17 Sep September 18, 2025 – Working w King Charles & High End Clothing Empire Federico Marchetti and Bra Investor Lisa Lindahl
Federico Marchetti – Chairman of The Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Fashion Task Force,Board member of Giorgio Armani, & Creator of YOOX NET-A-PORTER Group
The most important thing is take courage. Take risks, because if you don’t take risks, it would be impossible to be lucky. I was very lucky, but simply because I took so many risks, and most of the times it went well.
Federico Marchetti
Federico Marchetti took a few million dollar investment from Benchmark, a venture capital firm, in early 2000 and turned it into YOOX Net-a-Porter Group. This was later sold to Cartier’s parent company, Richemont, in a $6 billion transaction value. Marchetti found his own recipe for success by combining Silicon Valley hard skills with Italian creativity and humanism. His approach to business harkens back to this Italian DNA, and yet Marchetti helped bring fashion into the 21st century by building Italy’s first unicorn, in a country lacking digital infrastructure and tech culture. Marchetti’s story unfolds against a backdrop of European vistas, Milan, Lake Como, Venice, and England’s Royal Palaces. His journey starts with a challenging Italian childhood, and hits on many of the most significant moments in international business over the past decades—from working in the Twin Towers to studying at Columbia Business School and launching a start-up right before the dotcom bubble. Along the way he meets the who’s who of technology from Jeff Bezos to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Marchetti sits on the Armani board of directors as the only non-family member, attends the catwalk shows, and co-invests in the movies of Luca Guadagnino. From the glamorous party thrown with Anna Wintour to the dazzling coronation of King Charles III—where he sits on another type of front row as the only Italian invited alongside the President of the Republic of Italy—The Geek of Chic is as inspiring as it is entertaining, filled with doses of style, surreal situations, unexpected happenings, and ‘sliding door’ moments.
Lisa Lindahl – Sports Bra Inventor and Book Author of Unleash the Girls
The whole idea started as a joke… my sister said, ‘Why isn’t there a jock strap for women?’ And when I hung up the phone, I thought, this is not such a silly idea.
Lisa Lindahl
Lisa Z. Lindahl invented the first-ever sports bra, the “Jogbra”, in 1977 as a game-changer, evolutionizing athletic participation for women and girls and building a million-dollar business around it. She is an accomplished public speaker, writer, problem sighter and solver with knack for niche marketing and special focus on vision and planning, specializing in women-related issues. Along with being inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame and Smithsonian’s Innovate Lives series this spring in March, Lisa has detailed her life in her new book, Unleash the Girls, telling her deeply personal and improbable story of a young artist with a disability who solved a vexing problem and ended up leveling the playing field for girls and women across the globe.