Twenty Dollars, No English and Four Decades of Companies: Jay Adoni's Run as a New York Entrepreneur

NEW YORK. In 1976 a 17 year old named Jacob Adoni landed in America from Israel with a single twenty dollar bill and almost no English. Five decades later, the man everyone calls Jay has founded fashion companies, sold two of them to global buyers, run the American arm of an international brand, earned three securities licenses, developed supermarket sites on Long Island and led a snack food company. He is still building today.

The first two years were spent on the jobs nobody puts on a business card. He bused tables, cooked, painted, worked in warehouses and shipped boxes as a clerk in a shoe factory. "I don't mind working hard, I never complain," he said later. That shipping room turned out to be his education in the trade that would make his name.

In 1978, at 19, he started his own company, LJ Simone. Through his firm, Admos Shoe Corp. of New York, the L. J. SIMONE name was registered as a trademark in 1985 for ladies' handbags and for men's and women's shoes. The label became one of the best known American fashion accessories brands of the 1980s and grew past $120 million in annual sales.

By 1986 his story had reached print. Author Brett Kingstone gave him a chapter in The Dynamos: Who Are They, Anyway?, a book about the country's top entrepreneurs under 30. At 27, Mr. Adoni was running a manufacturer with more than 250 employees and more than $20 million in sales that year, selling to Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Bullock's and Dayton Hudson.

The book singled out how he moved. While others wrote off the American shoe industry and closed their plants, he expanded, buying equipment and inventory at liquidation sales. He kept a steady flow of new styles in front of buyers, and his team could spot a shoe in an Italian store on a Monday, photograph samples in the factory on Tuesday and put the new design in the hands of salesmen by Wednesday. "You got to be able to move fast to notice the new hot styles," he told the author.

In 1993 the global fashion accessories company Pentland Brands acquired LJ Simone, and Mr. Adoni stayed on as President of Pentland USA, running its American business. Over the next years he moved into finance, earning his Series 7, 63 and 24 licenses and working in the securities industry, and he qualified as a licensed real estate broker.

Real estate became a third career. As sole member of Harbor Park Realty, LLC, a development and management company in Glen Cove, New York, he developed a site for a ShopRite supermarket in 1995 and in 2001 managed its sale to the Ahold group, the Dutch owned parent of Stop & Shop, in a deal valued at about $26 million. He also developed a supermarket later sold to King Kullen and a Glen Cove shopping center anchored by a drive thru Walgreens.

Fashion called him back in 2007, when he founded PLV Studio, a maker and retailer of women's shoes and accessories under two global brands, Pour La Victoire and Kelsi Dagger. In March 2014 the private equity firm VMG Partners acquired a majority interest in the company.

He kept investing in new ventures. From 2012 to 2014 he was an investor and director of TAG, Inc., a family owned shoes and accessories company and home of the Modern Vice brand, and he has advised Modern Vice since 2015. The brand, relaunched by his sons, makes its shoes by hand in New York City. He has also served as CEO of Keep Healthy Inc, a fast growing snack company whose line includes dried fruit snacks and fruit based bars.

Today Mr. Adoni works where his career began, on the floor of his own shoe factory in Brooklyn, and he runs a rare coin business alongside it. Asked about his path from a twenty dollar bill to a long line of companies, his answer has stayed the same since 1986: "It can still happen in this country." His full story, with a year by year timeline and photographs, is at jayadoni.com.

Dynamo Times recognizes Jay Adoni for nearly five decades of entrepreneurship across fashion, finance, real estate and food, and for showing that hard work and speed can still build an American success story.