The businesswoman in Sarah Jessica Parker: wine, cocktails and a publishing label, but a shoe brand that is coming to an end

“So many shoes and only two feet,” laments Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker (Ohio, USA, 59 years old), in one of the episodes of Sex and the City. Her love/obsession with footwear is a constant in the plot. “You’re telling me I spent $40,000 on shoes and I don’t have a place to live? I’m literally going to have to live in my shoes…”, she says in another episode, not to mention that it is shoes, specifically luxurious blue Manolo Blahniks, that Big offers her to declare his love instead of the classic engagement ring. Parker caught something or a lot of Bradshaw when in 2014 she decided to launch her own eponymous footwear brand with George Malkemus, the then director of Manolo Blahnik in the United States ―who died in 2021―, as a partner. “In a silly way, I think that’s what people expected of me for Carrie Bradshaw,” the actress declared a decade ago, when she announced the birth of the brand. On August 16, however, it was her turn to announce its end. “After 10 colorful years, SJP by Sarah Jessica Parker has made the difficult decision to close its doors this fall,” said the statement shared with the media. The brand’s last remaining store in the United States, located at 385 Bleecker Street in New York, closed its doors on August 25. In the meantime, it still has physical branches in Dubai, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and online purchases will continue to be available until a date yet to be determined. “The SJP Collection team expresses its enormous gratitude to all of its loyal customers and followers, as well as to all those with whom they have worked,” the company thanked in its farewell. Since the announcement, the brand has reduced the price of its shoes, which previously sold for more than €600 on average, by 25%. More information Parker is known for wearing her own shoes on the red carpet. In October 2023, for example, she and her husband since 1997, Matthew Broderick, attended an event at the New York City Ballet and 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 her brand's shoes 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 with a pair of mismatched black and white polka dot SJP heels. In fact, Bleecker Street is close to Carrie Bradshaw's apartment, which made it easy for the store to become a tourist stop for fans touring the filming locations of the series in Manhattan. However, that seems to have not been enough for the firm's survival, although the reasons for its closure have not yet been shared.Sarah Jessica Parker at an event at the New York City Ballet wearing a pair of sandals from her eponymous footwear brand on October 5, 2023 in New York City. Gilbert Carrasquillo (GC Images / getty)“As fans of the original series know, fashion, and specifically footwear, has always been a very important part of the story, 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 [Malkemus] to design shoes from scratch that were true to both her passionate love of footwear and her evolving character,” she clarified. This entrepreneurial dream has now been cut short. However, Parker has diversified her facet as an entrepreneur with other ventures, including her beauty, wine, cocktails and literature brands, which are still running. Shoes may be the business that best suits the actress, but her facet as an entrepreneur has many other aspects. You only have to look at the bio on her Instagram profile, where she has almost 10 million followers, which is nothing more than a succession of profiles for all her projects. One of them is that of Invivo X, SJP, the wine brand that she launched in 2019. “The cheekiness of New York combined with the best wine regions in the world,” it advertises on social networks, thus joining the growing trend of celebrities creating their own brand of alcoholic drinks. In fact, she has also teamed up with the American cocktail and liquor brand Thomas Ashbourne to launch a line of Cosmopolitan ―Carrie’s favorite cocktail in the series― called The Perfect Cosmo by SJP, which she served free to customers of her New York shoe store, where she herself sometimes went to work as a saleswoman. Another of her lesser-known businesses is the SJP Lit publishing label, which focuses on “broad, deep stories that invite reflection and debate, including international and underrepresented voices,” as presented on its website. The label was born in 2016, within the independent publishing house Zando. “I’ve always loved reading for the same reason I love acting, which is a belief that I find other people’s stories more interesting than my own,” she told The New York Times at the time. The actress has also launched products with beauty, cosmetics, perfume, and fashion brands. In 2018, for example, she partnered with the online store Gilt to launch her own bridal collection “for modern, non-traditional 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.