A Munich-based startup, Planetics, has successfully closed its first financing round for its online marketplace for sustainable and fairly produced sporting goods. The exact investment sum was not disclosed, but the founders indicated a “six-figure” range of between €100,000 and €999,000. The capital raised will primarily be used to further expand Planetics’ market presence and the number of brands being offered to the public.
For the time being, the platform consists only of a German-language website, planetics.de, that offers the products of relatively niche brands in the yoga, fitness, running, outdoor and swim & surf categories. It is accompanied by a blog. One of the founders, Fabian Hörst, tells us that “it is definitely on our readmap to enter additional markets in the future via our online marketplace.”
Less than a year after it entered the market in October 2020, the startup was able to convince various investors with various kinds of expertise in the sector, including a former SportScheck CEO, Jürgen Habermann.“Planetics has managed to combine sustainability and sports on one platform in a relatively simple and above all transparent way for sports enthusiasts,“ Habermann commented. “In addition, with the marketplace, they have created a contact point for fair and sustainable sports brands, which are intensively examined on the basis of their own criteria.“
Additional investors are Bernd Geilen, former deputy CEO of the ING Bank; Andrea Lederer, an expert in e-commerce who previously worked for Amazon, Expedia and BestSecret; Arno Gerken, a long-time senior partner and global leader at McKinsey Risk Practice, and two other unnamed investors.
Planetics currently offers more than 1,000 products by 50 sustainable sports brands from all over Europe. It was founded in September 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic, after an experiment with 13 brands from Germany, Austria and Switzerland by three young entrepreneurs: Alexandros Taflanidis, Fabian Hörst and Raphael Breitner. After working for Lidl, Hörst helped to set up a marketplace for lamps. Among other experiences, Breitner worked for Amazon in Germany on online marketing and for Bitrock Digital Partners. He also participated in the launch of a yoga startup in the Netherlands. After collecting plastics for several months in Central America, Taflanidis ran a SIXT branch in Berlin.
At Planetics, Horst takes care of investor relations, finance and operations. Breitner is responsible for the development of the Planetics platform and its visual identity. Taflanidis picks the brands that fullfill its sustainability criteria.
Their initiative is a response to a rapidly rising demand for sustainable products in the sporting goods sector, especially among the younger generations who shop more and more online. It was followed a few months later, in April 2021, by the launch of the Sportgreen online store, also in Germany, by a retail member of Intersport and its subsequent establishment of a physical store in the German town of Ingelheim.
Other multi-brand websites with a similar mission have been launched in Europe, generally covering yoga and a variety of outdoor sports. We can mention https://www.lockrspace.com/ in the U.K., https://made-nature.com/ in France, https://www.weekendbee.com/ in Finland and https://vindpinad.se/ in Sweden. The latter also has a physical store in Lindome.
