HML-How it started
The story of one of Germany’s oldest webshops
Even though I find the sales of my books quite satisfactory: a young writer of my age needs an income for living.
I now often brag that I run one of the oldest online shops in Germany and today I want to tell you the story.
It started in the early nineties. I was in the final stages of my doctorate and had already lost the illusion that the world outside the university was just waiting for a chemist like me.
Frank, my partner at these times, bought a sewing machine and some accessories in 1993 and started making leather belts himself. He wanted to increase their tensile strength, because simple leather belts wear out quickly when worn for a long time.
After a few attempts with cut belts made of thick cowhides, he came up with the idea of taking a thinner shoe upper leather and gluing it together in several layers. The success was bombastic. We still wear some of the belts we sewed back then.
That was his business idea. I was hooked and started to put various pretty studs on the sewn belts. That’s what people wore back then. Unfortunately, this fashion quickly died down. and some of the belts with rivets still hang in the shop today…
Frank’s business idea nevertheless quickly became our business idea and I threw myself into the work with fervour in my spare time. I took a sewing course at the adult education centre, but that’s another story. We expanded our product range, because with our new processing method, not only belts could be made much more durable, but also bracelets, braces, wallets and shoulder straps.
Frank and I have always been addicted to the fetish and BDSM scene and so it came about that we also included collars, dog leashes, various restraints for hands, feet and other body parts, harnesses for the body and smaller harnesses for the more noble parts in our range.
We posted diligently in the social media of the time, i.e. fetish meetings and word of mouth. Already in the first year, the sales figures showed us that we had hit a nerve and Frank registered a business.
Regardless of the fact that he was and still is a qualified saddler, he had to call his trade “cobblery” because he did not have the title of master craftsman. Since then, “Manufacture of leather belts and bracelets” has been written on his (and later on my) trade licence.
Fresh from university, I brought a new business idea into our – by now joint – company in the mid-nineties: We were connected via some academic computers to a strange network in which services like “WWW”, “Archie”, “Gopher” and “e-Mail” could be used to communicate and find information. This was controlled by a revolutionary new software called “Netscape 2.0”.
For some time, there have been efforts to make these services available not only to universities, but also to the general public. In the nineties, this development took off. I bought a modem with a fabulous 2,400 baud (about 0.002 MBit by today’s standards), learned the Hayes command set, dialled into the Datex-P network of the Telekom and stormed into this newfangled Internet.
Everything you could look at back then went like this: Call up the page and go make coffee. When you came back later with the cup, you could already see the first contents, if you were lucky. Fortunately, Bremen became an ISDN test region in 1994. Since then, the page load was quicker and one had a real surfing experience. As long as the page code was manageable and the pictures were nicely small.
In 1997, I lost my heart to René. The smart Swiss worked in a Zurich company that provided webspace commercially. It was thanks to his persuasions that I registered the domain hm-leder.com and rented us webspace for a shop from the then Rainbow-Net.
Olaf, a dear friend, wrote me a little Javascript for the shopping cart and together we set up a series of static pages in HTML for our products. That’s all it took at the time.
The domain didn’t belong to me anymore and was first replaced by hm-leder.de, later by hml-fetish.com and now by hml-fetish.de. But you can still see the remains of this shop in the internet archive. Of course, the shop ran offline at that time, so I could send it on CD instead of a printed catalogue. Do you still remember CDs? Those silver discs…
The brightly coloured layout in frames corresponded to my taste at the time. Fortunately, I have learned since then.
You can get the original surfing experience by clicking on the caption. Only ordering is no longer possible. It would be an immense effort to adapt the shop to today’s legislation. By the way, the entire webshop including scripts and images is only 20 megabytes in size! Nowadays, you already download this amount of data when you call up the Facebook homepage.
Frank didn’t like but tolerated my activities on the internet back then. “You’re getting bogged down. That’s never any good,” I often had to listen to him. This time, however, I was right. Already in the year 2,000, the income from the web shop clearly exceeded the turnover in the shop and since then it has been our main source of income. Today, classic postal dispatch with written or telephone orders hardly ever happens.
Since 2000, I have also been running the webshop on my own. Frank continues to produce exciting things and I sell them, but no longer under the same roof. Occasionally the muse kisses me and I invent something new myself. For example, I developed the pony harness for two-legged ponies and the leather condom. Sounds exotic, but it attracts customers from all over the world to visit my webshop.
The first web shop I built myself lasted just under ten years. In 2006, I switched to OSCommerce, an off-the-shelf shop, and in 2015, I switched back to a self-written shop, which has been accessible at https://www.hml-fetish.com since then.
This year there is something new again. Anyone who wants to can get an idea of the current status of the construction work at https://www.hml-fetish.de/shop/. You can already order and anyone who orders there and gives me feedback will be credited with a ten percent discount.
In my heyday in the early 2000s, I employed two full-time staff and several temporary workers. Later – after unpleasant experiences with competitors – sales declined. Fortunately, however, I never ran out of business ideas. Over the years, HML Apartments (holiday flats in the district) and HML Verlag (science fiction, thrillers, crime novels and more) joined the ranks.
With this in mind, stay tuned!
Mike Gorden
