Startup Characteristics
Amorelie is an e-commerce platform offering lifestyle products that enhance people's lovelife. The product portfolio consists of more than 6000 products such as lovetoys, accessoires and lingerie. The aim is to provide a platform especially for women and couples which presents erotic products in a fashionable, fun, trendy and comforting way. Apart from the products themselves, the platform offers guidance, articles and entertainment about erotic and love-related topics. Hence, the surrounding makes the target group feel comfortable about a very sensitive product and increases the confidence to buy it. Amorelie is the first online shop for erotic products that differs drastically from the traditional players like Beate Uhse or Orion who still have a strong male focus and cannot serve today's needs of modern and young women and couples.
The business model represents an online retail model where products are bough from manufacturers and sold at retail prices. With the help of large investments in marketing (online, TV, PR, offline), this model is scalable in order to take over a significant market share. Furthermore, the development of own brands gives the opportunity to raise the margins significantly and international expansion can raise the overall volume.
Personal Characteristics
Amorelie was founded in December 2012 by Sebastian Pollok, WHU graduate and former investor of BV Capital in San Francisco, and Lea-Sophie Cramer, a Mannheim graduate of 2009 and former Vice President of Groupon. Together with a team of 20 people they are currently based in Berlin Mitte changing the perception and thinking about sex as a lifestyle.
After graduating from the University of Mannheim with a Bachelor in Business Administration in 2009, Lea started her career at the Boston Consulting Group. However, after a couple of months she met Oliver Samwer (Founder of Rocket Internet) and decided to enter a more entrepreneurial path. So she followed Oliver to Rocket Internet, the leading incubator in the german internet startup scene. Lea helped to build Groupon all over the world and led the Asian and Arabian market as Groupon's Vice President. In the end, she was in charge for over 1200 employees in more than 11 different countries. After Groupon's IPO and a lot of travelling Lea decided to found her own company in Berlin. Lea is a very passionate entrepreneur who works with a lot of enthusiasm, ambition as well as fun on challenging and promising projects. Her strength is a highly structured, well prioritized, detailed and, at the same time, fast way of working. Furthermore, she has great leadership skills and always tries to challenge her employees so they never stop learning. Lea tries to develop a personal relationship to all her employees so that low hierarchies are still given, which is favorable within a Startup.
Business Development and Challenges
In March, Amorelie closed the first round of financing, which enabled the Startup to set up a basis for the following months. The founders were able to set up an office, hire smart people and build the platform and the product. The start of the TV campaign at the beginning of november brought the development to another level and is an important step to get Amorelie's brand name out there and increase customer awareness. Amorelie was able to create a great PR buzz surrounding its business which has resulted in a high level of news coverage until today. Further, the team opened a Pop-Up Store in Berlin, created a TV campaign earlier as originally planned and tried unconventional ways of marketing. The next financing round will determine the speed and the extent of growth for the next stages.
One of the biggest challenges Amorelie is facing is the very negative image sexshops in Germany are afflicted with. Therefore, the team has built a brand which is more associated with fashion and lifestyle in order to change the way people think about Amorelie's products. In order to do so, the lifestyle-brand had to be placed in envirmonments that might not obviously be related with its topic of origin. This accounts for PR (magazines, TV etc.) but also for marketing and communications. It is Amorelie's aim to create a well-known and popular brand in the next years and eventually take over the leadership in the modern German erotic retail industry.
The Startup and Lea have also been featured in:
- Vogue
- Manager Magazin
- Cosmopolitan
- Amica
- Freundin
- Gründerszene (Video, German: Pop-Up-Shop)
- Wirtschaftswoche (see how competition is forced to react)
