Dalla Bancarotta a €1.2 MILIARDI di Fatturato 👕 Marco Boglione, Proprietario Kappa, K-Way e Sundek

We started from zero. Today 1-2 billion in aggregate sales. We sponsored Juventus, the national team, Barcelona. Toscani said, 'But you in your shitty knitwear factory, you shitty capitalist, you have to start making jeans?' I personally owed a dozen million euros. He told me: 'You are bankrupt, but not now, you went bankrupt a year and a half ago.' He says: 'We have to sign, otherwise tomorrow everything falls apart.' And the other said, 'If you don't sign, I'll kill you.' He says, 'We received an offer that can't be refused and I saw my world collapse.'

When I was little, 8-10 years old, I went fishing with a fishing rod. And there at the port of Alassio, in the 60s, there were already beautiful boats. Andrea one says, 'Whose boat is that? 30 meters, beautiful.' Of Sergio Pini in Farina. And what profession does an entrepreneur do? And when I was little, they asked me what I wanted to do and I answered entrepreneur. Everyone had a Ferrari there. There were always beautiful girls on board. And why ask me? At 9 or 10 I had a bad accident, so I had to stay in the hospital bandaged for a month because the accident was to my eyes, and so my grandmother taught me to crochet and I naturally did it and then sold it. I said, 'Grandma, I'll do it, but will you buy it from me for 500 lire?' I came out with almost 500,000 lire of those... all your grandmother? No, no, all my mother's friends came to visit me and all came down to buy potholders. I wasn't good at school.

No, I only discovered at 40 why I was dyslexic, so at a certain point I had myself sent to boarding school.

When I went to boarding school, after a few months, I asked the supervisors if I could bring up my darkroom to the boarding school, it was in Veneto, maybe I could set up a photography course. And then I said, but don't you want anything? I say, no, you take the fees for the photography course which was 400,000 lire a year. I only want the right to sell the photos I take. And he says, 'To whom?' 'To the students.' And I offer them for sale at 1000 lire. And naturally no one buys even one. So all the priests laugh. I say, 'Wait a moment, I haven't told them yet that if they buy that photo and take it home, they can resell it for 5,000 lire.'

A business exploded because the boys in boarding school only wanted that to have fun on the weekend and the parents who put them in boarding school,

So at a certain point I started earning

I earned 1.5 million lire. With that 1.5 million lire there was a lot of trading. These boys went home, maybe picked up Cartier, Ray-Bans, and the pawn shop of the Filipino boarding school was born. So we left the boarding school with a considerable nest egg.

I lasted two exams in 2 years and luckily one evening I met a person who changed my life. Maurizio Vitale.

But I met him when we were sleeping in the same room in two beds 2 meters apart. It was at our mountain house that we brothers used, a small apartment, and my brother had told this friend of his, 'If you don't know where to sleep, go there.' I found him in my bed and in the dark he says to me, 'What did you want to be when you grow up?' I say, 'Don't ask me that. When I was little I wanted to be a photographer.' And he says, 'And what do you do now?' 'I study engineering.' He turns on the light, says, 'Are you crazy?' And then we return to Turin on Monday afternoon and the phone rings at Vitale's secretary: 'Could you possibly come by? They give me the address here that Mr. Vitale would like to have a chat with you.' I go like a shot, I come down by car faster than Lauda. I arrive here and he hires me and I say, 'Yes, but what about university?' Well, we'll see.

He saw himself. I said, 'Now I'll do this better than me' and he paid me well.

But the first salary was 440,000 lire, let's say, that was 1300-1500 of today. He says, 'I'll make you go through the same apprenticeship that my father made me go through.' On the third second night shift and weaving. For a while I did a lousy job which was arranging yarns for external weavers and it was a crazy job for a dyslexic because they were sheets of paper as big as this table. I think I messed up everything I did and so they moved me to sales and I became responsible first for an area that was Puglia and Calabria, so easy to reach. I had to be there at 8:30 Monday morning. Ah, and leave at 3-4 in the afternoon on Friday.

I traveled a lot with Vitale and he had told me a thousand times that he had started making jeans because in Central Park with Toscani they had noticed in 1968 that many young people were wearing these garments. What are they? It was evidently a cultural thing. They wanted to show freedom, independence and then walking on Broadway, Vitale. Because Toscani said, 'But you in your shitty knitwear factory, you shitty capitalist, you dickhead, you have to stop making those shitty t-shirts, you have to start making jeans.' I say yes, but knitwear fabric, no, it doesn't matter, you have to make jeans and then at a certain point Vitale says yes, okay, then let's make jeans but what do we call these jeans? Toscani turns around and they were in front of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and says call it Jesus. He says but Jesus why Jesus? Vitale says and the other says it's a nice name, many already know it. Well, then let's call them Jesus and it was a huge success.

