Dixie Schtick: Miranda Lambert's Business Empire

Miranda Lambert doesn’t start side businesses the way most people do—by figuring out what she’s good at or sensing an unmet need. “I don’t even know what’s in style,” says the multiplatinum country singer about her latest project, a shoe brand named Miranda by Miranda Lambert she launched in June in tandem with her fifth album, Platinum. When Lambert was designing the line, her manufacturing partner told her that crystal-bedazzled boots—which are also platinum—might be too intense for the shoppers at DSW, a discount store that carries her collection. So she had a sample pair made in her size and has been wearing them onstage and in photographs for months. “I just decided we’d see what people start responding to,” she says.