It’s a warm spring day in Zurich, Jascha Rudolphi and Luca Steffen are obviously sweating a little in their fine wool sweaters. But that doesn’t bother the two young entrepreneurs, who quickly became young millionaires with their company Emix and above all with the trade in corona masks. For hours they tell their story, which leads from Switzerland across Europe to Morocco, India and China. A story about drinks and chocolate, about perfume and, for the time being, about masks, masks and more masks. But one thing remains a big trade secret: how much profit Emix has made with the Corona deals. 100 or 200 or even 300 million euros within a few months in Germany alone?
A committee of inquiry in the Bavarian state parliament, which wants to clarify various mask affairs and has invited Rudolphi and Steffen, among others, as witnesses, would have liked to know that too. The two should actually come to Munich this Friday and answer many questions. How did it work with the sale of fairly expensive masks, the quality of which was sometimes controversial, to the health ministries in Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and especially in Berlin, at the Federal Ministry of Health. And what role the Munich PR entrepreneur Andrea Tandler, who was richly paid by Emix, and her CSU channels played in this. The advertising strategist is the daughter of the former CSU general secretary and ex-minister Gerold Tandler.
But Jascha Camillo Rudolphi and Luca Alessandro Steffen, one just 24, the other just 25 years old, prefer to stay in Zurich. As a Swiss citizen, you don’t have to be a member of a sub-committee in Germany. Nevertheless, they resented the cancellation. The “mask boys”, as Florian Siekmann, member of parliament for the Greens and deputy head of the U-committee, calls them, have probably “lost their guts”. It’s just easier to drive a Porsche than to tell the truth in front of an investigative committee. Siekmann is alluding to the fact that the two young entrepreneurs also treated themselves to fast cars, including a Ferrari, after their rapid success. Emix replies that Siekmann’s “polemic statement” speaks for itself.
Rudolphi and Steffen do indeed look like boys, like big boys, but to reduce them to the mask trade would be too short-sighted. The two started trading while they were still at school. They often preferred haggling, you could also say gambled, to just studying at school. A normal career path with a school leaving certificate, an apprenticeship or a degree and an office job, possibly with standardized days after the time clock, would have been pure horror for the two of them.
Rudolphi, blond, well-trained upper arms, friendly smile, hands around sandwiches from the fine Sprüngli confectionery at the meeting with the SZ in a PR agency in Zurich. He tells of their childhood together in a small village near Zurich, from elementary school, where they became close friends. And although they took different paths – Rudolphi started a commercial apprenticeship, Steffen went to business school – they remained friends. And at some point they realized that their life as an apprentice and high school student wasn’t enough for them. “We wanted to be entrepreneurial and stand on our own two feet,” says Rudolphi. The boys were only 16 then.
Trade in cola from Poland
You dream of your own company. The first business idea gives them a drink that they often sit in front of at their meetings as teenagers: a bottle of Coca-Cola. Available for little money in Germany, you quickly pay five francs for 0.3 liters in Switzerland. That doesn’t let Rudolphi and Steffen rest. They try to find the branded drink abroad and bring it to Switzerland very cheaply and outside the official distribution channels. The two do the first tour themselves, once in Poland and back. In their luggage are a few pallets of Coke bottles, which they relabel by hand so that they can be delivered to kebab shops in Switzerland.
The young men set up a mini-drinks business, always looking for and finding new trade routes from Poland to the Netherlands to Portugal, and in between founding the company Emix Trading AG. Luca Steffen, dark hair, serious look, has the four letters tattooed on the fingers of his left hand. Emix has always been more than a job for him and his partner. Successes and failures alternate; In the meantime, the two of them get caught up in a swindler and at some point they sit depressed by Lake Zurich. The attempt to procure Corona beer of all things ends in a big failure. What irony of fate.
“Faster, more reliable and more efficient”
At that time, however, the two managed to do something that was considered almost impossible in Switzerland. On the outskirts of Europe, they buy inexpensive branded chocolate that is only sold at high prices in their own country. The strategy – if it is one, to graze half of Europe in search of goods of all kinds outside of the traditional trade routes – is working. And then it goes from Switzerland to China, the largest market in the world. Whether it’s megalomania or chutzpah, crazy or daring, it’s starting to work. In any case, the two no longer lack self-confidence. “Our specialty was and is that we are faster, more reliable and more efficient,” says Steffen.
When the two travel to China for the first time to meet possible partners, they rent a cheap apartment, but are always picked up in front of an expensive hotel. From 2018, Emix will then deliver Swiss perfumes and cosmetics to the Far East and do business in the millions for the first time. The following year sales are already in the double-digit million range. That’s a lot of money for two young entrepreneurs who, according to their own statements, only allow themselves a salary of CHF 3,500 a month and prefer to invest the rest of the profit in the company.
Corona masks instead of Corona beer
After all, it is the Chinese contacts that bring in the really big business, with Corona masks instead of Corona beer. At the beginning of 2020, the two say, a partner tells them about a mega virus in China. And that protective masks are scarce. As they say, Rudolphi and Steffen first try to find masks in Europe. They rattle off pharmacies, middlemen and other possible suppliers across the continent in vain. Then the realization follows: China does not need masks from Europe. But Europe, where the virus will soon spread quickly, urgently needs masks, wherever from.
Steffen goes to India, where the right raw materials are said to be available, procures machines and tries to set up production there. Meanwhile, Rudolphi flies to Morocco, where large quantities of masks are said to be stored somewhere in the desert. Finally, Steffen travels east from India via Dubai, lands in Hong Kong and an airport that is now almost deserted due to the pandemic, and thus realizes how serious the situation is.
The search for mask manufacturers in China starts from Hong Kong. According to Steffen, Emix offered advance payment, twice the price, the delivery of raw materials that were scarce at the time, and also took care of transport and export themselves. “We took the risk. We didn’t know what an airplane would cost in two weeks. And we didn’t know until the summer of 2020 whether we would make a profit or a loss,” says Steffen. “We simply believed in ourselves,” adds Rudolphi. And indeed: in the end, Emix can deliver masks in large quantities.
Masks and protective clothing were in short supply at the beginning of the pandemic.
(Photo: Laurent Gillieron/dpa)
The way the two talk about it, about the risk and the desert, about India and airplanes, it sounds like a great adventure. But supposedly it was more. “We didn’t just work around the clock because we were doing business, but because we wanted to help. At that time, there was a feeling that masks made the difference between life and death,” says Rudolphi. His partner Steffen adds that customers and suppliers are “all in the same boat”.
But was everyone really in the same boat? Some, the state buyers in Germany and Switzerland, paid a lot of money for the masks; from taxes. The others, the two young entrepreneurs from Emix, have been richly rewarded for their risk. And those who worked in the homes and clinics because of the pandemic, sometimes to the point of complete exhaustion and who urgently needed the masks, did so for the usual wages and salaries and maybe a few extras.
It would be exciting to know how Emix’s financial balance sheet turns out for the successful mask year 2020. But Rudolphi and Steffen do not publish any business figures, all their stories end here.