Kenneth Cole Productions

Cole originally named the company Kenneth Cole Incorporated in September 1982 and planned to showcase his new line of shoes during market week at the Hilton New York Hotel. Finding that he could not afford to purchase a hotel room or showroom to exhibit his line, he borrowed a truck and asked the mayor's office for permission to park two blocks away from the Hilton Hotel in front of a fancy shoe building. Upon learning that permits were only granted to utility companies and production companies shooting full-length motion pictures, Cole changed the name of the company to Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc. and applied for a permit to shoot a full-length motion picture entitled The Birth of a Shoe Company.

With Kenneth Cole Productions painted on the side of the truck, they opened for business on December 2, 1982, in front of 1370 Avenue of the Americas. They had a fully furnished forty-foot trailer, klieg lights, a director, a rolling camera, models as actresses, and two NYPD policemen as doormen. A velvet rope allowed a limited number of people into the trailers and in two and a half days they sold forty thousand pairs of shoes. The company remains Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc. to this day to honor this unusual beginning.

In 1984, Kenneth Cole opened his first store on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, followed shortly thereafter by another store on Union Street in San Francisco. Kenneth Cole retail and Company Stores can now be found worldwide in countries such as Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, Colombia, Israel, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Morocco, South Africa and India.

In 2013, Elana Drell Szyfer was named executive vice president of global brand strategy for Kenneth Cole Productions and, before this, she was CEO of Ahava Corp.

Kenneth Cole Productions announced in November 2016 that it would be closing all of its outlet stores within six months to focus on e-commerce and other lines of revenue outside of operating physical stores. Two full-priced stores would remain open in New York and Virginia. In January 2017 Kenneth Cole Productions closed the balance of their outlet stores to pursue its e-commerce business.

In September 2021, Kenneth Cole announced a partnership with Nogin to re-platform their e-commerce business, which would help decrease costs and add AI-generated technology to its website. However, in December 2023, Nogin eventually filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, blaming deals on some of its retail partners that required Nogin to purchase their inventory.

Criticism

Kenneth Cole Productions has occasionally experienced difficulty adequately staffing its stores in order to properly rotate employees through mandatory rest and meal breaks. For example, on April 16, 2007, the Supreme Court of California unanimously affirmed a trial court judgment requiring the company to pay an additional hour of pay for each day that a store manager had been forced to work a nine-hour shift without a break.