Bahman Irvani fell into the shoe business twice — the second time after his family fled Iran. His father ran a sports-shoe company in Tehran where Irvani — an accountant by training — did consulting ...

Sara Irvani didn’t plan to become CEO of her family’s shoe business. Although she’d spent many school holidays shadowing her father at Okabashi Brands’ Georgia factory, she had no manufacturing ...

Sara Irvani, Okabashi's CEO. In 1984, Bahman Irvani (son of a British-Iranian immigrant) founded Okabashi Brands, Inc., in Buford, Georgia, a small town just northeast of Atlanta, to create a sandal ...

Forty-one years ago, when Sara Irvani’s grandfather launched a footwear company in Buford, Georgia, half the nation’s shoes were made in America. Today, the figure is down to 1%. “From the late 1890s ...

Okabashi CEO Sara Irvani was the featured speaker at the chamber’s Executive Insights luncheon at the Embassy Suites Atlanta NE Gwinnett Sugarloaf in Duluth.