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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
ErosBlog posts containing "sex toys"
June 16th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
There’s an interesting interview and profile in Business Insider about Brian Sloan, a former lawyer turned sex toy manufacturer, who direct-sells sex toys for men. He makes a sort of blowjob machine called the Autoblow, an early version of which I blogged about obliquely and skeptically here. (Not this kind.) First Sloan got hooked by the easy money buying and selling antiques during those first golden years of the eBay boom, and then he got into the sex toy business because antiques don’t scale:
I began importing latex fetishwear from China during my time as an eBay seller. The reason was simple: going to auctions took a lot of time and effort and was not scalable. I needed high profit margin items I could buy from China, in quantity, to properly grow the business. I used Alibaba.com and connected with a latex factory in south China. I grew the business significantly by making custom sized rubber suits for larger people, and figuring out sub-niches of the latex fetish culture.
The key factor in the success of that business was clear: willingness to do whatever it took to grow the business, and not caring what other people thought of it. Once, I even had my mother videotape me and a friend walking through a shopping mall in Skokie, IL, wearing giant inflatable rubber suits!
At a certain point, the latex business also wasn’t scalable enough for me so I moved onto toys. I thought about a few other businesses and got close to launching brands of a few products, including anti-snoring devices and a teeth whitening system. I decided to stay in the adult industry as I had gained so much knowledge about it during my time selling latex.
The adult industry was particularly ripe to “disrupt” because of the combination of unusually high profit margins combined with industry-wide poor e-commerce knowledge. Only one brand of male toys and a few adult mega-stores had a high level of Internet marketing or online selling technology knowledge.
Ninety percent of adult toy brands only focused on high-volume manufacturing/sales solely to distributors. The breakdown of retail price allotted to manufactures in the adult industry is not pretty. I figured with what I learned about internet marketing from the latex business, and my location near factories in China, I could create internet-only brands and sell them for very competitive prices by cutting out the middlemen – distributors and retailers.
The most surprising people open up to him on airplanes about sex toy use:
Doing this kind of work, strangers sometimes feel its appropriate to open up to me on sexual topics that they would otherwise keep private. Once I was on a flight from Chicago to Qatar and met an oil executive who was working in the Middle East. The first part of our conversation centered around his role in his church in Oklahoma and some stories about his children who were Christian missionaries in Asia. To my surprise, when I told him what I did for a living, he told me that after his kids all left home and him and his wife had a lot of time on their hands — they bought their first sex toys!
And what is it like, actually trying to ramrod the manufacture of a complex mechanical sex toy in China?
I worked with a company in Taiwan whose normal business was manufacturing Wi-Fi whiteboards and commercial-grade air conditioning controllers. I thought that because they understood how to manufacture complex electronic devices, they could also manufacture my Autoblow 2. I was wrong. Their team lacked knowledge of ergonomics, had no experience working with TPE, the material that now comprises the interchangeable sleeves.
After working with them for 1.5 years, they managed to create a product that essentially collapsed upon itself when one tried to use it. It was a huge disappointment.
Basically you need a designer or two, a sourcing team to source the different components, and a few factories to work closely with to produce the main parts. Picking the right factory partners, and making sure that your main factory picks the right sub-factory partners is probably the most important aspect of the entire process. If one supplier factory is producing a sub-par component and your main factory doesn’t catch it, the whole project can fail.
It’s frankly not a very sexy process and involves talking with engineers, sometimes via a translator when things get technical, about things that make everyone in the room blush.
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April 18th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
I was not the first to speculate about the future promise of 3D-printed sex toys. But I was a little bit surprised to find some printed sex toys actually being offered for sale, like this Mechanical Animal from Frisky Beast:
Sadly, there’s nothing on their site (that I could find in a fast search) about the material they are printing these toys with. If you’re fussy about what you stuff inside yourself and others (which you probably should be) you might want to ask them about it before placing an order.
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December 14th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Don’t worry; your sex toys probably haven’t been pwned… yet. But the future is coming to smack us in the face like a deer in the fast lane on a dark night.
Science fiction author Charlie Stross posted an unsettling blog post about the increasing ease with which tiny wifi-enabled computers can be invisibly embedded into your common household devices, stealing whatever info about you they can observe (or performing commercially valuable calculations using your “free” electricity) and phoning the plunder home without your knowledge over your own wifi network. (Not so long ago there was an unconfirmed story out of Russia — Charlie has the links — about electric kettles being manufactured and sold in this pwned condition to unsuspecting Europeans.)
