Word: annelies
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Beate likewise hasn't tried anything like the at-home parties that established Ann Summers' female client base. Ironically, the first two Ann Summers shops were opened in London in 1970 by Swinging '60s man-about-town Kim Caborn-Waterfield, an actor who squired the now deceased blond bombshell Diana Dors. Caborn-Waterfield envisioned a chain of sex supermarkets patterned after Beate Uhse's. The shops were bought a year later by Gold Group International, whose holdings include a number of British soft-porn magazines and which is owned by managing director Gold's father and uncle...
...Ann Summers is not the only European sex chain with international ambitions. Germany's Beate Uhse--which also takes an upmarket, Main Street approach to marketing erotic paraphernalia--stunned local financial markets in May when its initial public offering of 8.4 million shares was 63 times oversubscribed. It is now one of Germany's hottest stocks, trading in the $19 range. Beate Uhse is likewise expanding operations elsewhere in Europe and beyond. In September the company acquired a chain of 44 "erotic discount centers," plus a Dutch mail-order company that offers a full range of sex toys, videos...
...provides a nearly perfect vehicle for reaching well-heeled customers with a taste for vinyl pushup bras or fur-lined handcuffs. Ann Summers got into Internet sales in the past two years and says its site www.annsummers.com averages a million hits a month. In August 1997 the company's monthly Internet sales stood at a mere $6,100; by last August the figure had climbed to $42,575. Beate Uhse expects online sales www.beate-uhse.com to hit $32.8 million this year...
Beate Uhse is the grandmother of safe sex in Europe, having opened her first sex shop in the northwestern town of Flensburg in 1962. At 79, she still heads the company's board. Unlike those of Ann Summers, only 30% of Beate Uhse sales are to women. "We are working on new concepts to bring more women into the shops, like including more lingerie," explains Ulrich Hulle, chief financial officer...
Transplanting a homegrown sex business onto distant shores will doubtless prove risky. Gold hopes to avoid offending local sensibilities by going the franchise route. "It helps us to have someone who understands the local culture," she says. So far, Ann Summers' Dublin store is the only one that has drawn opposition. Downtown merchants--saying a sex shop, no matter how posh, doesn't belong on a main shopping avenue--tried to get it moved to a side street. But the opposing retailers could not find any legal reason to keep the shop off O'Connell Street, and the company turned...