Windeln.de; Amazon for diapers

Added in 2017 to the portfolio

Windeln.de – literally “nappies dot de” – was a Munich online retailer of baby and toddler goods, founded in 2010 by Konstantin Urban, Alexander Brand and Dagmar Mahnel, and pitched to investors with the most reliably seductive phrase in all of e-commerce: it was going to be “the Amazon for babies.” The museum has learned to reach for its wallet protectively whenever a company describes itself as “the Amazon for” anything, because that phrase names a competitor, not a moat.

The May 2015 IPO on the Frankfurt exchange valued the company at nearly €500 million and priced the shares at €18.50, the middle of the range, raising about €211 million including the greenshoe. The market’s verdict arrived with unusual speed: the first trade printed at €18, and by the close the shares had dropped 19 per cent, to around €15. When a freshly floated growth story falls a fifth before the closing bell, the crowd is trying to tell you something.

The growth narrative leaned heavily on China, which became the company’s largest market. The hot idea of the moment was the “daigou” trade – resellers and personal shoppers buying trusted German and European baby formula and goods, prized by Chinese parents after domestic safety scandals, and shipping them east. For a brief window, cross-border demand made the numbers sing.

Then the singing stopped. The Chinese channel and the various foreign subsidiaries underperformed badly; the Eastern European business Feedo was sold in 2018 and the loss-making Southern European shop Bebitus was shut at the end of 2021. Regulatory and logistical frictions bit, and revenue did the opposite of what an “Amazon for” anything is supposed to do: it fell from €212 million in 2017 to just €52 million by 2021. A growth company that stops growing is merely a cash-consuming company with a high share count.

There was even a final, modern indignity: in June 2021 the stock was swept up in the Reddit meme-stock wave, which tripled the penny-stock husk in a single week – prompting a word of caution from the German financial regulator – and teased the desperate with a bounce that meant nothing. In July 2022 a planned capital increase of up to €5.5 million fell through, talks with potential investors failed, and at the end of October 2022 Windeln.de announced it would file for insolvency. IPO buyers were left with a loss of around 99 per cent.

But a listed shell in Germany never quite dies; it merely changes costume. In 2023 a group of investors took over the empty company through an insolvency plan, renamed it Nakiki SE, and kept the listing – with a tax-loss carryforward reportedly above €170 million as its most attractive asset. After a detour into litigation finance, the former nappy merchant has most recently presented itself as a would-be bitcoin treasury company. From the Amazon for babies to a would-be MicroStrategy in eleven years: the narrative, at least, never stopped growing.

The museum files it as a clean specimen of two fragile things stacked on top of each other: a hype-priced “Amazon for” growth story, balanced on a cross-border arbitrage trade that depended on Chinese demand and German trust holding steady forever. Remove either leg and the whole thing sits down.

Museum note: a nappy is, by design, a single-use product. So, it turned out, was the equity.

Further reading

• Wikipedia (German) – Windeln.de (ongoing)
• GlobalCapital – Windeln.de wins good price for IPO, then plummets on debut (2015)
• deutsche-startups.de – windeln.de geht direkt zum Start in die Knie (2015)
• Bloomberg via BNN – Reddit’s stock gamblers are landing on a few European bets (2021)
• FashionUnited – Windeln.de will Insolvenz anmelden (2022)
• Börsen-Zeitung – Die Zocker stürzen sich auf Windeln.de (2021)