percent stake in the business.
Then, in 2008, Barclays sold its stake to Graphite Capital, which held onto Kurt Geiger until 2011 when it sold the brand to The Jones Group for $350 million. And another management-led buyout came in 2014 with the help of Sycamore Partners that transpired when the former Jones Group portfolio was broken up into pieces. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.