Dominik Benner has taken over no fewer than 38 companies with the Platform Group in the past five years. The Wiesbaden-based company initially began as an online platform for shoe and fashion retail and is now active in 28 industries.
During an arranged video call, the CEO of the e-commerce group visibly appears to be in a good mood. The business model of offering stationary retailers a digital sales channel is ongoing. For 2026, the Platform Group – formerly known as Schuhe24 – is targeting sales of one billion for the first time. His success story began unplanned when fate suddenly knocked on the door and gave him a choice.
Suddenly a shoe trade
Together with his father, his mother was the fourth generation to run classic shoe stores in the Frankfurt area. The family had owned shoe and fashion stores in the region since 1882. “I was never interested in taking over my parents’ company,” Benner remembers. But when his father died unexpectedly in 2012, he had to make a decision. Will he join the family business or will he keep his position as managing director of the energy company?
“After 130 years, I didn’t want to be the one to close it down and end the tradition. That’s why I decided to continue the company,” he explains.
Although the business economist, born in 1982, comes from a family of shoe retailers, he had to learn the business from the ground up. As a child, he sometimes helped out in the warehouse or on weekends as part of his duties at home, but he had never been closely involved with the company.
“I wasn’t there shopping and I have no passion for fashion. I’m just not a born shoe salesman, I had to realize that at some point,” says Benner. As a colorblind person, he never really developed an interest in fashion.
Instead, Benner studied business administration for a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the renowned Swiss University of St. Gallen, which is known for its demanding admission test for non-Swiss people. He wrote his doctorate on mergers and acquisitions of family businesses – a topic that seems like an early indication of the Platform Group’s future expansion.
After completing his dissertation, Benner worked for the construction company Bilfinger Berger from 2008, and after three years, he took up a position as managing director at the energy company Juwi Group – which he gave up when he became the fifth generation to join the family business with six shoe stores.
From shoe store to fashion marketplace
“When I took over the shoe business, we asked ourselves how we could actually grow in the future,” says Benner. Soon after taking over his parents’ business, he opened his own online shop for shoes and quickly realized how difficult it is as a single retailer to get enough traffic from customers online.
His learning process led him to founding the Schuhe24 marketplace; After connecting more than 1,000 shoe retailer branches, he campaigned for the fashion trade – such as in autumn 2019 at the congress of the BTE Textile Trade Association in Cologne. At that time, his goal was to break the sales barrier of 100 million euros.
Dominik Benner tried to convince a room full of proud owners of fashion stores from German-speaking countries that they should conduct their business online via his Mode24 marketplace. The online platform takes over the running of a web shop, for example digital marketing or the processing of orders. After receiving an order, retailers receive an email and all they have to do is pack and ship the goods. This means that stationary retailers don’t risk putting a lot of work into their own online shop that doesn’t end up getting much traffic.
Looking back, his message seems obvious – for some, it wasn’t at that time, shortly before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. The bottom line is that stationary retailers earn less by selling through marketplaces than through their own stores. However, the lockdowns during the pandemic have made it clear at the latest why an additional online sales channel for brick-and-mortar retailers can help in the face of surplus goods, volatile weather conditions and frequencies as well as online competition from Zalando or Amazon.
“I told people relatively quickly: Your competitor will be Amazon in the future. Amazon will buy massive amounts of shoes themselves and sell them cheaply on the market,” says Benner. “This will be your competitor. And many people have understood that.”
Between stationary and digital
For a long time, brick-and-mortar retailers saw online players as annoying competition to their traditional business and neglected digital sales channels. To date, few – even established companies – have managed to successfully operate their own online shop. Because he entered the shoe and fashion business late, Dominik Benner was never stuck in the thought patterns of classic retail.
His appearance at the BTE Congress also differs from that of the other speakers. Is it his combed-back hair and horn-rimmed glasses, the pocket square in his jacket or the precisely coordinated Powerpoint slides that are reminiscent of business school, management consulting and corporate workflows?
But Benner knows how to score points with his background among medium-sized entrepreneurs. He presents himself as one of their ranks who helps stationary retailers sell online with a marketplace. And he doesn’t just cultivate this image to support his business case.
In addition to the headquarters in Wiesbaden, the entrepreneur still runs nine other shoe stores in the region. Since he joined the family business, four more stores have been acquired. Why does he continue to invest in stationary shoe retail despite the expansion in the platform business?
