WBJ: Where did the idea for creating the DeeZee footwear brand come from? 

Dominika Żak: The idea actually came from a visit to an erotic trade fair in Warsaw. I went out of curiosity, and I saw these beautiful sandals there in my size.

There was a wholesaler selling English footwear. I have very small feet, EU size 35, and at that time I couldn’t find shoes that fit me anywhere. I looked at the stand and liked practically everything.

So I went over and asked whether I could place an order. They said yes, but wholesale orders started at a minimum of twelve pairs. We got to talking and I told them I desperately wanted the shoes but didn’t actually have the money to buy them. We got along so well that they sent me twelve pairs on consignment and told me I could pay them once I had the money.

I kept three pairs for myself and listed the remaining nine on Allegro. The next day, I checked and they had all sold. I realized that in a single night I had actually earned more than my salary as a German teacher at a high school in Warsaw. It was simply an opportunity that appeared in front of me, and I took it. That was how I started DeeZee.

How did you come up with the brand name?

I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I knew I wanted something short and something that sounded a little English. One day, while I was watching television, my partner’s sister walked past me wearing Lee jeans. That gave me the idea of using my own initials, and that’s how I came up with DeeZee.

What were the first years of the business like?

They were like the early years of any startup: no money, no funding and no real knowledge, but a huge amount of passion. I didn’t spend much time wondering whether it would work. I just kept going.

From the very beginning, I knew I wanted it to become a big brand and that I wanted to create something exceptional. I simply knew that, at the time, you couldn’t buy shoes like that in Poland.

What were the most important factors behind that growth?

DeeZee started as a small store, and by the time I stepped down as CEO, we had revenue of more than PLN 127 million, with very good profitability and margins. Unfortunately, I can’t share the specific figures because the investor doesn’t allow me to. We had several growth levers, from the very beginning.

Social media was certainly one of them: first Facebook, then Instagram, as well as collaborations with influencers. You could say we were pioneers when it came to working with influencers.

We were also among the first fashion e-commerce businesses in Poland to invest in Google advertising. I have the impression that there is a real advantage in being among the first to enter a new space.

Another major step was traveling to China and creating our own footwear collections. DeeZee had initially been a retailer selling different brands; later, we developed DeeZee into a footwear brand of its own.

Then came the investment from the CCC Group and our expansion into our first international markets: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine. After that, we expanded into another twenty markets.

If I had to identify the biggest factors, though, I would probably say social media, influencer partnerships and, of course, bringing in the investor. But I also have to mention that we had an amazing management team. We were a close-knit group and, through all the highs and lows of running the business, we genuinely enjoyed what we were doing. That made an enormous difference.

There were many different growth levers, from the major ones I’ve mentioned to smaller but equally important decisions, such as hiring highly experienced specialists in areas like IT and finance. So it was all about people. They were enormously important.

Do you remember the moment when you felt that DeeZee was no longer a small business but had become a large, recognizable brand?

Absolutely. I walked into a CCC store and saw this beautiful DeeZee collection right at the front, with large numbers of customers trying on the shoes. Then I saw the financial results, and afterwards I heard the head of CCC describe it as a spectacular sales success. That was the moment.

Which decisions proved pivotal to the company’s development? And which mistakes cost you the most?

When it comes to mistakes, I have always treated them primarily as lessons. I never spent much time wondering whether I was making a mistake or not. I had a goal: I wanted DeeZee to become a large, recognizable brand, and that was what I worked toward from the very beginning.

Did I make mistakes? Of course. Find me an entrepreneur who hasn’t. Sometimes I learned from them immediately, and sometimes I went on to make another one.

One mistake that is definitely worth mentioning is that I waited too long to hire experienced specialists. I surrounded myself with junior employees whom I trained, and then they would leave because someone else offered them PLN 200 or PLN 300 more. In a sense, DeeZee became a very inexpensive training ground for other companies.

But I didn’t have a business background, so I simply didn’t know at the time that I should be building the team differently. Looking back, I should have brought in people with much deeper expertise in areas such as finance, logistics, warehousing and paid marketing earlier.

Another mistake was moving into clothing. We weren’t sufficiently prepared to enter that category at the pace and scale that we did.

If you compared the two categories, roughly 96 percent of our sales were still shoes. The clothing simply wasn’t selling in the same way.

We had to understand why, try different approaches and eventually recognize that selling shoes is completely different from selling clothes. We had to learn the category and bring in people who understood it. Then the war in Ukraine began, and unfortunately we had to let some of those people go.

As leaders and CEOs, we are learning constantly, and much of that learning comes from mistakes. Some were strategic mistakes like the ones I’ve mentioned, while others were much more basic. At one point, I lost all the money I had because I invested it in shoes that were never delivered, simply because I hadn’t signed a contract.

You sold DeeZee to the CCC Group. Was that exit always part of the plan?

I sold DeeZee to CCC back in 2018, but the transaction was structured over time. When I signed the investment agreement, I knew exactly when I would sell particular portions of my shares and when the full exit would take place.

