Part 2: Knock-off shoe website CTO

A few years into my freelance career, I helped many of my friends establish their online presence, but I had a dream about having a business of my own. The ideas were popping up daily, but being a one-man-show operation, I could not produce anything beyond a modest website where I offered my services. I desperately needed someone who could take the 'offline' part of the business upon his shoulders and let me deal with the things I knew how to handle.

So, I talked to my friends, primarily classmates, and tried to spark some desire for entrepreneurship in them. One of my close friends appeared to be willing to try something out. He was always an outside-of-the-box thinker and exercised remarkable ethical flexibility combined with the circumspection of a small field animal. We were friends from my early school years: me, a computer nerd with the confidence of a hamster, and he, someone equally certain about himself but more like a rat.

At the time, he was much into partying and getting nice outfits to impress his night-time acquaintances. Getting those outfits was practically impossible with our income, so he discovered places in Moscow where you could get some affordable knock-off variations of what he wanted for a dime a pair.

The place that he discovered was not something secret. It was a variation of a flea market, a phenomenon that deserves its own tale. It appeared that most fancy-looking Moscow dwellers were getting their outfits not on the high streets but on the outskirts, where I discovered a whole new world.

So, his idea was to establish an e-shop where people like him could fulfil their dreams. I had many doubts. On the one hand, I understood that we would sell pirated stuff; on the other, I did not understand how something that ugly and boastful could be sold for money. He convinced me that people who purchase this stuff know it's fake, as he and his night-time friends do, and that plenty of people like them would die for a shirt or jeans with some known label. In the end, he concluded that we were, essentially, providing some kind of delivery service: sourcing items in one of those bazaars and selling them to people around the country.

Reluctantly, I agreed. I understood that it put me in some place I'd never wanted to be, but my part was quite simple, and I knew the craft: making a website and working on the SEO. I remember being perplexed by how practically no one else saw this moral shortcoming of mine!

Something new was that we had to take pictures of the stock. That's how I managed to see how those flea markets operate and to know people there. With my eye getting used to the items we were selling, I started to see them everywhere: in the malls and boutiques of that era. I discovered that most of the expensive brand items sold in Moscow during that period appeared fake and differed only in price, reaching exuberant numbers in the premium malls and high streets.

I think it was around 2006, a year after we established the venture, our website finally picked up, and we started to receive around 5-6 daily orders instead of 1 or 2. Later, we grew a little more, but not a lot. It was something wonderful! People from all around the vast country ordered shoes, trousers and shirts. We appeared to be one of the first e-shops in Russia specialising in something that requires fitting and is not easy to sell as, say, electronics or household items.

Around half of the sales we generated were sent out to some distant places, and another half was delivered locally. The process was like this: my partner went to the bazaar every morning to get the items ordered yesterday. He was coming with our deliveryman, an older acquaintance of ours. They picked up the boxes and worked out the day's itinerary.

That was the time when money was easy, and a bit more persistence on my side could've put us on top of the e-commerce food chain. Just a few years later, our competitors removed the initial portfolio of forged shoes and jeans and became prominent players on the national e-commerce stage.

But this e-shop was bound to die and not thrive, though: being an unwanted child, a project that I felt ashamed for, I never paid much attention to its well-being and management. At some point, we focused too much on one particular supplier: someone reasonable, having many items in stock and not willing to let many other e-shops into his warehouse (at some point, it became a thing, and many youngsters were doing the same: taking pictures and selling it online).

The supplier we focused on was a family business: two Azerbaijani brothers were working together, one in Moscow dealing with sales, and another one spending more time in Turkey looking for new things. We both quickly realised that we could work together and formed an alliance: our deliverymen were trusted to take as much as they needed from their stock and return the items that were not sold routinely. Money changed hands a few times per month, so it was a big step forward compared to how we started: my partner used to spend days on the bazaar dealing with individual sales and returns.

The website we had at the time was generating around 2000 users per day, an impressive number in 2007 or 2008. We should've invested more time into it and extended our portfolio, but we focused on the things generating most of the sales, rarely experimenting with new products. We overlooked the risk of relying on something we don't control: the Azerbaijani brothers.

Around 2011, Moscow looked very different from just five years prior. It overcame the disfigured and wretched signs of the 'damned nineties', the time of poverty and lawlessness, and grew to appreciate both its Soviet and imperial heritage. Disorderly rag fairs, kiosks and chaotically placed ads were all bound to be wiped out from the city streets. Moscow government decided to crack down on visual clutter and our bazaar - being located in one of the central areas was the first to go.

The bazaars always were areas of lawlessness, and by the end of the decade, they became isolated fiefdoms with their own security forces, laws and hierarchy. Each of them had some distinct ethnicity in charge: ours had Azerbaijans, others were run by Vietnamese and Chinese, and Mountain Jews ran the biggest one. Bazaars were not only places of trade but also places to live! Each of them had a different set of customs and cultural imprints. 'Ours' featured many Turkish restaurants, some financial services to aid international trade, and many small shady offices providing local book-cooking. The Chinese bazaar was much bigger and featured a full-blown Chinatown under the roof of their vast market on its last floor, where the ceiling was low and no customers were around.

So, when Moscow finally decided to eliminate this cancer of chaotic trade, they had to deal with very well-established groups with one foot in the city and another in the federal government. Each group fought fiercely for its survival and prosperity, as every player eliminated provided additional growth to the bazaars left.

The Azerbaijani bazaar was in a bad state: being the smallest and close to the central areas provided enough incentive for the government to deal with it swiftly. So, one day, our brothers received a message that they had 12 hours to evacuate their stock and be gone. They were cautious people and followed the instructions: packed as much as they could handle and left.

For several days afterwards, they were not answering the phone, but that was not needed to know what happened: it was in the national news that the bazaar got demolished the next day, and a park promised to be constructed in its place.

We lost our main supplier and tried to figure out what to do, but it was late: the crackdown spread rumours to the other bazaars that promptly closed their doors and made to compromise with the government. For the next three months, very little trade was made, and we lost our customers (we had many regular customers). By then, we had other business running, and we sold the remnants of our online property to someone willing to invest his energy in finding new sources.

Once I got rid of all relations to that e-shop, I felt much better and never regretted the loss. The five years of dealing with the shoes, jeans, belts and shirts left me with a big bag of man's underwear of one particular type and a lesson: never to engage in something you don't feel like doing. The underwear bag diminished slowly but steadily. I think it took me around 5 to 7 years to utilise it according to its intended purpose. That was the first thing I actually wore that was available on our website. I felt kind of obligated to pay my tribute to all the good and bad that happened to us during our bazaar career. When I got rid of the last briefs, I felt a little nostalgic but happy: the quest was over.