In '78 we were in Central Park and I say to Vitale, Marie, what do you see? And he says, 'I see that everyone has a tracksuit, they run and have a little thing in their ears, it was called Walkman and what you saw is that everyone is running, there are no more jeans, something has changed here. We pass by a store called The Athlet Food, the precursor of Foot Locker, a store that sold only sneakers and some t-shirts of all kinds, sneakers.' And I say, 'Maurizio, in my opinion that is the jeans store of the future.' And he says, 'You're right, let's go back to Turin, he tells me nothing, there were the '78 World Cup in Argentina and we watch these World Cup at night because they were in Argentina, Italy plays and there was Antonio Cabrini and Vitale, who wasn't a football fan, watches the whole match and at the end of the match says: 'That one is a rock star.' A week after the national team returned, he was at Malpensa and he caught Cabrini's father and sponsored him. He came to me, said let's make the sport line and first Rob di K Sport was born, then K Sport, which today is K.

And Vitale says, 'And why don't we put the little men on the Juventus shirt? Never seen a football sponsorship until then in the whole world. Immediately hustle, you know a journalist, take us to Boniperti. We go to Boniperti. Vitale, who was a great salesman, starts spinning the sponsorship here, the strategy there. Boniperti understood little of what he was saying and at a certain point turns to his CEO, named Dr. Giuliano, and says, 'Giuliano, do you think they want to give us money or do they want money from us?' And while Giuliano says, 'No, president, I think that...' but he doesn't finish the sentence because Vitale says, 'Are you kidding? We want to pay, we want to buy the sponsorship' and the other doesn't let him come, says, 'How much will you give us?' And Vitale without even letting him finish the sentence, so it's a very fast thing, 200 million and Boniperti says, 'Beautiful.'

Mid-championship of '78. I leave with a bag of little men. We go into the Juventus locker room and we attach with the seamstress Iomini who tells me where do you want it? Here, here, lift a bit, put it here and so everyone actually the thing worked great because Rob started doing advertising, they took Cabrini, they took Tardelli.

I was in the office in the morning, the intercom rings and they tell me there's someone who says he's the president of Ajax. There was Cruyff at the time, Ajax was winning everything, and he says, 'I saw what you did with Juventus, very good among them.' This guy, who the hell is this? 'God, would you do an operation with Ajax like the one you did with Juventus?' He said, 'Yes, of course, president, we'll do it immediately.' And they didn't have a lira either at that time, always bankrupt. 'But how much did you give Juventus?' And I there in real time did the calculations and those 200 million were $100,000, but in a fraction of a second I tell him $50,000 to not make a mistake. I say, how do I do it? Half and then at most we negotiate with the president of Ajax. I was 22 years old and he says, 'Okay, then can we consider it done?' 'Of course, president. Absolutely, but how do we do it? But come visit me so we can get to know each other.' He didn't know I was 22, then I sent Vitale. But anyway we closed and we sponsored Ajax for 6 years. In terms of returns, the sport line, from the launch, went very strong immediately.

We announced that we would sponsor the entire American track and field delegation with names like Carl Lewis, Moses, Mary Decker, John Benis.

because from there there was the line that was going very well and they sponsored Borg and so they had offered to the line to sponsor Track and Field and they were so strong in tennis that they said we have nothing to do with that stuff and so at a certain point word spread that there was an opportunity. Vitale rushed, met the president of the federation, a certain Holland Castle, and meets him in a pub in Atlanta and Vitale says, 'I'll make you an offer on one condition: if you accept, you tell me how much Adidas was giving you because Adidas was the official supplier.' 'Ciao Dildan.' 'Ok. Italy says one million dollars.' The other doesn't respond. He takes the pen from his pocket. On the napkin he's eating on, he writes 1 million, gives it to Vitale with the pen, says 'Sign.' The other signs and says, 'Now it's your turn. $40,000.'

