Aged 34, London-based accessories designer Beatrix Ong is nearly a decade into her quiet, profoundly chic mission to reinvent our notion of perfect shoes. Her signature aesthetic - female without being cloyingly feminine, grown up without being tame, sexy without being obvious, classic without lacking edge - has won her critical acclaim, an A list celebrity following, and most recently, an MBE announced in the 2011 New Year’s Honours list, in recognition of her services to British Fashion.

Beatrix Ong was born in London to two doctors, who rather hoped she’d follow them into the medical profession as her two sisters both did. While she never intended to do that (“too squeamish!”); she didn’t grow up wanting to be a shoe designer either. Ong says she didn’t dream of shoes as a child, or the possibility of designing them one day - although she can vividly remember her “super shiny round-toed black patent Mary-Jane special shoes” when she was very young, how much she loved them, how wearing them made her feel.

After studying at Central Saint Martins in London, the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and an abortive attempt at a career in advertising, Ong enrolled onto a course in shoe design at Cordwainers College in London.

“The first time I started making a shoe, I realised this was it,” she says. “They give you really bad leather, plastic stuff. There was nothing glamorous about it at all: chunky mid heel, awful toe. But the moment I started lasting it, pulling it together, touching it - I thought: I want more.”

She began a career in fashion in earnest, her star ascended extremely quickly. She went from hard time as a fashion intern for Harpers Bazaar in New York to Creative Director of Jimmy Choo (a job she won aged only 22) in the course of a very few short years.

In 2002, Beatrix Ong launched her eponymous shoe range, which quickly garnered significant attention. Her first collection landed her a place on The Independent’s Top 10 Leading Shoe Designers list, alongside Manolo Blahnik and Patrick Cox; as well as the nickname ‘The New Choo’. In 2004, she opened her first boutique, in Primrose Hill.

Ong’s absolute dedication to moving things forward, to working and evolving her ideas, her look, her product, has resulted in multiple, wildly differing projects and collaborations. She has worked with Martine Sitbon, Alice Temperley on Temperley, Nathan Jenden and Pringle, creating shoes for each designer's catwalk shows. She has also collaborated with brands as varied as Dover Street Market and Topshop, adjusting her aesthetic and her designs so that they melded perfectly with the dramatically different requirements of each customer. Most recently, Ong has customised Nike iD Blazer Trainers; and developed a range for luxury luggage brand Globe-Trotter.

In 2008, she launched Ong London, her first men’s line. In 2010, Ong designed footwear collections for both men's and womenswear at Aquascutum, and opened a shop-within-a-shop for her own label, in Aquascutum’s flagship store on London’s Regent Street.

And so Beatrix Ong works and grows both creatively and commercially. With the English National Ballet; with illustrators Natasha Law and Neal Murran (both of whom have created specially commissioned artwork for Ong’s limited edition shoe boxes). With plans for a hotly anticipated sunglasses range (which launches in 2011). With a flagship boutique which opened on Pavilion Road in Chelsea at the end of 2010. And now, being made an MBE.

She says that her inspiration comes from anything, from birds to Magritte to calligraphy to secretly watching women try on the shoes she has already made, in store: “watching the way they change when they try them on; her posture changes, her attitude changes, she struts! To give that to women is… amazing.”