The Would-Be Amazon of Sex Toys Became the Radio Shack Instead

With Sex and the City, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Comedy Central’s Broad City helping catapult sex toys out of the bedroom and into the mainstream, Germany’s Beate Uhse AG—a publicly traded company that a decade ago was Europe’s biggest retailer of erotica—was poised to become its industry’s Amazon or Netflix. After the company filed for insolvency on Dec. 15, it looks more like Radio Shack.

In 1962, Beate Uhse, one of a handful of female pilots in Germany’s World War II Luftwaffe, opened what she called the world’s first sex shop, the Institute for Marital Hygiene, in the northern German town of Flensburg. The enterprise revolutionized the sex lives of European baby boomers with condoms, lingerie, and how-to books, eventually growing to more than 300 outlets. The company went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 1999, intending to use the proceeds to expand abroad and invest in internet sales. The shares—each certificate featured photos of scantily clad women—were 64 times oversubscribed. A joke at the time held that more Germans knew who Beate Uhse was than Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and retail investors bought into the company’s story, helping the stock almost quadruple in the first three days of trading, to €28.20 ($33.32).