An heiress of Chester County’s wealthiest family is now riding the wave of her own success, and it’s taking her a long way from home.

Riding on the backs of horses in the Dorrance family pastures south of Coatesville trained her to excel in competition and thrive in the culture of luxury, and Mary Alice Malone is now leveraging both of those skills in the launch of her London-based luxury women’s shoe brand, Malone Souliers.

“The discipline, strength and polish required for such high-ranking (junior Olympic equestrian) competition feature prominently in her just-launched line of masterfully constructed sandals, pumps and booties,” the New York Post stated in a recent article announcing her 17-style fall collection.

Malone doesn’t deny the key role her upbringing has played in her current success.

“I come with a lot of discipline, perfectionism and the ingrown understanding that, when training, one can have bad days, weeks and months, but that is part of growing and achieving. I’m not easily rattled, you see,” she told Bergdorf Goodman for a blog post previewing her release.

But she also attributes her growing brand to her experience in furniture design, the inspirations of her fashion predecessors in the freshly re-energized 1950s and the empowering 1970s, and a love of psychology.

“I have always seen as essential to the innate semantics of liking, remembering and choosing,” Malone said in the Bergdorf Goodman interview. “I couldn’t possibly design and build heels if I did not know why they make us, be you a girl or a woman, feel so sexy and luxuriantly empowered. Only reason I, we, are here. Right now.”

And she’s been able to translate that psychology into “leather and lizard shoes sculpted with discreet details like cushioned soles and noise-canceling inserts” that have won over the hearts of celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Amy Ryan just two years out of the London College of Fashion, according to the Post.

“One of the most important things to me is that it is great when they look beautiful on shelf, but they have to look amazing on the foot,” Malone said in a feature by The Wall Street Journal. “What looks good on one person doesn’t on another. … When they are right, it is like they almost disappear, and you just become a more brilliant version of you.”

Read much more about the Malone Souliers journey and the growing made-to-measure service in London, plus catch a glimpse of her latest collection in a trio of news articles: in the New York Post here, on the Bergdorf Goodman blog here and in The Wall Street Journal here.

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Top photo of Mary Alice Malone with business partner Roy Luwolt Uzo Oleh courtsy of the Wall Street Journal.