“It’s our DNA. And if it’s the DNA, you don’t want to give that up. That’s our origins and we believe that we still understand trade very well today,” explains Benner. “If you understand dealers well, you can work well with dealers.”
At 71, his mother Monika Benner continues to come to the family business every day, and his brother also works in the company. According to the website, the Benner family holding holds around 70 percent of the Platform Group, the rest of the shares are freely tradable on the stock exchange. He describes the corporate culture of the Platform Group as “family-driven”. “That means we make decisions quickly and directly. We have a very strong trial-and-error mentality. We try things out and don’t discuss them multiple times.”
Busy entrepreneur
As an entrepreneur, Benner also wants to give something back locally. Since 2022, the Platform Group has been inviting residents to an outdoor pasta table once a year at the company headquarters in downtown Wiesbaden; The draw decides the approximately 400 seats at the table. The pasta is supplied by the Benners’ restaurants, and the family is also active in business areas such as catering and real estate through the holding company.
As much as the Wiesbaden native is a locally rooted entrepreneur, Dominik Benner is also a busy businessman with ambitions. When Zalando entered the marketplace business in a big way, it began to look for new niches.
The first industry after shoes and fashion is the machinery trade. The Platform Group took over a company that only trades in machines. According to Benner, this is one of the most profitable divisions today. Then came bicycles with the Bike-Offer bicycle platform, on which more than 1,000 bicycle dealers sell their products.
“So we continued to venture into new industries, always with the same platform model,” says Benner. “We bring retailers onto our platform and do all the online trading for them because they can’t do it on their own.”
In December 2020, Schuhe24 Group changed its name to Platform Group to reflect its business model, which now spanned nine industries. This was followed, among other things, by forays into luxury fashion, the pharmacy sector and the artificial plant business. The Platform Group has now expanded into 28 industries and 14 European countries, and sales in the current year are expected to reach up to 735 million euros.
Fashion strategy
With the recent takeover of the sneaker shop 43halb GmbH, the Platform Group is investing further in the fashion & shoe sector, which currently contributes around 250 million euros to sales.
“We have continued to expand this fashion universe, but only in the luxury sector, with Fashionette, Winkelstraat, Joli Closet,” explains Benner his strategy. The average shopping cart value there is around 400 euros. “This is much more exciting than cheap items and you earn more margin with it.”
Around 5,300 fashion and shoe stores sell online through the Platform Group’s presence – from luxury boutiques to shoe stores, fashion stores, leather goods stores and bag stores. This means you can increase your sales between ten and 25 percent. Only up to four percent of affiliated retailers sell through the luxury fashion subsidiaries Fashionette and Winkelstraat as well as through their own online store.
Opportunities of the future
The current crisis in the luxury sector has not gone unnoticed by Benner and could also offer opportunities for marketplaces such as the Platform Group subsidiaries. “Fashion is super demanding. On the one hand it’s a discount battle and on the other hand the luxury industry is having a really hard time,” he says. For many, declining sales are met by rising costs for staff and rent. “On the other hand, retailers come to us to sell online and generate more sales.”
He also expects growth for his platforms from the recent consolidation among luxury marketplaces. “There is actually hardly any platform in the luxury fashion sector anymore,” he says. The ailing British luxury fashion retailer Farfetch is “no longer active in Europe” following its takeover by the South Korean e-commerce group Coupang. LuxExperience, the new group around MyTheresa, wants to focus on a curated luxury offering in the future; It is not yet known what will happen to competitor Yoox-Net-a-Porter’s platform business for stationary retailers after the takeover.
“Otherwise we don’t actually know any luxury platforms in Germany and that’s why we find this area exciting,” summarizes Benner. “You can still grow there.” He is also watching the above-average growth of the vintage luxury business with interest. “This is a huge growth market that is emerging.”
Looking into the future
After years of rapid growth, the Platform Group has now divested itself of small holdings that contribute little to sales. Over the next five years, the e-commerce group wants to concentrate on key investments that will contribute to future margin targets.
By 2030, the margin is expected to increase from eight percent to a double-digit value. Annual sales should then be at least three billion euros, and the group wants to expand into other countries and increase the number of industries to more than 50.
“We want to enter new industries. We can only enter new industries if we find good platforms here and become a little more international,” says Benner, referring to the USA. “So we want to go more towards America and reach new countries.”