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.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of publications were picking you up?

Samy Liechti: I remember the very first one was a daily newspaper.

Sramana Mitra: A daily newspaper in Switzerland?

Samy Liechti: Yes. When it came to e-commerce at that time, nobody had a clue how it worked. People were talking about new economy and nobody had any answer. Our project was very simple. Since I had a communication background, it helped a lot. We had a whole bunch of information for journalists. This helped us to get into it. Little by little, we got more coverage all over Europe. Little by little, customers came in.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get to a million dollars in revenue?

Samy Liechti: It took us two and a half years.

Sramana Mitra: What was the primary customer acquisition method? How did you acquire customers to get to a million?

Samy Liechti: Our products are rather cheap. They are around $10, so to get to a million, you need to sell a lot. We ran a lot of promotions. At the very early stage, we worked with a frequent flyer program. We bought miles and gave it to our customers. It was like a discount, but we never destroyed the price because they paid full price. This gave us, first of all, free communication. This gave us credibility.

Sramana Mitra: How did that work? You bought miles and then gave these miles to customers for free?

Samy Liechti: Yes. Whenever they bought a product, they got the miles which they usually have to fly for.

Sramana Mitra: So you did a deal with a frequent flyer program and you paid for those miles. They were getting mileage by buying your products.

Samy Liechti: We did a similar thing together with credit card companies. We also went to Human Resource departments and ran promotions on the intranet of big banks. What helped us a lot was word of mouth. Most of the customers were, first of all, very happy with the product and service. At the very beginning, we put in place a good customer service department. Therefore, they got a good experience and started talking about us. The more customers we had, the more people were talking about us. This brought us quite quickly to the $1 million border.

Sramana Mitra: In that $1 million, how many customers were there?

Samy Liechti: We had about 10,000 customers.

Sramana Mitra: So the average customer value is about $100?

Samy Liechti: Yes.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks
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