HML-How it began

The story of one of Germany’s oldest webshops

I often boast about running one of the oldest online shops in Germany. Today, I want to share the story behind it with you.

It all started back in the early nineties. I was finishing up my PhD thesis and had already lost the illusion that the world outside of academia was just waiting for a chemist like me.

At the same time—1993, to be exact—my partner back then, Frank, bought a sewing machine and some supplies, and started making leather belts. His mission was to massively increase their tensile strength, because standard leather belts quickly stretch out and lose their shape when worn for a long time. After a few experiments with cut belts made from thick cattle necks, he came up with the idea of gluing multiple layers of thinner shoe upper leather together. It was a massive success! Funnily enough, we are both still wearing some of the belts he made back then.

That was Frank’s business idea. I was hooked right away and started decorating the belts with various pretty rivets—that was the style at the time. Unfortunately, that trend quickly faded, and a few of those riveted relics are actually still hanging in the shop today …

From Adult Education Sewing Classes to “Cobbling”

Frank’s business idea nevertheless quickly became our business idea and I threw myself into the work with fervour in Frank’s idea quickly became our joint project, and I threw myself into the work with total enthusiasm in my free time. I even took a sewing course at the local adult education center, but that’s a story for another day.

We expanded our product range, because our new crafting method didn’t just make belts much more durable—it also worked perfectly for armbands, suspenders, wallets, and shoulder straps. Since Frank and I had always been close to the fetish and BDSM scene, it felt completely natural to soon add collars, leashes, various restraints for hands and feet, body harnesses, and smaller gear for the “more precious parts” to our collection.

We were busy posting in the social media of the day—which meant fetish meetups and word of mouth. Right in the first year, our sales figures showed us that we had hit a nerve. Frank registered the business. Even though he delivered highly qualified saddlery work (and still does to this day), he officially had to name the business “Flickschusterei” (cobbling/botched repairs) due to a lack of a master craftsman title. “Manufacturing of leather belts and armbands” is what it has said on his—and later also my—trade license ever since.

Into the Digital Future at 2,400 Baud

Fresh out of university, I brought a revolutionary idea into our company in the mid-nineties. Through the academy computers, we were connected to a strange network where you could use services like “WWW”, “Archie”, “Gopher”, and “Email” to communicate. The whole thing was controlled via a brand-new software called Netscape 2.0.

As this development gained traction and the internet started reaching the general public, I bought a modem with a whopping 2,400 baud (by today’s standards, about 0.002 Mbps). I learned the Hayes command set, dialed into the Telekom’s Datex-P network, and stormed the World Wide Web.

Back then, surfing went like this: click on a page, head to the kitchen, and make a coffee. When you came back with your mug, you might get lucky and see the first bits of content. Fortunately, Bremen became an ISDN test region in 1994. From then on, pages loaded much faster and it felt like a real browsing experience—provided the HTML code was clean and the images were shrunk down to a minimum.

1997: The Birth of the Webshop

In 1997, I lost my heart to René. The smart Swiss guy worked at a company in Zurich that offered commercial web space. It’s thanks to his powers of persuasion that I registered the domain hm-leder.com and rented web space for a shop from the former Rainbow-Net.

Olaf, a dear friend, wrote a little JavaScript for the shopping cart, and together we set up a series of static HTML pages for our products. Back then, that was all it took. The flashy, colorful layout in so-called “frames” was exactly to my taste at the time—thankfully, I’ve learned a thing or two since then! By the way, the entire webshop, including scripts and images, was just 20 megabytes in size. Nowadays, you download that amount of data just by opening the Facebook homepage.

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.

Frank wasn’t a big fan of my digital excursions back then. “You’re scattering your energy. That’s never going to amount to anything,” I heard quite often. But this time, I was spot on. By the year 2000, revenues from the webshop significantly outpaced our brick-and-mortar store sales. E-commerce became our main source of income; classic mail orders or phone orders became a thing of the past.

New Paths, Pony Harnesses, and Leather Condoms

I have been running the webshop on my own since 2000. Frank still busy-bees away making exciting gear and I sell it, but no longer under a shared roof. Every now and then, the muse kisses me too: for example, I developed the pony harness for two-legged ponies and the leather condom. Sounds exotic, but it still draws customers from all over the world to the shop to this day.

The first self-built webshop lasted nearly ten years. In 2006, I switched to osCommerce and finally, in 2015, moved back to a custom, self-written system that has been online at hml-fetish.de ever since.

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.

So, things definitely stay exciting around here. On that note: stay tuned!

Mike Gorden