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When Lukas visited the Darts World Championship at Alexandra Palace and saw the sport's enormous potential, the idea for myDartpfeil was born: personalized darts instead of off-the-shelf products. Today it has grown into a thriving e-commerce business with its own warehouse, machinery and a broad product range, supported by Banxware's instant financing to flexibly fund seasonal peaks and new product ideas.
Transcript (editorially adapted)
Lukas Haas is the co-founder of myDartpfeil, a company he started around 8 years ago together with his co-founder Tim, both 23 years old at the time. The core of the business is an online configurator for personalized darts, where customers can put together their own dart step by step. Since then the product range has expanded significantly, covering dart boards, surrounds, cases, jerseys and soon fully printable dart mats. The team is based in Berlin-Charlottenburg and has around 10 permanent employees, with significantly more during the winter season.
The founding story begins in 2016 with a visit to the Darts World Championship at Alexandra Palace in London. The atmosphere, somewhere between Oktoberfest and carnival, immediately captivated Lukas and Tim. Back in Frankfurt they hung a dartboard in their shared apartment, played regularly during exam periods and eventually wanted to buy personalized darts. When they realized nothing like that existed, they decided to build it themselves. Capital was tight, around 2,000 euros in savings each, and a professional development studio would have cost at least 15,000 to 20,000 euros. So Lukas and Tim built the configurator themselves using WordPress, plugins and freelancers from Southeast Asia. The result had a loading time of around 30 seconds, but held up for a year and a half and generated the first quarter million in revenue.
What followed was a rollercoaster. The Covid pandemic was a clear boom for myDartpfeil: families were stuck at home, schools were closed, and darts turned out to be the perfect family game. April and May 2020 were record months. A phone call Lukas received at the time captures the mood perfectly: a father with no knowledge of darts urgently needed a board and darts because his kids had been climbing the walls after two weeks of lockdown. But the boom quickly reversed. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, rising energy prices and a general reluctance to spend hit myDartpfeil at the worst possible moment, right in the middle of the peak season of winter 2022/23. The year 2023 ended with a significant loss, after 2021 had still been a record year.
A central theme in the conversation is capital and liquidity, which work fundamentally differently in e-commerce than in service businesses. Anyone selling physical goods typically has to pre-finance inventory, often months before the actual sale. At myDartpfeil this is made even more challenging by extreme seasonality. Revenue in December can be up to ten times higher than in a summer month. Goods sold in December need to be paid for in September, sometimes with a deposit required before production even starts. Lukas described this as one of the biggest entrepreneurial challenges he faces. He also observed that many founders in the e-commerce space focus almost exclusively on revenue growth while neglecting contribution margin calculations and inventory management, a mistake that can become very costly in tougher market conditions. Lukas himself had an advantage in this area thanks to his business degree with a focus on finance and accounting.
Lukas found his way to Banxware through a simple Google search for fast e-commerce financing without lengthy balance sheet requirements. He compared several providers and chose Banxware because of the best personal point of contact. The first occasion was a short-term inventory purchase in China that required capital within a week. What he values most about the partnership after four years is the combination of reliability and flexibility: he can wait until shortly before the actual need arises, and then receives an offer within 10 to 15 minutes. Traditional bank financing would never have been possible at that speed, especially since Lukas notes that young companies without a long track record or personal banking relationships have little realistic chance of securing funding quickly.
For marketing, myDartpfeil combines classic digital channels with sport-specific formats that are simply not available to most e-commerce brands. Alongside Google Ads, Meta, TikTok and email marketing, the company appeared in Sportbild magazine and ran TV spots on Sport1 during the Darts World Championship. The final was watched by up to 3.1 million viewers at its peak, with a market share of 23.3 percent and a target audience that was predominantly male between 14 and 49 years old. The isolated ROAS of the TV spots was approximately 3.4, and the share of new customers who cited TV as their first point of contact rose from the usual 17 percent to 42 percent in the five days following broadcast. For the coming season Lukas is planning a significantly higher TV budget and is also exploring additional streaming platforms. The fact that Sport1 approached myDartpfeil rather than the other way around gave the company a strong negotiating position. The brand also has partnerships with several Bundesliga clubs and traditional football clubs including Hoffenheim, Bochum, Darmstadt, Hannover, Paderborn, Mannheim, Rot-Weiß Essen and Blau-Weiß Berlin.
Looking ahead, myDartpfeil has two major plans: first, international expansion with country-specific shops including local currencies and tailored marketing, starting with the UK market; and second, a significant product expansion featuring fully printable dart boards, surrounds and mats, requiring a new configurator and a machine investment approaching six figures. Both initiatives explain why myDartpfeil is once again raising capital through Banxware. The big long-term scenario Lukas is hoping for is a German darts world champion, an event he compares to the Boris Becker effect in tennis, one that would catapult the sport and myDartpfeil in Germany to an entirely new level overnight.
