A month after Anyi Lu launched her baby—a designer shoe company of the same name—she found out that another baby was on the way: as in the kind that involves a delivery room.

But her daughter, who is about to turn 7, turned out to be a blessing for the San Francisco-based entrepreneur in more ways than the usual ones. At her first trade show, the World Shoe Association, Lu and her husband had her shoes on a display in a room at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, known for its labyrinth-like hallways.

"I was in the last room in one of those long corridors," says Lu. Into this tradeshow Siberia walked a buyer from Nordstrom— a pivotal retailer she and husband David Spatz, also the company president— wanted to get a deal with, but who ended up finding them by sheer luck.

The buyer, now a longtime friend, loved Anyi Lu shoes— and better still, remembered the pluck of the seven-months pregnant woman who had designed them and had schlepped to Vegas show to make sure buyers knew her name.

That first big client helped launch a business that brought in $8 million in revenues in 2011, up about 30 percent from the previous year, which was similarly up about 30 percent from the year before, says Spatz. Lu, who earlier this month showcased her fall collection at a popup boutique in New York just ahead of New York Fashion Week, now has her designs are in about 125 storefronts, nearly an even mix of department stores, including Nordstrom and Bloomingdales, and independent boutiques.

Not bad for a shoe designer who started out as a chemical engineer, albeit one who was also a competitive International Latin ballroom dancer who grasped that women’s shoes needed to be more comfortable. The idea for the business actually started with a frantic phone call from Lu's sister the day before her wedding asking Lu to find a pair of comfortable shoes for after the ceremony.

“She said that she had a beautiful pair of stilettos that she would wear for the ceremony, which she had timed to be exactly half hour and asked me ‘But what am I going to wear for the rest of the evening?’” Lu recalled. She bought her sister a pair of ballroom dance shoes—having danced in them many times competitively, she knew they'd serve the purpose and the happy ending was that the sister could dance all night in comfort while the other women just removed their shoes.

But ballroom dance shoes are not exactly stylish, so Lu, who has heard of women who will even take painkillers to take the edge off wearing heels, decided there was a need for comfortable stylish shoes that were sexy and not “matronly.”

“I thought that I can adopt the ballroom dance shoe idea and make it practical, but add design that makes it stylish,” Lu says. “Men don’t have to wear heels. Ultimately I design shoes for me to wear.”

Her shoes, which are hand-sewn at a small family-owned factory in the Tuscany region of Italy, range in price from $375 to $695. While the shoes are made in Italy, the cushioning is made of a material called “Poron,” which is actually used on seats made for astronauts and made by a manufacturer called Rogers Corporation, headquartered in Connecticut. Not many shoes use the material, but with her engineering background, Lu was easily able to talk shop with the Rogers people.

And while the costs of manufacturing in Italy, where the leathers are hand dyed, makes Lu’s designs on the higher end of the price spectrum, she says that they’re designed to last and be comfortable.

"People say 'Tell me why I should spend $400 on a pair of shoes,' and I tell them, 'You'll be able to wear them 10 years, 15 years, and wear them several times a week,'" Lu says. Do the math, and that's more cost-effective than a cheaper pair of shoes thrown out after several wearings because they are not comfortable.

Lu started the business with $500,000 in seed money from Spatz, a real estate entrepreneur who had worked as an oil executive at Chevron—which is where they met.

“I knew she had a great sense of style,” Spatz said, “but in the beginning you never know if it can become a business.”

Lu says she was “very lucky” to start with her husband’s help, but she recalls the funding wasn’t interest free.

“For the first three years, David told me my gift [for Valentine’s Day] was the business,” Lu says.

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Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com