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 place. We did not have enough people, socks, and time. This brought us to the next level. I think 70% growth in one year is a lot. We had to adopt processes, systems, and so on. That was the biggest growth ever. Usually, we have 20% a year.

Sramana Mitra: What level were you at the end of 2005?

Samy Liechti: We were at about $2.2 million.

Sramana Mitra: At this point, what geographies did you cover?

Samy Liechti: More and more international customers came in.

Sramana Mitra: Within Europe too?

Samy Liechti: No, we had a lot of countries but in every single country, we only had a few customers. We shipped to 60 countries.

Sramana Mitra: You are setup now to take payments from all different currencies?

Samy Liechti: We have four currencies. Outside Europe, we only had US dollars. At that time, people were used to doing international orders in US dollars.

Sramana Mitra: When you look at that scenario, did you make any specific bets? Our customer base is very international, but there are usually concentrations. You spend marketing dollars in those places where you see traction. You see more trends that are in your favor. What were the dynamics of your customer base in the mid-2000 decade?

Samy Liechti: We started spending a little bit in Germany, but apart from that, we didn’t spend marketing money outside our country. We did a lot of SEO which brought some traffic. We had some international PR. Since where I’m coming from is quite a globalized country with a lot of foreigners living, and with a lot of Swiss people moving around the world, our message spread around the world. Little by little, we had hubs. One is Sao Paulo in Brazil. We don’t have a Brazilian website and we don’t have their currency. 95% of our Brazilian customers come from the Sao Paulo area. The same thing happened with Australia. I don’t know why but all of a sudden, orders were coming in. We built up a little customer base in Australia.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like what was happening was word of mouth. Somebody found out about your site and told a few friends.

Samy Liechti: Exactly. I think what helped a lot was that I started doing a lot of speeches and presentations. Some of them at universities. University professors are very well-linked. Whenever you start reading an article from professors as examples, other professors in other parts of the world see this example and they bring this to their student. I think this helped us a lot as well.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks
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