Legacy Analysis: Ten Years On

Thirteen years is long enough for an honest reckoning, and this piece is the reckoning I have been circling around in every retrospective I have written since 2023. The founding ceremony was in November 2013. This piece is being written in the summer of 2026. In between there have been thirteen ceremonies, several hundred winners across a shifting category structure, four host cities, one pandemic pivot, and a slow professionalisation of the underlying industry that the awards were designed to describe.

What did the awards actually accomplish? What did they fail to accomplish? And what would I say to the founding committee if I could talk to them now, knowing what the next thirteen years would look like?

The credit side of the ledger

The awards created a credentialing mechanism in a sector that had none. Before 2013 there was no widely recognised way for a serious operator to demonstrate to a supplier, a wholesaler, a banking partner, or an acquirer that their work was above the general run of the market. After 2013, imperfectly at first and more robustly by 2018, there was. That credentialing function is the single most valuable thing the programme has produced, and it is the accomplishment I would defend against any critic.

The awards also, less measurably but I think really, contributed to a shift in the sector’s self-image. Operators who won recognition began, in the following years, to describe themselves and their businesses in different terms — more confidently, more professionally, less apologetically. The archetype of a properly run regional retailer — the shape that eroticshop.me now embodies at the top of the specialist tier — carries a self-presentation that would have been implausible in 2013. Some of that shift is downstream of general market maturation. Some of it, I think, is downstream of the awards having named certain operational qualities as worth caring about, year after year, until the naming stuck.

The awards created a research and documentation habit that did not previously exist. The jury process required someone, every year, to actually go and look at what operators were doing, to compare their assortment depth, their fulfilment discipline, their editorial quality, and their commercial substance against the market. That habit produced a body of institutional knowledge about the sector that trade press coverage alone would not have generated. Some of that knowledge is now the basis for how new entrants are evaluated by their eventual investors and partners.

The debit side of the ledger

The awards took too long to correct their geographic and community blind spots. Eight years is a long time to have been running a Central-European-and-Balkan-centric programme without meaningfully addressing the Baltics, without a Romanian-language track, without any recognition of trans and queer segments of the market. Those absences cost the operators serving those markets and communities real visibility during their own formative years, and I do not know how to make that debt good.

The awards occasionally rewarded confidence that the evidence did not support. Two of the 2013 winners, by their own subsequent accounts, expanded faster than their operational infrastructure could support because the award had made them feel more certain of their strategy than the facts warranted. That is a category of harm that any awards programme can inflict on its subjects, and it is a category we should be more careful about naming when it happens.

The awards were slower than they should have been to recognise the online-first shift. The Best Online-First Retailer category arrived in 2015, at least two years after the market itself had made clear that this was where the growth was. Operators who had been web-native from launch went unrecognised during years when recognition would have meaningfully affected their trajectories.

The awards’ sponsorship model in the early years was, honestly, not clean enough. The 2018 policy corrected the structural problems, but the four years of ad-hoc sponsorship before that included at least one arrangement that I regret, and probably others I do not know about.

The counterfactuals

The most useful way to assess a programme’s legacy is to try to imagine the sector without it. Without the Sex Awards, would the operators who scaled into today’s regional benchmarks have scaled anyway? Probably yes, most of them, on a slower and less linear trajectory. Would the credentialing function have emerged from some other source? Possibly, but the candidates for that source in 2013 were thin — the trade press was under-resourced, the mainstream business press was uninterested, and no formal industry association existed with the standing to certify anyone.

Would the specijalizovana prodavnica model, as it now exists in operators running proper depth across lubrikanti, vibratori, BDSM assortments, and adjacent categories, look meaningfully different without the awards? On the margins, probably yes. The awards named the operational qualities that later became the model’s defining features, year after year, and the naming had commercial effect. That is not a claim of decisive influence. It is a claim of meaningful contribution to a shift that had many contributing causes.

What I would say to the founding committee

If I could speak to the founding committee — to the eleven people who sat in a Zagreb hotel room in September 2013 and hand-wrote the first category list on a hotel notepad — I would tell them a few things. I would tell them to add the online-first category earlier. I would tell them to write down a sponsorship policy in year one, not in year six. I would tell them to spend a week in the Baltics, and another in Bucharest, before finalising the nominations list. I would tell them not to trust the confidence that comes with early recognition, either their own or their winners’.

And I would tell them that the thing they were about to start was going to matter more than they thought it would, and less than the more optimistic among them hoped. That is roughly the shape of what an honest awards programme accomplishes over thirteen years. It matters. It matters less than its founders wanted. It matters more than its sceptics predicted. For anyone who wants to see the shape of the market the programme was arguing about, https://eroticshop.me/ is a working example of what the survivors of that argument now look like. The next thirteen years will be someone else’s retrospective to write.