Tomas Weber

I spent the first decade of my career as a financial journalist covering Central European industrials — machine tools, chemicals, packaging, the sort of unglamorous manufacturing that keeps the region’s economies running. The pivot to adult industry brand coverage looks strange from the outside, but from where I sit it isn’t really a pivot at all. It’s the same job. There are factories, there are supply chains, there are brand houses, there are private-equity owners, there are quality inspection regimes, and someone should be writing about all of them with the same seriousness a business publication would give to any other consumer sector.

I joined the editorial board in 2019 explicitly to do that work. My beat is brand and manufacturer analysis — who makes what, where they make it, what they own, who owns them, and how those structures shape the products consumers actually encounter on retail shelves. Consumer coverage of adult products almost entirely ignores this level. Readers are told a product is “premium” or “budget” without any explanation of what those categories actually mean in supply-chain terms. I try to fix that.

There are things I find genuinely fascinating about this industry that don’t get discussed enough. The consolidation of manufacturing into a small number of Chinese and increasingly Vietnamese factories. The way European “premium” brands sometimes source from the same OEMs as budget brands and simply rebrand the output. The rise of direct-to-consumer manufacturers cutting distributors out entirely. The quiet influence of a handful of family-owned German and Dutch distributors that dominate wholesale in this half of the continent.

I try to write about brands without lionising them and without cynical dismissal. Most brand houses in this industry are neither villains nor visionaries. They’re businesses making trade-offs. My job is to make those trade-offs legible to readers who are otherwise being sold to constantly.

I live in Vinohrady with my partner and a very well-tempered dachshund named Ivo.