When a company prepares for an IPO, investors look at two things: the product and the distribution. For Starlink, the product story is well known. The distribution story in Europe is less understood - and it is the one we built.
In September 2023, nonplusultra and SpaceX announced an agreement to bring Starlink's high-speed, low-latency satellite internet services to consumers across Europe through leading consumer electronics retailers. Four months later, Starlink hardware and service contracts were on the shelves of 25 major EMEA retailers, online and offline, with full POS display installations. That timeline matters. Building equivalent retail coverage from scratch, with no pre-existing distributor relationships or retail agreements, typically takes an in-house team 12 to 18 months.
This post is a first-person account of what we built, how we built it, and why the European retail foundation we laid is material to understanding Starlink's position in the public markets.
The Brief and What It Demanded
When Starlink approached nonplusultra, they had a connectivity product that worked - technically and commercially. What they did not have was a European retail infrastructure. No account agreements with MediaMarktSaturn or Currys. No distributor relationships in France, Switzerland, or the Nordic countries. No field sales capability to train retail staff and drive in-store execution across thousands of points of sale.
That is not unusual for a technology company entering European retail from the US. The European CE retail landscape is structurally different from North America: fragmented across national markets, highly relationship-driven, and demanding in terms of the in-store support brands are expected to provide. A listing without the supporting field infrastructure is not a listing - it is a listing that lasts one buying cycle before it gets pulled.
The brief was to build the full retail function - distribution, account management, field sales, POS - across Germany, the UK, France, Switzerland, and the Nordic markets, and to do it fast enough to matter commercially.
Four Months to 25 Retailers
The standard for how quickly a consumer electronics brand can reach meaningful European retail coverage is 12 to 18 months from contract to shelf, assuming an experienced in-house team starting the process immediately. We did it in four months.
The countries covered: Germany, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, and the Nordic region. The retailers: MediaMarktSaturn across the DACH market, Currys across the UK, Fnac and Fnac Darty in France, Digitec in Switzerland, and Elkjop across Scandinavia - plus Coolblue in the Benelux region. Online and offline, with physical POS display installations in-store.
How is that possible at four months when 12 to 18 is the standard? Because the standard assumes you are building the infrastructure. nonplusultra already had it. The distributor relationships, the account manager access at each retailer, the field teams trained and active across the market - those were already in place for the brands we run in parallel. Starlink plugged into an existing infrastructure rather than building a new one. That is the structural advantage of a retail-as-a-service model.
The speed was not just about our existing infrastructure. Starlink brought something that made buyers move faster than they typically do with new brands: genuine consumer demand pull. Satellite broadband in rural and semi-rural areas fills a real gap that terrestrial connectivity has not closed. Buyers at MediaMarkt and Currys recognised that. When consumer demand pull meets a credible in-store execution partner, the listing conversation accelerates.
What "On the Shelf" Actually Means
I want to be precise about what we mean by a retail launch, because it matters for understanding the commercial quality of what we built. Getting a SKU into a retailer's product database is not a launch. A launch is product available and correctly priced, POS display material installed and compliant with brand standards, retail staff trained and able to answer the questions consumers will ask, and a field team visiting regularly to maintain compliance and identify issues before they become delisting risks.
For Starlink, this was a more complex in-store execution challenge than a typical consumer electronics product. Starlink's service proposition - satellite internet, subscription model, hardware purchase - required retail staff to understand and explain something that most of them had no prior category experience with. The training programme we built and delivered across five countries had to close that knowledge gap before the product went on sale, not after.
The POS build was also non-trivial. Satellite internet is an intangible service sold through physical hardware. Making that proposition legible on a retail floor - in a way that competes with the visual intensity of a consumer electronics environment - required display design that could communicate the connectivity proposition and the value of global availability in a brief retail interaction. We produced and installed that material across all 25 retail partners within the four-month window.
What This Means for Starlink's European Position
With Starlink's IPO trajectory becoming clearer, the European business is now a public markets question as much as a commercial one. Investors evaluating Starlink will want to understand the distribution infrastructure: how products reach consumers, how that coverage is maintained and grown, and how defensible the retail position is.
The distribution infrastructure in Europe is not built on one-off agreements. The partnerships nonplusultra holds with MediaMarktSaturn, Currys, Fnac, Elkjop, and Coolblue are active, ongoing relationships with embedded account management and field teams. Maintaining a retail position at this level requires continuous execution: managing sell-through data, responding to seasonal range reviews, negotiating promotional placements, and keeping the field programme active. That work does not stop at launch - it is the steady-state operation that determines whether a brand holds and grows its shelf position year over year.
Press coverage of the Starlink launch in Europe appeared in CRN, ChannelPartner, and Elektromarkt in late 2023. That coverage reflected not just the announcement but the fact that the execution - the speed, the retail breadth, the in-store quality - was genuinely unusual for a brand entering European CE retail.
What nonplusultra Does and Why It Matters for Brands Like Starlink
nonplusultra is the leading EMEA retail growth partner for technology brands. We manage the full retail function - strategic retail management, field sales and merchandising, data science and business intelligence, Amazon and marketplace management, and retail touchpoints including shop-in-shop installations - across 10 countries, 50+ retail partners, and more than 3,000 stores covering 80% of European purchasing power.
The model we operate is not distribution. We do not own the relationship between the brand and its retail partners - the brand does. What we provide is the embedded infrastructure that makes the retail relationship work commercially: the account teams who know the buyers, the field teams who keep the shelves right, the data infrastructure that tells you what is selling and what is not, and the speed of deployment that turns a commercial decision into a retail reality in months rather than years.
"Our collaboration with Starlink is a testament to the trust industry leaders place in our capabilities," I said at the time of the announcement. That trust is the thing that is hardest to build and most valuable to hold. It is what makes a four-month retail launch across five countries and 25 major retailers possible - and it is what makes the European position we built together durable.
Benjamin Gehring is CEO and Co-Founder of nonplusultra Sales GmbH, Munich. nonplusultra runs European retail distribution for technology brands including Starlink/SpaceX, Meta, Ring, Shokz, and SumUp across EMEA.