Sem Michels.

Sem Michels is a Dutch entrepreneur and the founder of ABO Brandgroup, a brand-building group that creates and scales modern consumer brands. The group owns multiple ecommerce brands, with Horizum as its most visible flagship, plus BeeConsistent, a consistency app for content creators. Everything under ABO is bootstrapped: no investors, no funding rounds. Every brand earns its own growth.

How it started

It started in 2018, when Sem Michels was fifteen. His first business was selling on bol.com, a Dutch ecommerce platform much like Amazon. He quickly noticed how thin the margins were: selling on those platforms was mostly shoving boxes and paying the platform all kinds of fees. That taught him the first big lesson: he had to start his own webshops.

And it was exactly as unglamorous as it sounds. While still living at home with his parents, Sem packed every order himself, printed all the order invoices manually on a $30 printer, and brought the packages to the post office by bike. At some point the orders became too much for one trip, so he went twice a day. The post office closed at five, which meant leaving school early and biking as fast as he could to make it in time.

In that same period he worked a weekly job at Albert Heijn, a Dutch supermarket, so the business journey could continue. Stocking shelves paid for the next batch of stock.

School never really had his attention anyway. Sem was always at the back of the class, thinking about his next business project.

In the years that followed, various brands were started, and every brand taught him something new. The numbers kept getting bigger ever since.

After high school, Sem attended a graphic design school, where he also learned branding. For one of his internships he joined Media Monkeyz, a marketing agency, using the skills he had built with his own companies to help other brands with their advertising and branding.

He knew quickly that agency life was nothing for him: all the meetings and following other brand owners' agendas. He wanted to focus fully on his own brands, and in his head, he already was. Even so, he had a wonderful time there and learned a lot about himself and the future.

In 2024 he went all-in. In his first month as a full-time entrepreneur, his own webshop processed more than 1,500 orders at a healthy profit margin, with Sem doing nearly everything himself. The marketing, the branding, the web design, the product sourcing. All of it.

A year and a half later, the one-man webshop had become a worldwide team of 10+ operators, each of them, in Sem's own words, doing their job a hundred times better than he ever could have.

Building Horizum

One of those brands outgrew all the others. Horizum, the most public of the group's brands, grew from an idea into content creator gear used around the world. The positioning is deliberate: Horizum advertises quality tripods built to last years, not seasons. In 2024 the brand crossed seven figures in revenue, earning Shopify's milestone recognition. In 2025, Sem Michels locked in trusted manufacturing partnerships across China: the supply chain foundation the group's brands still run on.

Growth came from the community as much as from the ads. Horizum built a base of more than 30,000 brand ambassadors and launched a flagship product engineered from over 40,000 pieces of feedback from customers. In 2026, Horizum® became a federally registered trademark in the United States.

Beyond ecommerce

In 2026 the portfolio grew past physical products. Horizum launched BeeConsistent, a mobile app that helps content creators stay consistent and keep posting. The idea came straight from Horizum's own customers: creators kept saying they had the right gear, but struggled to actually stay consistent with it.

The app also solves the hardest problem in the ecommerce model: LTV. Creator gear is a one-time purchase almost by design: a tripod that lasts years doesn't get bought twice. BeeConsistent turns those one-time buyers into recurring subscribers, adding a recurring revenue layer on top of every hardware sale and multiplying what a single customer is worth over their lifetime.

The app passed 600 paying users in its first month, with creators across fitness, lifestyle and travel niches competing for the highest posting streak.

ABO Brandgroup

Everything Sem Michels has built, and the brands still to come, now sits under one umbrella: ABO Brandgroup. Anything But Ordinary. The playbook is deliberately simple: start small, reach profit first, own the customer relationship, and build brands meant to matter in ten years, not ten days.

“Building slow is often faster than you think.”

Sem Michels

The group runs multiple ecommerce brands, but only a few are shown publicly, a deliberate choice in a market full of copycats. The quieter brands perform all the same: one of them, in the furniture niche, was featured in House Beautiful, one of the most trusted voices in design and home living. ABO keeps a lean, worldwide team and grows through its own brands first, with acquisitions of complementary labels when they fit what the group does.

What's next

More brands, more products, and more of the same discipline. In Sem's words: no grand plan, no blueprint, just building brands that are hopefully still relevant in ten years.

You can follow Sem Michels on LinkedIn, or see what ABO Brandgroup is building at abobrands.com.