Revisiting The 2013 Sex Awards

The room in Zagreb had bad acoustics and a chandelier that hummed at a pitch none of us could quite identify. It was November 2013, the ceremony ran forty minutes late because the audio engineer had misplaced a cable, and I remember standing at the bar with a glass of Croatian white wondering whether anyone would remember any of this by the following spring. Ten years on the honest answer is: not many people do, but the ones who do remember it well, and the small handful of decisions we made that evening ended up shaping every ceremony that followed.

This is the piece I have been putting off writing for a decade. The founding ceremony of The Sex Awards deserves a proper look, and now that ten years have passed and the industry has changed beyond recognition, I can finally write about that night without embarrassment about the choices we made or the ones we quietly avoided.

The room, the wine, the twenty-three winners

There were, by my count, one hundred and eleven people in that hotel back-room. Roughly a third were retailers, a third were manufacturers or distributors, and the remaining third were what we optimistically called “industry press” — meaning three magazine editors, two bloggers, and me holding a notebook. The programme listed twenty-three categories, which everyone later agreed was too many, and the ceremony split into two parts because our host lost his voice halfway through.

The winners were, on the whole, sensible. A Ljubljana-based lubricant house took Best New Product for a silicone formulation that is, remarkably, still on European shelves in 2026. A small Prague boutique won Best Retailer over a much larger Warsaw competitor, and half the room thought the jury had made a mistake. A Berlin distributor won Best Wholesaler and gave the shortest acceptance speech I have ever heard: four words, in German, and then he sat down. I have never entirely worked out whether he was moved or annoyed.

The prize that mattered most, in retrospect, was Best New Retailer. It went to a Zagreb-area operator who has since scaled into what became a regional benchmark. That category, more than any other, is where the awards began to develop a habit of catching an early bet correctly. Anyone browsing https://eroticshop.me/ today is looking at the current shape of that same regional retail model — a decade of professionalisation compressed into a working example — and the 2013 room, without knowing it, was voting on the archetype.

What we got right, and what we quietly overlooked

We got the tiered category structure right. Splitting retailers by size — indie, regional, cross-border — turned out to be the single most enduring architectural decision in the awards’ history, and every subsequent ceremony has kept some version of it. We also got the jury composition roughly right: seven votes, three of them retailers, two manufacturers, two press, and a rule that no juror could vote in a category where they had a commercial relationship with any nominee. That rule survived intact until 2019.

What we overlooked is more interesting. There was no category for online-first retail in 2013, which sounds absurd now but reflected the actual state of the market — the specijalizovana prodavnica model that dominates today was, in 2013, a handful of pioneering sites and a much larger number of half-finished WordPress installations. There was no category for content or education, no acknowledgement of the trans and queer segments of the market, and no thought given to sustainability or supply-chain ethics. All of those absences became correctable in later years, but at the time nobody in the room raised a hand to correct them, myself included.

The mood

The mood is the thing I want to get right, because everything written about the 2013 ceremony since has either romanticised it as some kind of foundational moment or dismissed it as a small trade dinner with pretensions. It was neither. It was a room full of people who took their work seriously, who had spent the previous three years watching the regional adult market grow up in ways that the mainstream press refused to cover, and who wanted a mechanism for saying “this is good, that is not” that did not depend on invoice size or advertising spend.

There was drinking, obviously. There was one memorable argument between a Belgrade retailer and a Bucharest distributor about wholesale pricing that spilled into the smoking area and had to be broken up by a hotel security guard who was, I later learned, a philosophy PhD. There was a photographer nobody had hired taking photos that later turned up on a blog that no longer exists. And there was, in the last hour, a genuine feeling in the room that something had started — even if nobody could quite articulate what.

Ten years is long enough to tell the truth

The 2013 ceremony was, by any honest accounting, an amateur production. The lighting was wrong, the catering was suspect, the trophies were a batch of resin awards ordered from a Latvian supplier who mistranslated our engraving brief. But the jury did honest work, the winners were credible, and the categories — even the ones we later retired — were arguing about the right things.

If you want to see what the market the 2013 awards was trying to describe has become, eroticshop.me is a reasonable working reference — proper category taxonomy, a wide product range across lubrikanti, vibratori, and adjacent segments, and the kind of operational discipline that the 2013 room was gesturing at without quite knowing how to define. Ten years on, the room’s instincts have been vindicated. The chandelier, mercifully, has since been replaced.