A single wedge shoe sits on a credenza behind Inka Mims’ office desk, a small reminder of the long path she has traveled. Mims owns Inka’s Uniforms, a family-run business on Sherwood Forest Boulevard that sells and monograms school uniforms, medical scrubs and business clothing.
As Business Report details in a new feature, Mims placed the shoe in her office as a daily reminder of her mother’s tenacity and strength.
Srecka “Lucky” Fredotovich made the open-toed leather sandal, its pair and countless other shoes during World War II while living in Split, Yugoslavia (now Croatia). She created the shoes from scraps of leather purses and exchanged them for food to feed Mims, her grandparents and aunts. Food was scarce during the war, Mims says, and her mom did whatever she could to care for her family while Mims’ dad was away.
“My mom was a housewife during the war and my dad was a chief engineer on ships, and we were separated from him for nine years. Four of those years we didn’t know if he was alive,” says Mims, 80. “So my mom made shoes and she traded them for corn and other items for us.”
Lucky also wore the shoes—the one that Mims keeps in her office and the other one that she keeps in her home—on their voyage to America. They left war-torn Croatia to meet Mims’ dad, Vinko, in New Orleans.
“My dad paid for us to get on a first-class ship,” Mims says. “My mom took the first one available.”
They traveled for a month by cargo ship and Mims, who was 10 years old at the time, kept herself entertained. She roller skated on the deck while the ship sailed through a seemingly endless sea toward a new beginning for her family.
In 1947, Mims and her mom docked in Port Arthur, Texas. Though she had last seen her father when she was just 1 year old, she instantly recognized a man dressed in a suit with a hat pulled low over his eyes and carrying a briefcase as her dad.
The family settled into an apartment on Jackson Avenue in New Orleans where her dad worked for United Fruit Company and transported bananas. After living in a country where food was scarce, Mims was excited to eat bananas but she missed home.
“I had always heard that money grew on trees in America,” Mims says. “But I didn’t see any money. I saw wooden shacks.”
Mims eventually graduated from high school and enrolled at LSU, where she met her husband, Sam. They married when she was 19 and by the time she was 28 she was raising four children: Tania, Sam, Inka and Ben. They had moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and later to Odessa, Texas. The family moved back to Louisiana when both Mims’ and her husband’s fathers were ill. That’s when she decided to pursue a career, taking work at Young Fashions, a school uniform shop. She worked there for 20 years before launching Inka’s Uniforms at the urging of a friend.
Today, Inka’s Uniforms is a family-run business. Her husband, Sam, keeps track of the finances. Her youngest son, Ben, is vice president, while daughter-in-law, Amy, is a buyer and Mims’ granddaughter, Coral, manages the monogramming, silk screening and embroidering. She employs 13 people year-round for both stores but hires many more during their busiest season.
Many of her employees have been with her for a decade.
“I always say when Ms. Inka retires, I will retire,” says Regina Blanchard, 62, who runs the shipment and orders in the warehouse. “She is wonderful to work with. She has integrity and creates such a loyalty from the people who work with her.”
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