My blog

An acquaintance sold us the news about a niche in the Bulgarian automotive market. My high school friend and I didn't hesitate for long. We went to the Różycki bazaar and filled two backpacks and four travel bags to the brim with calendars and suction cup car blinds. Then we bought LOT Polish Airlines tickets and after a few days, on a frosty winter morning, in the second half of the eighties, we opened a stand at the largest bazaar in the capital of Bulgaria.

Sales were going like blood from the nose, the Bulgarian police forced us to change locations several times, and hot tea from a mobile café barely restored circulation to our frozen feet. After a few hours, when everything indicated that our accessories would fly back to Poland, a gentleman appeared who offered us a wholesale purchase of the entire product. Although the price he threw out was significantly different from the value assumed in our business plan, we agreed to the transaction without hesitation, because the calculations showed that the margin would be fair.

Over the next few weeks, we became giants in delivering calendars and roller blinds to the Bulgarian market. We flew to Sofia five more times. Each time, our contractor picked up the entire shipment right after leaving the arrivals hall, and we spent several intoxicating days with the money we earned, drinking Bulgarian cognacs and skiing on the slopes of Vitosha near Sofia. The best memory of our Balkan business will remain the wedding of our Bulgarian liaison's daughter, during which I got to know the taste of homemade rakia with plums.

When the Bulgarians lost interest in our accessories, my partner and I were forced to find another business area. Somewhere around the turn of the eighties and nineties, when Poland was suffering from a shortage of everything, our good friend became the director of the Opoczno plant, thanks to which we could count on a delivery of one truck of tiles per week. We founded a real company. We knew that we should give it a name, the sound of which, just in case, would allow us to quickly win over state officials. And indeed, at the slogan "Plajta spółka z oo" the doors in the tax office opened by themselves.

The plan to rent an empty basement in the block where I lived backfired. Envious neighbors couldn't be convinced even by the free installation of an intercom. So we opened the store in my apartment, on the first floor. My father was already dead by then, and my mother had gone to Germany for a few months. My brother was convinced that somehow his bed could be squeezed in between the packages of tiles. My partner's father, a specialist in such matters, calculated the maximum weight that a block of flats could bear, and so we opened a tile store in the Grapa housing estate in Konstancin.

The interest was enormous. The best were the squares for the kitchen, fifteen by fifteen, the so-called "cloud" in colors from coffee to diarrhea. On the day of delivery, when a large queue of customers was already waiting at my apartment door, my partner and I would move the entire truck to the first floor. We were in our twenties, so we had no problem carrying two packages, taking care never to leave the goods unattended on the street, because at that time they were exceptionally popular.

I remember that during one of the deliveries, when we had almost finished the entire shipment, I went downstairs for the last run. There were three packages standing on the pavement. I wouldn't be able to lift them all, so I took two, convinced that the last package would be safe, because a few meters away stood a neighbor with a dog. However, when I returned downstairs, the last package had disappeared somewhere. So I asked the neighbor, who was still standing no more than two meters from the place where my tiles were dropped off, whistling and pretending not to be interested in the unloading, if she happened to know what had happened to it. She replied that she hadn't seen anything. Surprised, I looked around and quickly spotted the lost item in the bushes that grew right by the entrance.

Business was going great. We hired someone to sell, we were busy with our studies ourselves. The average salary was 180,000 złoty then. My partner and I would drop in from time to time for an advance payment of a quarter of a melon and then we would take a taxi to Warsaw for duck at Kamienne Schodki. Those were wonderful times.

The business did not last very long, however, due to the change of job of our director from Opoczno, but for several months after its closure, people knocked on my apartment asking "if I could get a cloud."

But my real big business was yet to come.

In 1993, the weekly Billionaire appeared in Poland. The first color newspaper, on glossy paper with reports, interviews, and color photos of celebrities. They sponsored the first league football club Sokół Pniewy and Koło Fortuny – a very popular TV program at the time hosted by Wojciech Pijanowski and Magda Masny. The weekly cost 52 thousand złoty, or a little over 5 złoty in today's money.
The weekly organized a contest for its readers. In each issue, they printed several thousand random ID card numbers on a dozen or so columns. The numbers were printed in random order, so as to make it difficult to find them. The contest consisted of checking whether the reader's ID number was not among the printed numbers. If you found your ID number on the list and it appeared there once, you won a ring, twice a television set, three times a small Fiat. The contest was very popular. People bought the newspaper, which cost a lot, but by buying one copy, you could find the ID numbers of all your household members, or even the residents of an entire block, so the costs could be divided among a larger number of people.

One day, while watching Wheel of Fortune with a friend, in which there was always a small Fiat in the middle of the studio with the word "Billionaire" painted in large white letters on the hood, I thought that we could make money on this by providing an ID number lookup service in the weekly magazine.

At the prison printing house on Rakowiecka Street, we ordered several thousand A4-sized cardboards, divided in half by a perforated line, on which the customer's ID card number and address were entered. On the cardboard was written the commitment of Jamex - because that's what we called the company - that for a year, i.e. in fifty-two editions of the weekly, we would search for the ID card number provided by the customer, and if we found it, we would pass this information on to the customer by registered mail to the provided address, together with information on the number of occurrences of his ID card. The sellers offered such a yearly service for a price of PLN 50,000. They entered the customer's data on both parts of the cardboard, accepted payment, tore off half of the cardboard and handed it to the customer.

Every Wednesday morning, when the weekly appeared on newsstands, I bought one copy and brought it to the company. At that time, I was studying computer science, so writing software to automatically read issues from the weekly and manage the customer database was no problem for me. My partner, who took care of the logistics of the entire venture, quickly found a canvassing company, "New York Marketing," which took care of sales. The signs with the inscription "thank you to canvassers" were not to appear until the mid-nineties, so sales were impressive.

In all, we sold a quarter of a million packages. At the peak of our business, we averaged about 200 contest winners a week—about 10 percent of which were televisions and the rest rings. We never found a car. Probably Billionaire never published the same issue three times. We sent out those 200 letters to customers every week, and got nice phone calls of thanks.

In 1994, a corporation swallowed me up and for over two decades refused to let me go. I will never forget those years of Polish breakthrough, when everything was achievable, when no one knew what lay ahead, which coincided with my entry into adulthood. I am happy that I could participate in them.