In 20 years, Yoox has gone from a garage in Casalecchio di Reno to the pinnacle of Swiss luxury, evolving from one of the first web start-ups into a thriving company worth €5.3 billion. It has been quite the journey for the company often referred to as Italy’s Amazon of the fashion world. The man behind this success story? Federico Marchetti, a shining example of all Italian entrepreneurs searching for both inspiration and tangible role models. Few people are able to create something – a start-up worth over a billion dollars – from nothing, but Marchetti is undoubtedly one of them. This is the story of how he did it.

The makings of the innovator

Marchetti’s can-do attitude is rooted in his DNA. Born in Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, he is the son of a former SIP worker and a Fiat employee. Later, in an interview with the Financial Times, he would say this of his family: « My parents didn’t encourage me in any way. I didn’t have any guidance. But I was really, really, really good at school. »

When it came to choosing what to study at university, Marchetti – reluctant to give up his summer at the seaside to revise for the medicine entrance test – chose the « simpler » economics. Quickly, he began to look further afield and in 1993 moved to New York with a degree from the Bocconi University under his belt. An MBA from Columbia opened the doors to the world of financial consultation and Marchetti soon joined Lehman Brothers « not to be a banker, but to learn as much as possible », as he puts it.

Marchetti’s return to Italy, at the end of the 1990s, was traumatic. He worked for a large business consultancy firm, but it soon become clear that the job wasn’t for him. He quit after just three months, determined to harness the potential of the internet in a sector that had not yet tapped into the power of innovation: fashion.

The masterstroke of combining the internet with fashion

Marchetti wanted to do something that nobody had thought to do back in 1999: make it possible to buy a Valentino evening gown with just a few clicks of the mouse. The big brands of the fashion industry were shut up in their gilded boutiques, their noses firmly turned up to the fledgling internet. Where the big fashion houses did have websites, these were nothing more than digital shop windows featuring images of models on the catwalk. There was no buzz around e-commerce because it simply wasn’t associated with luxury. Even the newly formed Amazon was selling little more than books.

It was in 2000 that Marchetti’s creation took shape, under the rather unusual name of Yoox. It was a tribute to the x and y chromosomes and the nascent new millennium, but there were also subtle references to Google’s double o and binary code. He found funding from former Olivetti CEO Elserino Piol, considered by many to be the real father of web development in Italy. In the space of weeks, the project – which was still a hypothetical business plan to all intents and purposes – had obtained what was a crazy figure for the era: three billion lira, €1.5 million euro, for 33% of the future company. Additional funds followed in the subsequent years.

Yoox was officially founded on 21 March 2000 and the first order was placed from Holland on 21 June. The dot-com bubble of 2001 burst shortly afterwards, followed by the global financial crisis of 2008, but Marchetti’s company stood firm and emerged unscathed – and stronger.

The stock exchange and the merger with Net-à-Porter

On 3 December 2009, Yoox floated on the STAR – the Piazza Affari stock exchange dedicated to medium-sized companies. The total proceeds, calculated on the basis of the offer price of €4.30 per share, amounted to around €95 million. Four years later, the company moved to the FTSE MIB, the index of Italy’s 40 most-traded companies.

The participation of the venture capital funds that had fuelled Marchetti at during the initial phase was progressively reduced and in 2015 Yoox merged with another luxury e-commerce giant: Net-à-Porter, controlled by Compagnie Financière Richemont (who in turn controlled brands of the likes of Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Piaget and Montblanc).

Richemont takes it all

A shock announcement arrived on 21 January 2018: Swiss group Richemont had bought out the remaining 75% of Yoox that it didn’t already own for a fee of €2.7 billion, thus taking the valuation of the company to €5.4 billion. Faced with these numbers, Marchetti’s reputation as a Steve Jobs­-style dictator was put to one side. Speaking to the Financial Times, Marchetti recognised that although he wasn’t loved by his staff, this was a necessary sacrifice to ensure success: « It doesn’t matter if they don’t love me. I don’t need love – I need results.”