How They Sold Amorana Successfully
Beatrice Lessi
The Hottest Newsletter
I receive a newsletter from Alan Frei – whom I met the first time when I interviewed his business partner, Lukas Speiser, and heard how they started what is now the largest reseller of sex toys in Europe, Amorana .
The newsletter included a video titled How they sold Amorana successfully, and you can see it at the end of this blogpost. Alan and Lukas talk about how they became entrepreneurs and how they finally sold their business. The story is candid and juicy: it goes from a lot of useless meetings and lack of ideas, to wasted time in bars and late nights, to realising that the sex toys industry wasn’t digitalised (there were still a lot of traditional shops at the time, but not a really professional, non intimidating and women-friendly online platform), to setting up a first home office (Lukas stored vibrators and the likes in a bookshelf, wrapped them up and biked to the post office to ship them), to spending a lot in marketing…and finally to creating an online shop for sexual wellness that “just kept growing and growing very fast”, and now makes an undisclosed amount of money, “in the double digits millions”.
The First Thing to Buy When You Have A Lot of Money
Eight years later, the company has been sold. Cédric Waldburger, author of the video, interviews the two founders.
How has money changed your life?
Alan: I realised that you just have other stress. Maybe 15 minutes I was relaxed and so happy looking at it. But suddenly you have other things coming up, other problems. Money helps in different things. I didn’t have a lot of money on my bank account. Suddenly other things come up, like taking care of negative interests on your bank account. People calling because they want to invest your money, people calling …who want your money!
Lukas: My life has been a rollercoaster together with Amorana…we joke that in a startup there are only two phases: either euphoria or panic. Doing this for seven years kind of takes a toll on you. Some of it went away when we sold…Obviously money helps; I sleep a lot better now!
What does luxury mean to you? (Alan is a minimalist, for more details check his website).
Alan: Living in a hotel – I moved into a hotel, they take care of everything and that’s luxury. Reducing the stress for things that in my opinion are not productive, and on the other hand creating cool things. These are the things I want to invest in. I don’t want to invest it in a new car or something.
Is there anything else that you’ve bought since you have sold the company?
Lukas: hmmm.(pause). No. We said:look, we need to celebrate this event! And we got us an ice cream.
Below, the full video
