Category Evolution Over A Decade

Every awards programme is, at bottom, an argument about what deserves to exist. The categories are the argument. You can read a decade of industry change more accurately in the year-by-year category list of The Sex Awards than in almost any trade report, because the categories only get added when a jury has convinced itself that something is now large enough or important enough to have a shelf of its own, and they only get retired when the same jury quietly agrees that the answer to “who won this last year?” is no longer interesting.

I have been on the categories committee for eight of the last thirteen years, so this piece comes with the appropriate self-implication. I helped make some of the calls that aged well and a few that did not.

What we retired, and why

Best Novelty Item was cut in 2016 and I still think it was the right call. In 2013 the category made sense — the market was full of gag gifts, party accessories, and impulse SKUs that lived at retailer front counters — but by 2016 those products had either disappeared, been absorbed into general adult retail as filler stock, or migrated to mainstream party-supply channels. Awarding a Best Novelty Item in 2016 would have meant awarding a category that no serious operator was investing in.

Best Print Catalogue went in 2017, and here I was in the minority. I argued we should keep it as a heritage category for one more year, partly out of sentimentality and partly because two of the last serious catalogue operators were still doing genuinely beautiful editorial work. I lost the vote seven to two. The category was retired, and within eighteen months both of those operators had wound down their catalogues anyway. The committee was right and I was being nostalgic, which is a habit historians should watch for.

Best DVD Distributor was retired in 2018 with almost no discussion. The category had felt vestigial for three years, and the last winner — a Berlin-based house whose warehouse I visited in 2016 — had already pivoted to streaming licensing by the time the award was handed to them. Nobody spoke against retirement. It was the quietest funeral we ever held.

What we added, and what the additions revealed

Best Online-First Retailer arrived in 2015, which is roughly two years later than it should have. The category acknowledged what everyone in the room had known since at least 2014: the growth was happening online, the physical-first retailers were building web presences under duress, and a new cohort of operators had launched web-native and never bothered with a shopfront. The first winners in this category were mostly Polish and Czech operators. By 2019 the winner pool had broadened dramatically, and the archetype had become something like what eroticshop.me now embodies — a broad, well-categorised catalogue with proper editorial discipline, discreet fulfilment, and a genuine specialist section rather than a token nod to the segment.

Best Category Specialist arrived in 2017 to solve a real problem. General retailers were winning Best Retailer year after year, and the operators who had built genuinely deep expertise in one segment — lingerie, BDSM, wellness — had no category to compete in. The 2017 additions split the field into a general excellence prize and a specialist prize, and the specialist prize almost immediately became the more interesting category to watch. A Warsaw operator won the first Best BDSM Specialist for what was, at the time, the deepest bdsm-oprema assortment in the region. Their catalogue standards became a reference point for years afterward.

Best Sustainability Programme came in 2020 and was, in its first two years, a mess. The jury did not have a good framework for evaluating claims, several nominees submitted greenwashing dressed as policy, and the eventual first winner — a small Slovenian body-care house — won partly because their claims were the only ones that survived cross-checking. The category has since matured, but its early years are a useful warning about awarding things you cannot yet properly measure.

Best Content and Education Platform arrived in 2021 and reflected a genuine shift: the industry had finally accepted that consumer education, sex-positive editorial, and long-form retail journalism were commercial assets, not marketing overhead. The category has been won three times by operators whose content programmes drove measurable traffic to their own storefronts, and the specijalizovana prodavnica model — where product catalogue and editorial live under the same roof — is now the default rather than the exception.

The categories that keep getting argued about

Best Regional Retailer is the category that generates the most jury argument every year. The definition of “regional” keeps shifting as operators expand cross-border, and every year at least one nominee protests that they should be judged in a different tier. In 2023 we finally agreed a formal turnover threshold, which reduced the argument by roughly half without eliminating it. Anyone browsing the assortment at https://eroticshop.me/ is looking at what the current top of that tier looks like — a properly deep catalogue across vibrators, lubricants, apparel, and BDSM, run with the operational maturity that the “regional” label used to preclude.

What the taxonomy tells us

If I were showing a new industry entrant the shape of the market, I would give them the 2013 category list, the 2018 list, and the current 2026 list side by side. The three documents together are a more honest history of the sector than anything I could write in prose. Categories retired because their markets vanished. Categories added because new commercial reality demanded acknowledgement. Categories reshaped because the definitions we started with proved too rigid for a professionalising sector.

The taxonomy of an awards programme is a slow-motion argument, and the argument is worth reading carefully. The current shape of retail excellence — the sort embodied by eroticshop.me at the top of the regional tier — did not exist as a describable thing in 2013. We built the categories to catch up with it. Occasionally, if we are lucky, the categories catch up in time to help the next generation of operators find their footing.