2:08 - An infamous meeting with Japanese business people
12:13 - A sock subscription in the 90s?
19:50 - Getting raw materials from all over the globe
37:51 - Tracking customer metrics in the 90s
39:33 - Bootstrapping in e-commerce
This episode was co-produced with EO Zürich. Check out their upcoming event, Entrepreneurs Summit 2025.
Samy Liechti is a co-founder and the former CEO of BLACKSOCKS, the Swiss e-commerce sock company that invented the “sockscription” back in 1999. He holds a BA in Business Administration from HSG and worked for marketing agencies like Leo Burnett, Burson-Marsteller and Wirz before starting BLACKSOCKS in 1999.
It all began when Samy found himself at a tea ceremony, after a business meeting with some Japanese clients, where he had to take off his shoes, and embarrassingly found he was wearing mismatched socks. The solution to the problem of forgetting to replace old socks was, in his mind, an online sock subscription — but it was 1999: if you sold socks, you did it on catalogs or through the phone; e-commerce was still called e-business back then, and vanishingly few people ever bought anything online. To make matters even more difficult, Samy’s co-founder quit after a few months. But none of these deterrents could stop Samy, and 6 months after the official launch of the company, BLACKSOCKS had already 1000 customers. 20 years in, some of their sock models have been sold millions of times.
In 2023 BLACKSOCKS was acquired by Rohner Socks, and Samy left the company.
The cover portrait was edited by www.smartportrait.io.
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