Von Floerke - Guerilla Radio | Kapitalmarkthygienemuseum

gifted to the portfolio in 03/2019

It all started with a pitch on “Die Höhle der Löwen”, Germany’s version of “Shark Tank”, in 2015. Unfortunately the full original clip (season 2, episode 3) is not even available behind the VOX paywall any more here.

“Höhle der Löwen” is a German reality TV show in which start-ups pitch their products and services to a jury of five entrepreneurs. After the pitch and some haggling, judgement is passed. If the “Lions” see fit, they make an offer and provide seed funding.

Von Floerke was founded in Bonn by David Schirrmacher. The original aim of the company was (quote): “help men to develop more self-confidence, become more masculine and gain more classical elegance through high-quality accessoires like bow ties, dress handkerchiefs or socks”. After starting a small online shop in 2014, the founder won over three of the five Lions – Frank Thelen, Judith Williams and Vural Öger. The episode aired in September 2015; on air the deal was EUR 100,000 for 33% of the business, renegotiated upwards afterwards.

At the beginning, everything looked “smooth and dandy”. The show gave von Floerke visibility. Sales increased, and retailers like Zalando, Kaufhof and Otto started selling the products. The monthly revenue run rate in 2016 was stated at EUR 400k. Frank Thelen was a “very, very happy investor” (01:21).

Soon afterwards the first troubles began. The tabloid BILD reported that one of the investors, Vural Öger, would sell his stake in von Floerke (Judith Williams also left after about a year). Schirrmacher gave an interview in which he vented about Öger at length (link): “I am a little bit puzzled. First Vural Öger leaves our partnership with a good capital gain, then two of his companies go bankrupt…” A sneak preview of what was to come…

Frank Thelen, meanwhile, kept his stake. When the start-up used the video above to raise EUR 1.2mn of debt via the crowdlending platform Kapilendo, things behind the scenes weren’t as smooth as everybody pretended. Operationally, matters seemed to be worse than the video suggested (link).

CEO Schirrmacher decided to “think really big” and to bring production back from Asia to Germany. To that end the company acquired the tie maker Edsor Kronen, partly to integrate more of the value chain.

The other investors didn’t like that move at all. Behind the scenes Frank Thelen tried to sell his stake to the German entrepreneur Christian Heitmeyer, founder of brands4friends (link). Once the rumours went public, this earned Thelen a pretty extensive shitstorm.

At the same time, Schirrmacher appeared to be in contact with Christian Schoenberger, a German entrepreneur who had got into legal trouble selling alcohol online (link) – although von Floerke denied this loudly at the time, and so did Schoenberger. Either way, in October 2018 the bow-tie shop started selling Red Bull, caviar and vodka. Jack Daniel’s, Absolut Vodka, three bottles at a time at fire-sale prices… (link)

Things went downhill relatively fast.

The German deal website Mydealz published a deal on a Friday afternoon and orders flooded in. By Sunday evening, EUR 250k of sales had been done on that one deal alone. Triggered by those extremely cheap alcohol deals, the company sold thousands of triple-bottle packs – around 40,000 orders came in from mid-October, but only about 15,000 had been shipped by early November. PayPal reportedly froze the account for fear of an “exit scam”, and things blew up. Thousands of customers didn’t get the bottles they had paid for, Mydealz blocked the shop, and in December 2018 it emerged that the Bonn public prosecutor had opened an investigation on suspicion of fraud and delayed insolvency filing – the proverbial excrement had hit the fan…

Frank Thelen tried to get out and got mad (link): “That Von Floerke is selling cheap booze is not coordinated with me. If I could, I would stop it.” Or: “I would never sell cheap booze. I am about as interested in that as I am in cat litter shovels.” He obtained a preliminary injunction so that his name could no longer be used in von Floerke’s marketing.

CEO Schirrmacher took Thelen’s behaviour as treason and switched gears dramatically. He started a public media war.

First he started handing out discounts while still using Frank Thelen as the public face of the brand (without consent). The code “HEULLEISE42” translates as “CRYQUIETLY42”, the 42 being a reference to Thelen’s holding company, e42.

Then at some point von Floerke started selling “Frank Thelen must leave” boxes:

10€ box with a value of 30€. Let us surprise you, and make a statement on whether this man is truly von Floerke. We think not. He defames us, he lies about us. If you see it that way too: make a statement by buying the box.

(By the way: the Kapitalmarkthygienemuseum is very interested in getting its hands on one of those boxes!)

Meanwhile, CEO Schirrmacher found that this kind of guerrilla-radio marketing was to his liking. True to the motto “there is no such thing as bad press”, he went all in.

One day, particularly stressed out, he went on a live stream and ranted about everything. The feed drew thousands of viewers, and Schirrmacher concluded that this was quite an effective use of social media marketing.

From then on, mostly via Facebook, Schirrmacher held regular live streams in which he taunted, swore, drank and showed off the gun collection he owned as an avid hunter. “We shoot prices down,” he once yelled; one evening the discount code was “Colt38”. This eventually culminated in a (fake) SWAT team visiting him at home at 6am in March 2019 (link + video). The real police did drop by that same month – at lunchtime and without a battering ram: after a viewer had filed a complaint, officers and the weapons authority inspected his guns and found everything registered and locked away. (Listen to the podcast mentioned below for the full, unbelievable story.)

In the same month Thelen finally got out, handing his shares to a co-shareholder for a symbolic one euro.

Unfortunately, most of the videos, with thousands of people commenting live, are lost today. At one point Schirrmacher staged his escape from Germany at the airport – combined, of course, with another 30% discount: “Ehrenmann30”.

That was when a good friend donated a pair of socks to the collection of the Kapitalmarkthygienemuseum.

In preparation for this post I listened to a podcast and a two-hour interview given in May 2019. I was utterly surprised by how sober, witty and reflective Schirrmacher comes across. I recommend listening to it, if you want the full view straight from the horse’s mouth. (Link: taken down by YouTube.)

But all the guerrilla tactics didn’t work. A debt haircut agreed with most creditors in spring 2019 bought some time, but in October 2019 the company filed for insolvency. The crowdlenders on Kapilendo were left fearing for their EUR 1.2mn, while the founder set up shop as a financing consultant. As for the criminal investigation: according to Schirrmacher, prosecutors dropped the case in 2024 for lack of sufficient suspicion.

A German book by David Schirrmacher, “Ein Start-Up Märchen”: Amazon – quite a read!

Museum note: of all the merchandise von Floerke ever sold, the socks may be the only item that was actually delivered, never trended on Facebook and still holds its value – which, in this collection, is the definition of a blue chip.

Von Floerke - Guerilla Radio

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