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 had arrived here in Europe. It was always the same examples of eBay, Amazon, and some others. People suddenly started wondering if there’s something going on in our country. There was not much going on, so the socks guys got quite some coverage. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 4)

Rick Wilson: On one hand, you have this free-wheeling, open source world where as long as someone knows what they’re doing, they can literally do anything. On the other hand, you have what I call apple-ification where all of the hard choices have been made for you. There’s some brilliance to that for sure. The successes of Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Volution have shown that there’s a demand for that. I would say that’s the biggest change in the last seven years. Today, to be an e-commerce owner, you don’t have to be a particularly technical person whereas in 2007, you needed to be somewhat technical. If you go back farther than that, you absolutely had to be technical to have an advantage.

Sramana Mitra: That’s correct. Shopify and Volution are catering to the more starting merchants. Bigcommerce is catering to the slightly larger sweet spot of $1 million to $30 million revenue. Magento is the larger player. Where do you fit into that picture? >>>

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 knew that we don’t have time to solve all the problems. We did a couple of things. One thing was we spent a lot of time discussing which problems we wanted to address. We selected only one or two and then we solved them.

Sramana Mitra: Which ones were those? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007, what was the landscape in the e-commerce shopping cart or the e-commerce platform world? What was going on around you? What was the competitive landscape? Whom did you compete with directly and indirectly?

Rick Wilson: Yahoo stores was still a popular platform. I wouldn’t say that it had momentum, but it was certainly popular. The osCommerce software, which had been very popular, had faltered. I was never a big osCommerce guy, so I can’t remember if they released version three or four. They were in between major versions and it just died on the vine. They never got the major version out. I think Magento’s alpha was announced during that time. Shopify was just starting to arrive on the scene. I heard about them in 2008. Volution was probably the earliest success story as a pure play Software as a Service platform provider in our space. >>>

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 up in Switzerland. I went to one of the finest European business schools. I studied Business and Economics in Switzerland, Paris, and Toronto. After graduating, I worked in marketing and communications before I opened up my own company. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That is also the beginning of the rise of more fragmented industries right? Let’s say that these larger brands that are operating on Tmall start to be able to track customers and build a trusted relationship with the consumer. Let’s say the first time the transaction happens on Tmall, the user is starting to get familiar with the brand. Then I imagine they would start feeling comfortable buying from that brand off Tmall.

Jacob Cooke: Yes, that depends. Every company that we deal with has different channel strategies and channel partners, but that’s true. It could work vice versa. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 6)

Jacob Cooke: One more thing I should point out is it’s not that you can’t contact those users. Even with those unique identifiers on Tmall, it’s actually the same as their AliWangwang account, which is similar to Skype. You still can contact that user. You just have to work within that ecosystem. You have enough consumer data to work with. You always have the shipping addresses as well, so you can go and send offline flyers. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens if you’re a new merchant?

Jacob Cooke: If you’re a new merchant, you’re in the sandbox for 30 days. That can be tough. You probably want to focus on pricing for the first 30 days. You also might want to up the guarantee level. Basically, every sector is different. One of the most competitive sectors is clothing. That’s basically what we want to do. We want to go in and benchmark where everybody else is at. You probably want to make a few sample purchases with those guys. You want to be a little bit better. You’ll probably engage our firm, for example, to set those bars for your people with experience to create that fulfillment system. >>>