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?

Samy Liechti: In every single meeting, it was a different one. The idea behind is if you have a backlog of 20 projects and it takes you half a year to resolve them, we wanted to be fast. We wanted to solve, every second, the biggest problem.

Sramana Mitra: What is the first problem that you decided to solve for the marketplace?

Samy Liechti: At that time, people had palm pilots.We just copied the electronic data of our friends and then we created a mailing list. We had money coming in. We stuck to spending just 25% of sales for marketing. That’s what we did. The more customers we had, the bigger the marketing budget became and the faster we could grow. Then we said, “The customer experience is key.” Every single customer should get more than he expects. A good experience helps us to build a brand and helps to bring back the customer. This really helped us build the brand. We have very loyal customers. Since we had limited marketing funds at the beginning, we only addressed people who, in the long run, will stick with us. We didn’t do promotions on customers who will only buy once. We wanted to build a customer lifetime value that is as high as possible.

Sramana Mitra: When you and your co-founder launched this website and emailed out to your network of contacts, did you guys put in any money?

Samy Liechti: At the very beginning, we invested something like $30,000.

Sramana Mitra: Between the two of you?

Samy Liechti: Yes, the two of us. By the time the business was running, we invested a little more money. Our biggest investment was that we were working for free.

Sramana Mitra: The two of you basically put some little bit of money in and then you worked for free. It was just the two of you at that point?

Samy Liechti: At the beginning, we were just two. Little by little, we had a student working for us. The team became bigger.

Sramana Mitra: You launched this site and you mailed out to this palm pilot contact list. How much response did you get?

Samy Liechti: We got quite some response but most people were saying, “Are you kidding me?” That was the first response. At the same time, we also started to doing press releases. We had the same reaction. Whenever someone wrote an article about us, we got more credibility.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks
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