We originally agreed on five years and later extended that by another year. So from the very beginning, I knew that the company would eventually be fully acquired by CCC.

I agreed to that and I wanted it. Ultimately, that is exactly what happened. So it wasn’t a decision I suddenly made a year or two before leaving. The decision had been made many years earlier.

I think it is fair to say that every successful company eventually reaches a point where it either gets sold or starts investing in and acquiring other companies itself. In our case, this was the path I had planned, and I followed it through.

Was it emotionally difficult to part with a company you had built from scratch?

The idea of looking for an investor had already been taking shape in my mind for about two years. I knew how much money I wanted to receive and what I wanted to do with it afterwards, so I was mentally prepared for the process.

Once I signed the investment agreement, I also knew that five years later the company would no longer be mine. And five years was plenty of time to get used to the idea that DeeZee would come of age.

That was what we were preparing for. I also had plans for what I would do with the money: I invested it, created new brands and invested in real estate.

Today I’m free and independent. That was very important to me.

Of course, saying goodbye to the team was emotionally very difficult, because to me DeeZee was always about the people. It still is, in a way, because I continue to work with many of them and I’m still friends with some of them.

But the decision itself wasn’t emotionally difficult. I’d had plenty of time to prepare for it.

How did your role change after selling DeeZee? Did moving from managing your own brand into a new professional chapter require you to redefine yourself?

My role actually hasn’t changed that much, because I’m still a CEO. I still have a team, although it’s smaller.

The big difference is the people I surround myself with. When DeeZee was starting out, I worked with a lot of junior people. Today, everyone I work with is highly experienced, and working with people at that level is completely different.

As I mentioned earlier, I already knew many of them from DeeZee, and now we work together in my new company. We are all working toward the same goal. We know where we want to be a year from now and where we want to be in five years.

So on the one hand, I still manage a company. On the other, I have virtually no involvement in day-to-day operational activities, which gives me a very different kind of freedom.

Today you teach female entrepreneurs how to use social media to build their brands and increase sales. Where did the idea for this new direction come from?

That’s another interesting story. I went to a training course in the United States because I wanted to learn how to use social media even more effectively to grow DeeZee and sell shoes.

When I got there, I discovered a completely different world: people who owned companies but didn’t have to go into their companies every day. Their businesses no longer depended on them operationally, and at the same time they were building personal brands and earning money from them.

What struck me during that course in the US was that almost everything being taught was something I already knew from experience. I simply hadn’t known that it was possible to build a business around it.

After five days of that training, I came away convinced that I wanted to leave DeeZee and that this was going to be my next chapter.

Throughout my business career, I had worked almost exclusively with men, and it bothered me that women were still somewhat in the shadows and that there simply weren’t enough women in business. I started thinking about what I could do about that.

Many people are active on social media but are unable to turn that activity into sales. Where do they most often go wrong?

The most common mistake is neglecting the foundations. People don’t define their mission or vision, they don’t know who their customer is, and they don’t properly set up the social media account they are going to use.

And this isn’t only about Instagram. It could be TikTok or LinkedIn. These platforms differ, of course, but many of the underlying principles are similar.

If we don’t know who we are talking to, then we are essentially shooting in the dark. So very often, the problem comes back to weak foundations. Without them, it is very difficult to move forward.

The second major issue is mindset. We don’t work on ourselves enough: we don’t read, educate ourselves, surround ourselves with the right people, listen to podcasts or find mentors. Too often, we assume we will do everything better on our own. That can be a very costly mistake.

What are the most important principles of building a strong personal brand that you teach the participants in your courses?

First, they need a mission and a vision. They need to know why they are doing it and why they are going onto Instagram, LinkedIn or any other platform in the first place.

And ideally, the answer shouldn’t simply be money. Money comes as a consequence when you build a strong personal brand around something meaningful.

So you need your vision, your mission and your “why,” but you also need to know who your customer is. From the beginning, you should understand what you are going to sell and who you are going to sell it to.

A personal brand is still a business. Of course, people want it to generate income, so you have to be very clear about what you are selling and who you are selling it to.

The next step is understanding your customer’s pain points. Once you know who the customer is, you need to ask yourself what problem you are actually solving for that person.

You need to know what they struggle with, why they come to you and what kind of product or solution they are looking for. I encourage people to actually write those pain points down and identify at least ten.

Only when we really understand what worries our customer, what stresses her and what keeps her awake at night, can we create something that genuinely responds to her needs. That is where a strong personal brand begins. 

Dominika Żak 

Founder & Ex CEO DeeZee 

Dominika Żak began her career as a teacher before founding DeeZee in 2005. Over nearly two decades as CEO, she built the e-commerce fashion brand from the ground up, growing it to PLN 127 million in annual revenue. In January 2024, she fully exited the business, selling 100% of the company to CCC Group. Today, through The CEO System, she helps entrepreneurs build personal brands as measurable business assets that drive revenue and create long-term company value.