Olivia Morris is best known for Slag Bags and Tattoo boots. Marian Buckley meets the shoe designer who's a powerful blend of wit and wisdom. Olivia Morris hails from Richmond in Surrey and although she can't remember exactly when she first became obsessed with shoes, she thinks that her chosen profession may have something to do with the fact that her feet were a size 8 when she was 14. "Luckily they didn't grow any more," she says, "but I always had a nightmare finding shoes." As a teenager she wore DMs and remembers being the first girl in school with a pair. Born and brought up in Richmond Surrey, Olivia has close associations with Ireland. "Both my parents are Irish so I have a second nationality," she says. After A Levels she went to Wimbledon College to study fashion but found "that I wasn't very good at it. I remember one day I came home and started sketching some shoes and that was it." After her Foundation Course, Olivia went to the UK's premier shoe design college, Cordwainers. Whilst studying she worked part-time at Patrick Cox's shop and he sponsored her graduate collection. Following graduation, she spent a year working for fashion footwear label Stride, then left to take a business course and establish her own company. "Cordwainers is very geared towards commerciality and that's important, as I now realise running my own business."   Olivia found the technical teaching at Cordwainers invaluable. "The most brilliant thing about Cordwainers is that you really do learn how to make shoes and no one can really design shoes properly without knowing how they're made. The technicians there are brilliant. " Although all her shoes are hand made, she no longer makes them herself. Instead she uses a small, family-run factory in London's East End. Whilst at college she dreamed of being able to make original shoes which were affordable but "I now have come to realise that that's impossible because in order to do something original it is more time consuming and therefore more expensive." Shoe design and manufacturing is laborious. Each shoe has around 60 components. Olivia designs the shoe on paper and from the design creates a last (the wooden block a shoe is made around), and then a pattern is cut around it. Some two months later the prototype emerges and it can take five months from the initial design to the finished sample. Since setting up her own company in 1998 Olivia has found that "90% of my time is spent running a business, I don't sit in my office every day sketching." In the early days, she worked from a corner of her front room. Her first success came when she designed a range of Slag Bags. "Me and a friend were having a laugh and I decided to call them Slag Bags," she remembers. The bags attracted press attention and helped Olivia become known quickly and without the aid of outside investment or professional PR. "I've always done it myself," she says. "I am just a normal girl really I am not interested in having columns about where I go on holiday in Elle magazine, I appreciate my PR if it has a picture of my shoes, if it's about my work, if I am respected for what I do."   Recent successes include a piercing - which include her personal favourite pair of shoes - and tattoo collection. The latter have proved hugely popular especially in LA and New York and although flesh coloured tattoo boots won't be available next season ("I don't want there to be too many of these, I don't want there to be too much of anything") she is continuing to produce them in new colours. September 2001 will also see the launch of her new Mods and Rockers collection. Olivia's father worked on Quadrophenia and she's a big fan of the style. "I've done lace up boots which have been fabricated from parka jackets. I have bought a lot of antique war medals and you stick them onto the boot, it's like customising a pair of shoes." Watch out for another hot autumn style, black leather Victorian style lace up boots with crucifixes. Olivia will also be designing shoes for Anthony Symonds' spring/summer 2002 collection which will be shown on the catwalk during London Fashion Week. At 27, Olivia may dream of running a profitable business but she's already a serious impact on the designer shoe industry. Her approach is totally upfront and honest. "Everything I do is a little bit tongue-in-cheek," she admits. "At the end of the day fashion is a volatile business and it's purely there for people's enjoyment... all I really want to do is have a nice little house, a nice garden and a load of friends around me." Olivia Morris, 19 Portobello Green, London W10, telephone 020 8962 0353 or email here.

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