The accidental CEO: How Platform Group's Dominik Benner reimagined his family business for the digital age

Dominik Benner has acquired no fewer than 38 companies with the Platform Group over the past five years. The Wiesbaden, Germany-based company initially started as an online platform for shoe and fashion retailers and is now active in 28 sectors.

During a scheduled video call, the CEO of the e-commerce group appears visibly cheerful. The business model of offering brick and mortar retailers a digital sales channel is working well. For 2026, the Platform Group, formerly known as Schuhe24, is targeting one billion euros in revenue for the first time. His success story began unexpectedly when fate suddenly knocked on his door and presented him with a choice.

An unexpected entry into the shoe trade

Together with his father, his mother ran traditional shoe shops in the area around the German city of Frankfurt, representing the fourth generation. The family had owned shoe and fashion stores in the region since 1882. “I was never interested in taking over my parents' company,” Benner recalls. When his father died unexpectedly in 2012, he had to make a decision. Would he join the family business or keep his managing director position at an energy group?

“After 130 years, I did not want to be the one to close it down and end the tradition. That is why I decided to continue the business,” he explains.

Despite being born into a family of shoe retailers, the business graduate born in 1982 still had to learn the trade from scratch. As a child, he sometimes helped out in the warehouse or at weekends as part of his household chores, but he had never been closely involved with the company.

“I was not involved in the buying process and have no passion for fashion. I am simply not a natural-born shoe salesman, I had to admit that at some point,” says Benner. As a colour-blind person, he had never really developed an interest in fashion.

A shoe shop from the Benner family. Credits: via Platform Group

Instead, Benner studied business administration for his bachelor's and master's degrees at the renowned Swiss University of St. Gallen, known for its demanding entrance exam for non-Swiss nationals. He wrote his doctorate on mergers and acquisitions of family businesses, a topic that seems like an early indicator of the Platform Group's future expansion.

After completing his dissertation, Benner began working at German construction group Bilfinger Berger in 2008. Three years later, he took on a managing director role at the energy company Juwi Group. He gave up this position when he joined the family business with its six shoe stores, becoming the fifth generation to do so.

From shoe retailer to fashion marketplace

“When I took over the shoe shops, we asked ourselves how we could continue to grow in the future,” says Benner. Soon after taking over his parents' business, he opened his own online shoe shop. He quickly realised how difficult it is for an individual retailer to attract sufficient customer traffic online.

His learning process led him to found the marketplace Schuhe24. After connecting more than 1,000 shoe retailers, he targeted fashion stores, for instance at the BTE Handelsverband Textil congress in Cologne, Germany, in autumn 2019. At the time, his goal was to break the 100 million euro revenue mark.

Dominik Benner tried to convince a room full of prideful independent fashion retailers from German-speaking countries to conduct their business online via his marketplace, Mode24. The online platform would handle the operation of a webshop for them, including digital marketing and order processing. Retailers receive an email after an order is placed and only need to pack and ship the goods. This way, brick and mortar retailers avoid investing significant effort into their own online store that might not even generate much traffic.

Dominik Benner entered the platform business with Schuhe24. Credits: Screenshot of the Schuhe24 website on December 30, 2025 / FashionUnited

In hindsight, his message seems obvious—but on the eve of the pandemic, many were not yet convinced. Selling via marketplaces typically yields lower bottom-line margins for brick-and-mortar retailers than selling through their own stores. However, the lockdowns during the pandemic highlighted why an additional online sales channel can be beneficial for physical retail. It helps manage excess stock, volatile weather conditions, fluctuating footfall and competition from online players like Zalando or Amazon.

“I told people relatively quickly: Your future competitor will be Amazon. Amazon will buy massive quantities of shoes and flood the market with them at low prices,” says Benner. “That will be your competitor. And many understood that.”

Between brick and mortar and digital

For a long time, brick and mortar retailers viewed online players as unwelcome competition to their traditional business and neglected digital sales channels. To this day, few companies, even established ones, have managed to successfully operate their own online shop. Due to his late entry into the shoe and fashion business, Dominik Benner was never confined by the mindsets of traditional retail.

His presence at the BTE Congress also differed from that of the other presenters. With his slicked-back hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and pocket square—combined with perfectly coordinated PowerPoint slides—his style was reminiscent of business school, management consulting, and corporate workflows.

Yet, standing among these mid-sized business owners, Benner knows how to use his background to his advantage. He presents himself as one of their own—a fellow retailer helping brick-and-mortar shops transition to online marketplaces. And this isn’t just a carefully crafted image to bolster his business case; it’s a persona he genuinely inhabits.

To this day, the entrepreneur still operates nine other shoe shops in the region, in addition to the main store in Wiesbaden. Since joining the family business, four more stores have even been acquired. Why does he remain invested in the brick and mortar shoe trade despite the expansion of the platform business?

