“The moment I realized that Yoox would make it? When of cloistered nuns bought eight pairs of mules from our site. I took it as a sign. A divine sign.” Maybe for the customer. Perhaps because he could hardly imagine accessing the internet in the isolation of seclusion. But for Federico Marchetti those eight pairs of shoes represented the turning point for the company he founded a few months earlier. Yoox. Born in 2000. The Italian startup that brought the world of fashion online. Succeeding to become one of the main fashion e-commerce sites. Then a giant in the sector with the merger with Net a Porter in 2015.
Marchetti remembers the steps of his journey by sharing with the guests of the Italian Tech Week in Turin previously unpublished anecdotes from his entrepreneurial history. Curiosities, successes and mistakes. Many. Contained in a newly published book (The adventures of an innovator, Longanesi). His moment is dedicated to the lessons an entrepreneur learns from his mistakes. And he tells the most frequent about him. “Sometimes I make mistakes in evaluating the people who work with me. I overestimate them. My wife says it’s because I’m a romantic. I fall in love with people. There was a moment before the quotation (2009, ed.), in which I realized I had made a mistake in appointing a new sales and marketing director. I had to call the old guys back,” recalls Marchetti. That about mistakes he tries to give some advice to the young startup founders who listen to him at the Ogr in Turin. “The only way to get out of a situation when you realize you’ve made a mistake is to react immediately. Pride is evil. Especially for a startup.” He remembers some of his mistakes. But there are many more anecdotes. Marchetti, who left the position of CEO of his company in 2021, does not hold back: “Today I work almost exclusively for King Charles. We met a few years ago, then he invited me to Scotland, to his castle. AND he told me he was a descendant of Dracula. Or better. Of Count Vlad, the king who repelled the Ottomans as in Bram Stoker’s book. In that castle that phrase had a certain effect”, confesses the entrepreneur. But he didn’t get upset and gave the then prince a toothpaste squeezer: “It was said in the tabloids that he wasn’t able to squeeze the tube and that he needed a butler to do it. I risked it.” But Carlo liked the gift. What came next proves it.
If his entrepreneurial story wasn’t enough to tell his fortune, the episodes of his life do it. The chance meeting with Bill Gates in the Microsoft founder’s kitchen while he was eating sushi. Or Jeff Bezos’ “ogre” laugh at his jokes during a panel. “He laughed loudly at everything. Then he asked me if I wanted to sell him Yoox. He made me a proposal. Good. I refused. I didn’t say anything to my investors that they would have given it to Amazon immediately.” A gamble. But the life of an entrepreneur is made up of risks. “Those who do this job just for the money are destined to fail. You need to follow your passions. Do something that fills your life. And Yoox has filled my life. To do it, I quit a job I hated. I got into debt. But if I think about it the real danger wasn’t doing it. It would have been doing a job I didn’t like for life,” she concluded.