Perhaps the most famous quote from the Disney character Stitch is “Ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind”, but for Tanja Filipovska, Stitch isn’t just a cute cartoon— he’s helped her clock more than $15 million in annual revenue.
The Sydney-based mum started working as a designer for sock brand MADMIA around 2013, before taking full ownership of the company in 2016.
Since then, Filipovska has grown MADMIA into a global business with warehouses on three continents and a 30-strong staff base around the world. These staff include designers, accountants, licensing managers, production staff and more.
So how did she do it? Simple: Filipovska never said no.
“There isn’t the word ‘no’ in a dictionary for me,” Filipovska tells SmartCompany.
“I have to win no matter what. Even if they say no, I will knock on their door maybe two hundred times until they say yes.”
With the company projected to grow another 67% in the next year alone—taking the annual revenue figures to $25 million—it’s clear that Filipovska knows the strength of avoiding ‘no’.
A silent gift
“I was doing everything from my kitchen table. That’s where I started working in the business initially, because back in the days we didn’t have the budget to even have an office,” she says about looking back on her days as a MADMIA employee.
Filipovska was actually the only employee of MADMIA from day dot, with a silent investor backing the company and hiring her as the creative director following her years of working as a fashion stylist and designer in both Bulgaria and Australia.
Asking herself what the best way to design a pair of socks that are “something different, and something that has never been done before”, Filipovska started implementing shoelaces onto the socks.
“I saw that people love the 3D effects on the socks, so I started adding ears and tutus and frills and hats and whatnot.
“At the beginning, it was really, really hard. I remember the days where we were selling one pair of socks a day, but I was still so happy, because I was like, there’s one person in the world [who] believes in what I do.”
The initial owner of the company, a silent investor who Filipovska will only describe as a “very powerful and well-known investor” who has invested in “many successful startup businesses”, ended up giving his only employee 49% of company shares in 2015.
He wasn’t interested in running the business long-term, after all. So in 2016, Filipovska offered to buy him out.
“He always said from the start: ‘Tanja, this is your baby. One day, hopefully it’s going to be yours’. So I asked to buy the rest of the 51% shares and take over the business myself,” she says.
“I thought ‘I can do it better my way’,” Filipovska says.
“And I have”.
The Disney Dream
In the eight years since taking full ownership of MADMIA, Filipovska has scaled the business drastically — off-handedly saying she believes it’s about 3,000%.
The one-woman team now has around 30 staff, with two more hired just yesterday. Due to the demand from customers, MADMIA has three warehouses: two in Sydney (along with the HQ) and one in Bulgaria.
“It’s been two years, but it just doesn’t stop. It’s unbelievable,” Filipovska says, reflecting on the growth in the American market.
Indeed, the Floridian warehouses have paid off immensely, perhaps considering Walt Disney World is based there, too.
The most popular launch to date for MADMIA has been Disney’s Stitch socks, with demand so high that the company extended pre-orders four times to sell 60,000 pairs of Stitch socks despite only releasing the product three months ago in July.
“[The business] is doing significantly well,” Filipovska acknowledges, “The demand is there, and now the problem we are facing like every business owner, [is] how can we keep up with the demand?”
Filipovska herself isn’t sure what to expect, considering the business is “booming from year to year”.
She is hopeful that by 2025, all orders of the sellout Stitch socks will be filled from the pre-orders, and that the manufacturing issues MADMIA is currently facing due to the increase in demand will be smoothed out.
Despite only opening the warehouse in Bulgaria six months ago, Filipovska is already on the lookout for a larger location.
The rapid growth in the European market wasn’t anticipated, but Filipovska says the staff are “buzzing” about scaling the business even further, and she clearly isn’t shying away from the challenge with the headcount growing as we speak.
“I can’t believe it, sometimes,” she says about MADMIA’s success.
“…But at the beginning, it was very hard.
“I must say, if you asked me to do it again, I probably [wouldn’t], because it was really, really hard.”
