NEW YORK - s4story -- This year marks fifty years since Jacob "Jay" Adoni arrived in the United States. He came from Israel in 1976, at 17, speaking very little English.

Within a few years of arriving he was running his own company, L.J. Simone, where, according to WWD, he hired a young Steve Madden as a sales rep. Madden later counted Adoni and his partner Lance Rubin among his early mentors.

His first American jobs were the kind few people put on a resume. He worked as a bus boy, a cook, a painter and a warehouseman. Then he took a job as a shipping clerk in a shoe factory, and that job set the direction for everything that followed.

In 1978, two years after arriving, he started L.J. Simone, a ladies' handbag and shoe company based in Long Island City. In 1987 his story appeared in The Dynamos, Brett Kingstone's book about young American entrepreneurs, published by John Wiley and Sons.

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The decades since have taken him well beyond his first trade. After Pentland Brands acquired L.J. Simone in 1993 he served as President of Pentland USA. He went on to develop commercial real estate on Long Island and later founded PLV Studio, the company behind Pour La Victoire and Kelsi Dagger.

Fifty years on, he has come back to where he started. Today he works in his shoe factory in Brooklyn and runs a rare coin business.

The full timeline and photographs are at https://jayadoni.com

About Jacob "Jay" Adoni
Jacob "Jay" Adoni came to the United States from Israel in 1976. He cofounded L.J. Simone, served as President of Pentland USA and founded PLV Studio. He is based in New York.

Media contact: https://jayadoni.com/contact.html