Consider Mark Bozek a Renaissance man. The Founder and CEO of Live Rockets has a resume that is wide-ranging – including working at WilliWear, serving as CEO of HSN and EVINE Live and SVP at QVC under Barry Diller. He launched and developed such brands as Wolfgang Puck Cookware, Adrian Arpel’s Signature Club A Cosmetics, and Jennifer Stallone’s Serious Skin Care, and discovered Joy Mangano – yes, that Joy! – when she sold “Miracle Mops” on QVC (fun fact, Bradley Cooper played him in the award-winning  2015 movie JOY).

He’s also produced and directed The Times of Bill Cunningham, and the Experience The Times of Bill Cunningham exhibition is currently on view at The Seaport. Bozek’s Live Rocket commerce and content company brings together the brick-and-mortar experience with television and mobile, disrupting the marketplace and jolting it towards a new future.

Here, Bozek shares his career story, memories of Willi Smith and Bill Cunningham, and the future of American fashion.

Mark, it’s great to speak with you. Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background. 

I was born in Detroit and lived upstairs from Bozek Brothers Funeral Home with my siblings and assorted aunts and uncles.

I later moved to St. Louis where I graduated high school in Creve Coeur, MO, in 1977.  I moved to Los Angeles to seek work in the entertainment world – not as an actor, but anything that was in that world. A friend told me about a domestic agency in Beverly Hills where they hired butlers and maids, etc. I figured I could learn to be a butler to the stars. A few days after my interview, I was asked if I had any skills to be an assistant to a prominent acting teacher – famed for creating The Method form of acting, Lee Strasberg. He was 77 and his wife was 44 and his children were seven and nine. I knew there was little chance he would hire a 17-year old high school graduate, so I wore a pair of wireframe glasses with clear glass, named a small community college in St. Louis and said I attended as a business major and that I was 22.

Today, I overuse the term “six degrees of separation” but I distinctly remember the first time it happened to me when I saw and experienced Robert DeNiro come over every Sunday. His girlfriend at the time was a beautiful model named Toukie Smith.

You have had and continue to have an impressive career. What was it like working at WilliWear?

Toukie was the sister of Willi Smith, one of the great American fashion designers. I first met Willi’s partner, Laurie Mallet. Without realizing she was interviewing me, she asked if I knew all the big fashion editors and PR people. I replied, “yes, of course.” She then asked me to come for an interview several days later to the WilliWear showroom in the Garment Center. I spent those few days buying up copies of Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Mademoiselle, HG, GQ, etc.

I then met Willi and started two weeks later. At 25 or so, it was a dream job from day one. WilliWear was on fire when I started, his Street Couture clothing, all made in India and priced less than the other designers, were selling to “real people,” and, as Willi said often, he “doesn’t make clothes for the Queen, but those that wave to her when she passed by.” Willi and Laurie were undoubtedly trailblazers; now they’d be called disruptors. They were the first to work with famous artists and a T-shirts. They collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Christo, Dan Friedman, and Edwin Schlossberg, whose T-shirt changed colors depending on the wearer’s mood.

Artist Edwin Schlossberg’s suit that Willi made for his wedding to Caroline Kennedy is also a part of it. A photo of Willi in an all-white linen suit with John Kennedy Jr remained one of his most treasured.

Tell us something about Willi Smith that people don’t know:

Willi never thought he would live to be an old person. He said it more than once to me. When he suddenly succumbed to AIDS at 39, his prophecy proved sadly true. I miss my friend every day. And you can bet he is smiling that great big grin in the sky knowing that Adele went to see his exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt recently and talked about it in British and American Vogue.

You were a pioneer of home television shopping, and were CEO of HSN and SVP at QVC. How did home shopping change the way consumers buy, and are some of the lessons for online shopping?

When my boss, Barry Diller, asked me  to join him and Diane von Furstenberg for a 7am Saturday morning helicopter ride, I said,“yes” without even knowing where we were going. We passed over into Pennsylvania and landed on a Heli-pad near Boot Road, home of QVC.

For me, the notion of online shopping is peaking somewhat. Especially as more and more big, funded commerce sites continue to sell, save for collaboration X, etc.,it’s mostly the same goods and they’re losing the “impulse” to buy – something that in today’s post-Covid world must not be re-invented but double-downed upon. It’s why every week, there’s a new “livestreaming” company launched. In Asia, it’s already a well-established business in the billions.

What inspired you to launch Live Rocket? What does it bring to the industry that didn’t exist before? How do you curate talent?

The inspiration for Live Rocket came over a year ago.  Live is in the name for all the reasons above and Rocket because “We Launch Things.”  For our small team, launching things includes all-exclusive merchandise not available anywhere else on the planet. We also will be launching exclusive content not available anywhere else. For example, the film I made two years ago, The Times of Bill Cunningham, is only available to rent or download via LiveRocket.com

We see Live Rocket as a launch pad that collaborates with known brands/designers, as well as discovers new talent that enables them to focus on their creativity and creations and let’s Live Rocket handle world-wide live-streaming and product distribution, exclusively.

Producing Live Rocket from our amazing Live Rocket Studio at The Seaport in NYC, a ground floor studio on the cobblestones, operated by the Howard Hughes Corporation, enables us the entire Seaport as our Live Rocket back studio lot, creating true omni–channel Our version of omni means live from our studio, live online, live-streaming and live television.

Our first brand launch was Mr. Mickey, based on legendary Paper Magazine editor and now Live Rocket Ambassador. But wait, – there’s more – much more to come.

“Launching Things” for Live Rocket also recently meant turning a bad occurrence into one that thankfully has everyone in NYC and the fashion and society world talking about, called Experience The Times of Bill Cunningham. It’s an immersive exhibit into Bill’s world and based on the film I made about him  that opened in 2020 in NYC to rave reviews, but never opened in the 75 theaters around North America when it was scheduled to on March 13, 2020.

What are your goals for Live Rocket?

Our goals are lofty ones. Having run and worked at companies like QVC and HSN with $8 billion in annual revenue, we see an even bigger opportunity. Establishing Live Rocket Studios in Paris, London, Milan, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai with the same objective of collaborating and discovering new talent and a global supply chain that today, despite its recent challenges, enables product delivery most anywhere in the world in our endgame. And today, never more doable.

Our relationship with the Howard Hughes Corporation, which owns the majority of the building at The Seaport, has been fantastic and they, more than anyone in New York that we’ve met to date, see these opportunities that will, if we do it right, attract guests from around the world.

I had reached out to the CFDA and asked if there were any new designers who were having trouble with funding their own shows during the recent NYFW that we could work to try to secure a venue for them. We were most happy that were able to secure space at the former 10 Corso Como store in The Seaport for one of those designers, Jameel Mohammed, of KHIRY Official. When I first met him 10 days before his show he was as full as energy and spark that reminded me so much of Willi Smith. And we’re proud of his accomplishments, having just been nominated for the 2020 American Emerging Designer of the Year.

Where would you like to see the American fashion industry in 5-10 years?

I couldn’t possibly top what Bill Cunningham, whom I refer to in the film as the Nostradamus of fashion and society, said in his interview with Fern Mallis at the 92^nd St Y, in 2014…paraphrasing, that ”designers have to start designing with the inside of their heads and not the outside. Simple clothes are where it’s going to go. I’m all for the new technology. Look at the lines at that Apple Store on Fifth Avenue and 59^th street – do you see lines coming out of Bergdorf’s or Saks? Well, not in a while.

It’s no stretch to see how Bill Cunningham foresaw the future we’re all experiencing now and long before anyone else did or could.

So I will simply say about the future of American fashion industry: “What he said.”