Failure Is a Part of Success
“In my journey, I have realized that there are prejudices linked to being a woman, but we overcome them and today, as a starter-upper, I don’t want to be supported because I am a woman, but because of my idea.” Starter-upper and marketing expert Rosa Scelsa is the co-founder of Jampy, the Italian platform dedicated to dog health.
“I chose Bocconi because at the time, in the years following the 2008 crisis, there was a lot of talk about pragmatism in the choice of university, and I wanted a path that would help me get a job fast.” And so it was. While specializing in marketing, she chose an Erasmus study abroad program in Norway at the NHH Norwegian School of Economics because of her “great passion for Nordic cultures,” and graduated in 2012.
At first, Scelsa found herself “in a whirlwind of internships.” Mikamai, Nestlé, publishing at RCS, but she soon realized that this was not her path. “I was caught in a loop, trying to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up, and I realized that I didn’t enjoy my job and was getting bored very quickly,” she adds. So much so that she thought about doing a PhD in Copenhagen, but she wasn’t accepted. “On a trip to Berlin, I sent out five CVs and had five interviews in one week. That’s how I ended up at HelloFresh, where I became online marketing manager in about two years. There was so much to learn: it finally fulfilled my desire to face new challenges every day.”
From here, a career in marketing began that led her to Hundred in 2017, the Berlin-founded but New York-based start-up that focuses on providing personalized nutrition plans. She says: “I was living a double life, 15 days in Berlin and 15 days in New York, always on the plane. But I liked it: I got to live in the Big Apple, which really is the city of opportunity.” Moreover, in the start-up environment, being creative and bringing innovation “is a plus, and in fact I was able to see the projects I had conceived come to life.”
In 2020, she returned to Italy with Betterly, the new brand of the De Agostini Group, but the adventure was short-lived. This stopover, however, became an opportunity to decide to go into business for herself. “I contacted an old friend who had skills that complement mine,” she says, “and we threw ourselves into it without fear of failure, also because I believe that this is a component of success, because it always teaches you something.” The idea of betting everything on the pet industry came from personal experience “and the daily problems of my friends who had dogs and couldn’t find quality products in the supermarket.” That and a careful study of the market and the industry, where innovation is slow.
She says: “It’s an ambitious project, designed to put into practice what I had learned in marketing, while avoiding the mistakes I had seen or made along the way.” Her approach to business: “I advise young people to be humble in their work; doing start-ups doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want. You have to study a lot all the time. But the fact is, founder is something you become.
In general, the golden rule for me was: change jobs or companies when the learning curve flattens out.”
