Nicole Yelland serves as chief communications and strategy officer at the Hispanic Organization of Mortgage Experts (HOME). One day, when she was watching the fashion design series “Project Runway” with her 5-year-old daughter, she had an idea: Why not combine her day job with her interest in fashion?
In her free time, Yelland spent two months working on design ideas for La Reina — meaning “the queen” in Spanish — a shoe designed specifically for women in the mortgage industry. When the time came to present her idea to HOME founder and CEO Rogelio Goertzen II, she was nervous. After all, shoes and mortgages don’t typically go hand in hand.
She needn’t have worried. Goertzen loved the idea and encouraged Yelland to see the project through to completion.
“When she told me, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ This aligns with everything that I’ve been preaching,” Goertzen said. “Hopefully, this reinvigorates other people to be creative, not just with shoes, but even with mortgage products.”
The final shoe design was created in partnership with AliveShoes. The low-top shoes — which debuted on May 6, just prior to Mother’s Day — currently sell for $239. They feature black Italian leather and metallic gold-colored soles and are handcrafted in the Le Marche region of Italy, an area renowned for its luxury footwear.
Yelland noted the shoe design was inspired by Hispanic and Latino culture, and its regal namesake stemmed from the idea of inspiring confidence and empowering women in the mortgage industry.
“When you’re a young girl, you want to be a princess and wear a crown,” Yelland said. “When you grow up to be a woman, you are the queen of your household, and you deserve two crowns for your feet.”
Yelland added that all profits from shoe sales go toward supporting HOME’s mission of empowering Hispanic and Latino Americans through homeownership education and advocacy.
Goertzen, who recently joined Empower Mortgage as chief growth officer, founded HOME in 2024. He said he appreciated the work that the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals was doing in the real estate industry and saw an opportunity to make similar inroads in the Hispanic loan officer community. He said the nonprofit is also working to educate Hispanic consumers “about the different intricacies within credit within the mortgage industry that is very different from Latin America, which oftentimes is what’s tough to explain in multigenerational households.”
“I might qualify for the mortgage,” Goertzen gave as an example, “but I also need my parents and my grandparents (on the loan). They might not understand the differences in credit because they came from Mexico or from El Salvador, and that’s what we’re hoping to do here at HOME is bridge that gap in a fashionable way.”
Yelland said the initial response to La Reina has been enthusiastic, which may lead to future product launches down the road.
“We have so many ideas,” Yelland said. “We’re not going to be a shoe company, but this won’t be the last shoe you see from us.”
