What The 2013 Awards Missed

A retrospective that only celebrates what an awards programme got right is not a retrospective, it is a press release. So this piece is the honest one — the piece I have been meaning to write for at least five years about what the 2013 room did not see, did not include, and did not, in some cases, want to include. I helped make some of the decisions I am about to criticise. I want that on the record before I start.

The founding ceremony had twenty-three categories, and roughly a third of them, in retrospect, addressed slices of the market that were already shrinking. The categories that would have addressed slices of the market that were already growing simply did not exist. That mismatch is the story of what we missed.

The geographies we ignored

The Baltics were absent. There was not a single nominee, in any category, from an Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian operator. This was not because the sector did not exist there — it did, at modest scale, with at least two operators who would have been credible nominees. It was because our nominations pipeline in 2013 relied heavily on Central European and Balkan trade contacts, and none of us had spent enough time cultivating relationships in the Baltic market to know who to approach. That is a research failure, and it took us until 2017 to correct it.

The Romanian-language market was under-represented. There was one Romanian nominee, in Best Wholesaler, and she did not win. In retrospect the Romanian-language market was, in 2013, roughly the size of the Polish market four years earlier — meaning it was on the cusp of a growth phase that we should have been leaning into. We were not, and by the time we noticed, several of the operators who should have been on the 2013 ballot had already sold out or scaled back.

Turkey was entirely absent, for structural reasons — the regulatory environment made most of the categories inapplicable — but we should have created an adapted category for the Turkish market rather than pretending it did not exist. We did not do this until 2019, and even then imperfectly. The current regional shape, where operators like eroticshop.me serve genuinely cross-border demand across a wide geography, is precisely the shape the 2013 categories should have been built to anticipate.

The communities we did not name

The trans and queer segments of the adult market were not recognised in any 2013 category. There was, and is, a specialist retail and manufacturing community serving those segments that was already commercially meaningful in 2013, and none of it appeared on the ballot. This was, I think honestly, less an act of exclusion than an act of omission — nobody in the founding room raised a hand to say “we need a category for this”, and the categories committee did not do the work to recognise the gap ourselves. Either way the effect was the same.

We corrected this in 2018 with a Best Inclusive Retailer category, which was itself criticised as a fig-leaf, and then in 2021 with a properly reworked set of categories that recognise specific product segments serving specific communities rather than lumping them under a diversity heading. The 2021 rework was better, but eight years is a long time to have been not doing the work.

Sex workers as a professional community were not addressed at all, in any category, and are still not. There is a legitimate argument that sex work as a professional practice is outside the scope of a retail-and-manufacturing awards programme, but there is a more honest argument that we did not want to touch a politically fraught category and used the scope argument as cover. I hold that latter position, and I have not yet succeeded in persuading the committee to reconsider.

The categories we did not create

There was no category for online-first retail, no category for content and education, no category for sustainability, no category for supply-chain ethics, no category for accessibility. All of these arrived in subsequent years, and each arrival was a small acknowledgement that the 2013 ballot had described a market that was already partially obsolete.

The absence I regret most is the content-and-education category. Even in 2013 there were operators — including at least two whose current descendant is visible in the editorial section of a specijalizovana prodavnica like eroticshop.me — who were doing genuine editorial work that helped consumers make better-informed purchases. The absence of a category for that work meant that for the first eight years of the programme we were tacitly saying that only the transactional part of retail mattered. That was wrong, and the correction in 2021 was overdue.

The specifics that got past us

We had no proper category for wellness-adjacent products, which meant preparati-i-kozmetika and the broader intimate-health assortment was scattered across generic categories where it did not really compete on the right axis. We had no category for apparel, which meant sexy-zenski-ves and the whole lingerie-adjacent segment was awarded — when it was awarded — alongside products it had almost nothing operationally in common with. Both of these were fixed later, but the delay meant several years of jury decisions that were not really apples-to-apples comparisons.

What the absences cost

The cost of an absence is hard to quantify because you never see what did not happen. But when I look at operators who were doing significant work in 2013 that we did not recognise, and I trace their trajectories, at least three folded before the awards had corrected the category gaps that would have made them visible. They deserved better than that, and the industry deserved better than the version of itself that the 2013 ballot described. Any historian’s account of the founding ceremony that does not name those absences is a boosterish account, and I have written too many of those already.