“It is our DNA. When something is in your DNA, you do not want to give it up. This is our heritage, and we believe it helps us to understand retail very well to this day,” explains Benner. “If you understand retailers well, you can also work well with them.”

His mother, Monika Benner, at 71, still comes into the family business every day, and his brother also works for the company. "According to its website, the Benner family holding company owns roughly 70 percent of the Platform Group, with the remaining shares publicly traded. He describes the company culture as 'family-oriented.' 'That means we make decisions quickly and directly,' Benner says. 'We have a very strong trial-and-error mentality. We try things out rather than debating them over and over.'"

A dynamic entrepreneur

As an entrepreneur, Benner also wants to give back to the local community. Since 2022, the Platform Group has invited local residents to an annual open-air pasta dinner at its headquarters in Wiesbaden city centre. The approximately 400 seats at the table are allocated by lottery. The pasta is supplied by the Benners' restaurants; through the holding company, the family is also active in business areas such as gastronomy and real estate.

As much as the Wiesbaden native is a locally rooted entrepreneur, Dominik Benner is also a dynamic businessman with ambitions. When Zalando made a major move into the marketplace business, he began to look for new niches.

Despite his local roots, the Wiesbaden-born entrepreneur is a restless businessman with a vision to match. As Zalando pivoted heavily toward marketplaces, Benner began to look for new niches.

The first sector after shoes and fashion was machinery. The Platform Group acquired a company that deals exclusively in machinery. According to Benner, this became one of its most profitable divisions. Bicycles followed, with the Bike-Angebot platform, where more than 1,000 bicycle dealers sell their products.

“In this way, we have continued to venture into new sectors, always with the same platform model,” says Benner. “We bring retailers onto our platform and handle their entire online business because they cannot manage it on their own.”

In December 2020, the Schuhe24 Group changed its name to the Platform Group to reflect its business model, which now spanned nine sectors. This was followed by ventures into luxury fashion, the pharmacy sector and the artificial plant business, among others. The Platform Group has since expanded into 28 sectors and 14 European countries, with revenue for the current year expected to reach as much as 735 million euros.

Fashion strategy

With the recent acquisition of the sneaker shop 43einhalb GmbH, the Platform Group is continuing to invest in the fashion and footwear sector, which currently contributes around 250 million euros to its revenue.

“We have continuously expanded this fashion universe, but only in the luxury segment, with Fashionette, Winkelstraat and Joli Closet,” Benner explains his strategy. The average basket value there is around 400 euros. “That is much more exciting than low-priced items, and you earn a higher margin.”

Around 5,300 fashion and shoe shops sell online via the Platform Group's sites, ranging from luxury boutiques to shoe shops; fashion stores; leather goods shops; and bag retailers. This allows them to increase their revenue by between 10 and 25 percent. Only up to 4 percent of affiliated retailers sell through both the luxury fashion subsidiaries Fashionette and Winkelstraat and their own online store.

Future opportunities

The current crisis in the luxury sector has not escaped Benner. He thinks that it might present opportunities for marketplaces like the Platform Group's subsidiaries. “Fashion is incredibly demanding. On the one hand, it is a discount battle, and on the other, the luxury industry is really struggling,” he says. Many are facing declining revenues coupled with rising staff and rent costs. “On the other hand, retailers are coming to us to sell online and generate more revenue."

He also expects growth for his platforms from the recent consolidation among luxury marketplaces. “There are hardly any luxury fashion platforms left,” he says. The struggling British luxury fashion retailer Farfetch is “no longer very active in Europe” following its acquisition by the South Korean e-commerce group Coupang, Benner added. LuxExperience, the new group around MyTheresa, plans to focus on a curated luxury offering in the future. It is not yet known what will happen to the platform business for brick and mortar retailers of its competitor Yoox Net-a-Porter (YNAP) following its acquisition.

“Otherwise, we are not really aware of any other luxury platforms in Germany, which is why we find this area exciting,” Benner summarises. “There is still room for further growth there.” He is also watching the above-average growth of the vintage luxury business. “That is a huge growth market that is emerging.”

A look to the future

After years of rapid growth, the Platform Group has now divested some small shareholdings that contributed little to revenue. Over the next five years, the e-commerce group intends to concentrate on key investments that will contribute to its future margin targets.

By 2030, the margin is set to increase from 8 percent to a double-digit figure. Annual revenue is then expected to be at least three billion euros. To achieve this, the group plans to expand into more countries and increase the number of sectors to over 50.

“We want to enter new sectors. This will only work if we find good platforms here and also become a bit more international,” says Benner, with an eye on the US. “So we want to move more towards America and reach new countries.”

This article was translated to English using an AI tool.

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