By Contributor,Pooja Shah,Vittorio Zunino Celotto
Copyright forbes
MILAN, ITALY – MARCH 28: Federico Marchetti attends Elisa Sednaoui Foundation and Yoox Net a Porter Event on March 28, 2017 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Elisa Sednaoui Foundation)
The Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna shimmer with centuries of artistic heritage, their intricate patterns catching the Mediterranean light that filters through ancient churches. For a young Federico Marchetti, growing up in this sleepy seaside town of 150,000 along the Adriatic coast, these masterpieces weren’t just tourist attractions but his first lessons in merging beauty and business. In his memoir “The Geek of Chic: An American Dream Italian Style,” (published on September 9, 2025), the YOOX Net-a-Porter founder shares the secrets to international entrepreneurial success.
Marchetti’s latest memoir, with a foreword by the late Giorgio Armani, recounts his entrepreneurial successes and lessons.
Federico Marchetti
“I describe myself as transforming from a geeky kid in the sleepy seaside town of Ravenna to building a $6 billion digital empire,” Marchetti tells Forbes in an interview. “It’s a beautiful city full of monuments and mosaics that have influenced me to bring beauty into business. This is an Italian thing. It’s typical of Italians to add beauty and culture to their businesses.”
Those same mosaics that captivated teenage Federico would later inspire King Charles III during his visit to Ravenna in April 2025, underscoring the timeless power of the city’s artistic legacy. But for Marchetti, they represented something more personal: proof that beauty and commerce could coexist.
Marchetti’s Columbia Business School Transformation
Coming from a humble family with a father who struggled with bipolar disorder, Marchetti understood early that dreams required both vision and tenacity. At 19, he left Ravenna with a clear mission: to pursue the “American Dream.”
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The late 1990s at Columbia Business School became the perfect crucible for his entrepreneurial awakening. While Amazon was gaining traction and the internet was in its infancy, he lived at the epicenter of a digital revolution. “I felt living in New York that the internet was becoming a big evolution, and I felt it in advance compared to the Italians,” he recalls.
This cultural intersection fascinated him. “In my mind, I was a mix between American culture talking about stock exchanges and Wall Street and Silicon Valley and technology and algorithms and processes and Italian culture, which is mostly small family businesses.”
Marchetti earned his MBA at Columbia Business School in New York and shaped his strategic acumen to take his business global.
Federico Marchetti
At Columbia, Marchetti learned to write strategic business plans while absorbing the American entrepreneurial mindset of creating something from nothing. The timing proved serendipitous. “No one was thinking about selling fashion online,” he observed. His radical vision: bringing together fashion and digital commerce, “two worlds that were so distant from one another ten years ago and are now closer than ever.”
Marchetti’s Debut Into E-Commerce with YOOX
The name YOOX itself tells the story of Marchetti’s innovative thinking. Combining the Y and X chromosomes with the “00” from binary computer code, it represented a brilliant fusion of biology and technology, a metaphor for bringing the organic world of fashion into the digital realm.
What started as a dream in 1999 became reality when Marchetti returned from Columbia and began drafting his business plan. “There was no social media and there was no Instagram,” he remembers, highlighting his pioneering vision.
The breakthrough came in 2003 when Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital firms, made a bold bet on an Italian entrepreneur. “They invested in an Italian company, but in the case of fashion, they understood that being Italian was a competitive advantage,” Marchetti explains. “They invested $7.2 million to penetrate the New York market and enable international expansion.”
This moment marked when he knew he had arrived as an entrepreneur; after all, the funding provided validation that his luxury e-commerce vision could scale globally.
How Marchetti Expanded His Fashion Empire Globally
The Benchmark Capital investment proved transformative, enabling YOOX to establish itself in America while maintaining its Italian design sensibility. By 2015, Marchetti’s vision evolved into something grander: acquiring Net-a-Porter to create YOOX Net-a-Porter Group, the world’s leading luxury fashion e-commerce platform. The numbers tell an unprecedented growth story: $3 billion in revenue, 5,000 employees, and offices spanning the globe. For Marchetti, the real achievement was proving that technology and luxury could enhance each other.
As the late Giorgio Armani wrote in the memoir’s foreword, Marchetti was “one of the first to sense the potential of fashion on the web, inventing a reality that hadn’t existed with commitment and determination as his instruments.”
Pictured the late Giorgio Armani (left) with Federico Marchetti.
Federico Marchetti
Marchetti’s Mission To Educate Future Entrepreneurs
Today, Marchetti serves as Chair of His Majesty King Charles III’s Sustainable Markets Initiative Fashion Task Force, uniting global luxury brands including Chloé, Armani, Burberry, Cucinelli, Stella McCartney, and Prada. In a sector known for individualism, he’s rallying these groups around shifting towards a circular, climate-conscious, and nature-positive industry. The King of England now considers Marchetti his consigliere on regenerative fashion and digital innovation, collaborating on several initiatives and projects that bridge luxury commerce with environmental responsibility.
Marchetti works on His Majesty King Charles III’s service as Chair of The Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Fashion Task Force to promote a climate-conscious fashion industry.
Federico Marchetti
But that’s not all. Marchetti has come full circle, teaching “Creating A Startup In the Digital And Sustainable Economy” at his alma mater. With 70 students from around the world, he guides them through creating sustainability-centered business plans, departing from the pure growth-focused models of the early internet era.
“Speaking with these young people in their twenties, the real reason I wrote the book is to give courage to the young generation and teach them to take risks,” Marchetti explains. “Without risk, you’ll never know if you will be lucky or not. You need to make sure that the world is getting better, not worse. Money will come, but don’t make it the focus. That’s short-term thinking.”
How Marchetti Advocates For Ethical Businesses
In “From Geek to Chic,” Marchetti champions combining “innovation, business acumen, and AI with humanism, creativity, and empathy.” The memoir offers entrepreneurs hard-won wisdom about avoiding “growing too big too soon” while achieving meaningful scale and impact.
The book serves as both autobiography and manifesto, providing a roadmap for entrepreneurs who refuse to choose between profit and purpose. Marchetti’s memoir demonstrates that the geeky kid from Ravenna and the global fashion icon are complementary facets of a life lived at the intersection of beauty and technology.
Marchetti sees particular promise in how young entrepreneurs approach fashion and sustainability, noting their commitment to “the quality of materials” and understanding that if you are able to do good business, then you are doing something good for climate change. His approach to the next generation remains both inspiring and practical: “Be brave. I have put a lot of trust in the young generation that they will change the world.”
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