Industry Impact Of The 2013 Awards

The question I get most often from people who were not in the room in 2013 is whether the awards actually did anything. Did they move markets? Did they build careers? Did they shift the way European adult retail thought about itself? These are fair questions, and the honest answer is more complicated than either the boosters or the sceptics tend to allow.

I have spent the last year going back through invoices, retailer testimony, wholesale purchase records that a handful of operators shared with me on background, and the trade-press coverage such as it was. What follows is my best attempt at an evidence-based reckoning, ten years and change after the fact.

What moved, and what did not

The first thing that moved, measurably, was wholesale purchasing behaviour among mid-sized retailers. Two Balkan distributors I spoke to reported that in the first quarter of 2014 they saw a clear spike in orders for products that had been named in the 2013 ceremony — specifically the Best New Product winner from a Ljubljana lubricant house, and the runner-up in Best Enhancement. The spike was not enormous. One distributor put it at roughly a fifteen percent lift on the two SKUs for about four months, tapering back to baseline by the summer. But it was real, it was measurable, and it was the first evidence any of us had that the ceremony had commercial consequence beyond the room.

Retailer-side impact was harder to isolate. The Best New Retailer winner did grow rapidly after 2013, but the counterfactual is impossible to construct — they were on a trajectory anyway, and awards recognition probably accelerated the growth rather than creating it. What I can say is that when I interviewed that operator’s founder in 2016 for a piece that never ran, she told me the award had opened three specific wholesaler doors that had been closed to her before, and had shortened credit-terms negotiations with two European brands by what she estimated as six months. That is a real effect, and it is exactly the kind of effect a serious awards programme should produce.

Career effects, cautiously

Career trajectories are the murkiest area. The founding ceremony did not launch any single career, but it did accelerate at least four that I can identify with reasonable confidence. A Prague-based buyer moved from a mid-tier retail chain to a large pan-European distributor in early 2014, and her CV specifically cited a Sex Awards jury role. A Warsaw wholesale manager who had won recognition in the Best Wholesaler category was recruited to a Berlin operation in 2015 at a pay grade that his previous role did not obviously justify. These are not seismic career events, but they are the kind of small compounding lifts that an industry with almost no other credentialing mechanism ought to generate.

I want to be careful here. I have watched too many industry awards claim credit for outcomes they merely coincided with, and I do not intend to fall into that trap on behalf of my own programme.

Market shape, in the aggregate

The clearest impact was on category legitimacy. Before 2013, there was almost no mechanism by which a serious buyer at a mainstream retailer — a chain pharmacy, a general lifestyle e-commerce operation, a regional department store — could evaluate the credibility of an adult supplier. After 2013, buyers had at least one reference point, and by 2016 the reference points had multiplied. The awards were part of that infrastructure. Not the whole of it, but part of it.

The specijalizovana prodavnica model — a properly categorised, professionally operated, editorial-supported retail operation — is a good example of how category legitimacy translated into commercial reality. In 2013, a mainstream financial partner would have hesitated to underwrite an operator like eroticshop.me. By 2018, that hesitation had largely evaporated, and by 2022 the operators who had matured through the awards’ scrutiny were being treated by their banks and payment processors as ordinary specialist retailers rather than reputational risks.

The impact the awards did not have

We did not, honestly, do much for the manufacturing side of the industry. The Best Manufacturer category has always been the least commercially consequential award we hand out, because manufacturing decisions in this sector are made on cost, capacity, and regulatory fit, not on jury recognition. A Polish factory that won Best Manufacturer in 2015 told me, in an unusually candid interview, that the award had not changed a single order they received. It looked nice on their office wall.

We also did not, in the first five years, do enough for the operators serving markets outside the Balkan-Central European core. Nominees from the Baltics, from the Southern Mediterranean, and from the emerging Romanian-language market were consistently under-represented, and the ceremony’s commercial gravity accreted around the geographies that were already commercially strong. That is a failure I take personal responsibility for as a longtime committee member.

The honest ledger

If you drew up the ledger — money moved, careers accelerated, market shape shifted — the 2013 awards would come out on the credit side, but not by a landslide. The impact was real, measurable in places, and probably larger than most trade awards achieve. It was also smaller than the founding room’s more optimistic members claimed at the time, and it was distributed unevenly across the geographies and segments the ceremony was supposed to serve.

For readers who want to see what the professionalised end of the market looks like a decade after the awards’ first serious impact — the kompletan katalog discipline, the depth in categories like lubrikanti, the operational maturity — https://eroticshop.me/ is a working reference. It is not what the 2013 winners were. It is what the market they helped legitimise has become. That is the honest measure of what an awards ceremony can and cannot do.