LNKSTR

In late 2019, my co-founder and I took on a €1M loan for our D2C fashion brand Buckle & Seam — personally guaranteed. Just months later, the pandemic hit. Within a year, we lost everything. So why veer off the path of bootstrapping that we had embarked on in 2016 after experience significant scale and loss with Rocket Internet Already in South Asia?

This talk isn’t about failure for its own sake. It’s about the hidden fragility of e-commerce growth stories and the hard lessons I learned as a founder when rapid scaling collided with external shocks.

I’ll share what I would do differently today:

Why covering fixed costs with stable, relationship-driven revenue matters more than chasing vanity growth.

How to build healthier business foundations and resilient customer relationships.

Why sustainable growth beats aggressive scaling when the unexpected hits.

My goal is to give operators, founders, and e-commerce leaders practical insights they can apply immediately — to avoid the traps we fell into, and to build businesses that survive and thrive in uncertain times.