Holy shit. No, K changed radically.

always work, don't have an agenda, which doesn't mean working 24 hours a day for 365 days. We took great vacations, Vitale and I loved it, he loved it too. Boats, diving, he did everything, but maybe we would stop somewhere on the way back from Japan and stay there a week, but there was no Saturday, Sunday, it's 8:00 PM, nothing, there never was, we worked, but we had fun and we dreamed. We would finish at the restaurant, I'd say, 'Fuck, now let's do this, that.' It was continuous and when there wasn't something like that at the restaurant, we would calculate how much we thought the restaurant was earning. Beautiful.

Vitale gets a bad illness, one of those that at the time gave no escape. He gets AIDS, he was one of the very first confirmed HIV-positive declared heterosexuals and he tells me, 'The time has come for you to go be an entrepreneur, because here without me I don't know what will become of the company, after 7 years it went bankrupt and not only that. Also Daniela, who was his super secretary assistant with whom I was flirting.'

I earned very well.

Eh, I was earning about a hundred million lire a year at that time, which is like earning €300,000 today, but I was 28, but we didn't have an alternative either, eh, it's not like we could go look for a job. I would rather kill myself at that point than go work for someone else after working like that. And one day we were in London, in a taxi, it was raining, a scooter passed us, you could see an antenna sticking out and there was a chest and a top box with written 'rapid delivery from desk to desk'. Interesting. I was already into computers and all that, I already imagined it, I founded Mototaxi.

In '85 I moved into this garage where the company was. In the garage next door there was Mototaxi with my wife to start this life. We were in the attic with two children, with some income from Mototaxi, with Football Sport Merchandise which, even if it earned something, increased debt and we only functioned thanks to our programming ability on the first PCs because they were all small, very complicated businesses. Imagine mail order. In the 80s in Italy, credit cards existed, there was only cash on delivery by post, they lost 10% of packages. So the first moment was dramatic because we thought everything was going well. I brought in my accountant who said, 'You are bankrupt, but not now, you went bankrupt a year and a half ago.' And here we go on and there was all debt to suppliers because we discovered that the invoices, the suppliers sent them, our guys, all the young kids I had met outside the stadium, they put them in the drawer and left them there. When the supplier shouted, then they would go look, send me a copy, etc., they paid, but accounting didn't exist.

We got out with a loan of 50 million lire that allowed a bank to give us another 50 and with 100 million we started and we earned. Then we had shops at the stadium, mail order, and some stalls we supplied because in the meantime, immediately in '85 we made the first licensing contract with Juventus, that is, to be able to make caps, shirts, and there again from Boniperti he says, 'But why do you want to give me money? Everyone does it? Outside the stadiums there was everything, scarves, flags, trumpets, but there wasn't even a real Juventus brand, no one had registered it, and so I say yes, now it's like this, but it won't last forever. Why do you say that? Because in America that of the bootleg, of the unauthorized, is already over. Eh, but here it's different, then it ended. Anyway, Football Sport Merchandise lost money for 10 years, but luckily there was Mototaxi that earned it, so in the end the two mouths at home we fed them.

Football. The first year we had a turnover of 300 million, the second 800, the third 1.5 million and 9 years later we were already doing about thirty billion. We sold merchandise of Italian teams in Japan, but a Greek client owed us a billion and didn't pay us, so said, 'It's over.'

La Rinascente entered in '86, let's say a partner of good reputation, we needed it, it was nobody. I have always said that I had three great teachers: one Maurizio Vitale, another my mother, and the other Gianluigi Gabetti, right-hand man of lawyer Agnelli, CEO of LIFI, then of Exor, and he liked me and in that period La Rinascente was a holding of the IFI group, Exor and all. So he set up two appointments for me, one with La Rinascente and the other with Berlusconi because I sold by mail order. Television had started doing telesales which were going very well and so he says La Rinascente might have an interest and indeed I made a presentation to a certain Nesi who was the CEO of La Rinascente at the time, which ended. It was supposed to last a quarter of an hour, 20 minutes that appointment. It lasted an hour and a half, two, and I wanted to propose to him to become the company participated by them to sell everything they already had in stores, also by mail order, which Bloomingdale's, Macy's, all their great American competitors did, a great success. Here there was only Postal Market. He asked me, 'But what do you need from us?' 'Nothing,' I told him, 'you do a capital increase at the price you decide that the company is worth.' They gave me 120 million lire into the company, not to me, for 20% of the capital. Then at the end of the meeting he says, 'Would you cancel your appointment with Berlusconi if I said yes?' And I said, 'If you say yes, I'll leave here, go celebrate immediately, call Berlusconi and say...'

Well, of course, because it was much more dynamic. La Rinascente were a bit, well, sleepyheads. The other one opened television, sold, telesales, anything.