Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In 2005, you said you had the biggest growth year. What kind of numbers did you do? Samy Liechti: We had 75% growth. The reason was very simple. We had won an award for customer experience in the US. I remember we had a whole bunch of PR coverage all over the

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Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Were all these customers in Switzerland? Samy Liechti: We have different currencies and languages here. We were not prepared for payments outside Switzerland. We only had Swiss Francs. All of a sudden, we had our first German customers. Then we started the same for Germany. Little by little, we introduced other currencies and

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Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to these articles? Were you doing PR outreach to the press? Samy Liechti: We did a press release. At that time, we did that by fax. Then we put together a list of potential journalists. Then we had a little luck. By the time we launched, the Internet hype

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Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you do it? How did you launch? What did you do specifically? Samy Liechti: We knew that marketing will be very hard. We knew that a subscription business will only work if people like the quality of goods they receive. We knew that we wanted to build a brand, and we

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Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 1)

Samy Liechti has built up a very nice subscription e-commerce business from Switzerland selling socks, underwear, and shorts. The company is 100% bootstrapped. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Samy Liechti: I’m Swiss and grew

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 1)

The dynamics of e-commerce in China are very different from the US. Let’s dig in! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to your company and yourself. Tell us what you do and your background. We’ll take it from there.

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In this strategy of being the a customer service portal for brands, the business model around that is not exactly an advertising business model; it’s more a SaaS business model, isn’t it? David Karandish: That’s where half of the revenue comes from, but we leveraged the Advertising.com business model to build out the

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’re offering a content management platform that you offer as a SaaS product to these retailers? David Karandish: Exactly. And in that content management platform, we have a couple of different options. We can provide the content from the Answers.com community. Or we can help partner for the content with top brands. So

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