I was reading along and taking all this in, parsing it (the way I tend to do) as just another pebble on the dystopian-tech-future beach, when I came upon this comment by troutwaxer that extended the futuristic speculation into a realm of interest more directly relevant to the ErosBlog readership:
Why be afraid of the kettle? That only tells people that you’ve had a spot of tea.
Your vibrator, on the other hand, knows all the really nasty secrets! If someone really wanted to spend money on learning about your sex life, you vibrator would know if you are male or female, how many lovers you have, and whether you do anal – and that’s just for starters. You could probably build a camera into any electrically powered sex toy, and a really expensive vibrator could probably sample DNA, or perhaps cancel it’s own noise and record sound…
What makes this much more interesting is that I’ve recently spent time in a chain of sex toy stores as an outside vendor. (They use a technology company I sometimes work for.) The high-end vibrators there can cost up to two hundred dollars and some of them have very fancy controllers (which I suspect aren’t analog.) I used to wonder why those high-end vibrators, which I suspect are bought by high-end people, were so expensive.
Now I know.
From now on any sex toys that get used in my house will be made of wood. I will carve them from a tree I planted myself.
I love a good wooden sex toy as well as the next historical reenactor, but that doesn’t make troutwaxer wrong: there’s quite a trend toward expensive fancy vibrators with a lot of sealed-unit unknown electronics inside. The day will come — sooner than you think — when you’ll want to be able to conduct a security audit on your own sex toys. Or, I suppose, there’s the alternative model, where you get sent an expensive sex toy for “free” that comes with terms of use allowing it to track and report on your sexual habits so that appropriate commercial offers can be more narrowly targeted at you. Gives LOVEINT and SEXINT new meaning!
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November 11th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I’m not quite old enough to be a Baby Boomer, but I’m old enough to contemplate this problem seriously:
Disposing of sex paraphernalia – actually all those embarrassing items you have stashed around the house – is something every boomer should be concerned about. The days are dwindling down to a precious few and some of you have a nasty cough. Do you want the people clearing out your house, particularly your children, to find those feathery, metallic, rubbery, polymer blend items you ordered one drunken night a few months after you’d been forced to take early retirement? Do you want them to know their big, tough construction worker dad liked to dress up in heels and a boa and sing “La La La” from “No Strings,” one of Richard Rodgers’s weaker efforts?
You may be thinking, “What do I care what my friends or children find in the house? I will be beyond embarrassment, I will be dead.” But you are wrong. Doctors now know that the human sense of embarrassment can last up to two weeks after the heart stops beating…
I’ve actually been fortunate to be able to help someone with this problem from the other direction. A gentleman of some years was in possession of many boxes of highly personal effects from a deceased relative. Some boxes the relative had stored with him before marrying late in life, and others (mostly more respectable books) had been given over by the relative’s widow. Valuing books himself, knowing that books predominated in the collection, and knowing of my interest in erotic books, the donor handed over entire collection to me in closed and unexamined boxes. Unstated was the donor’s desire to spare his own heirs from having to deal with it. I promised to give or find the books a good home, while disposing of any other personal effects respectfully and discretely; and that was that. No money changed hands. I spent a day driving, I got some interesting vintage sex books, and I was able to remove a literally weighty problem from my donor’s garage (and thus relieve his mind).
It was an unexpectedly personal transaction throughout. Even after I had the boxes safely home and began to sort them, the sorting process was surprisingly personal; there was an entire long lifetime of sexual confusion and pain and discovery recorded in the progression through decades of various kinds of porn, toys, and clippings from writings on human psychology and sexuality. By separating these materials and disposing of the clippings and age-deteriorated sex toys, a respectable library of porn and sex books was not only saved from likely destruction, but laundered of its power to illuminate (or tarnish) the memory of its creator.
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September 5th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
An outfit called Aslan Leather posted this picture on Twitter:
Scrawled upon the (I am presuming) returned package: “Return To Sender: Sex toys cannot be ship!!”
It’s the two exclamation points that make this perfect.
Nobody escapes the pornocalypse, I tell you!
July 2nd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Have you ever wondered about the legally-ridiculous disclaimers that you see on the packaging of most sex toys? You know the ones: “sold as an adult novelty”, “not a medical device”, “for external use only”, and so on. Why are they there? What good are they?
Well, Dangerous Lilly has expended an astonishing amount of investigative effort in putting together a pair of blog posts in which she attempted to answer that question by contacting numerous sex toy companies and asking them (along with anybody else in industry) what they were hoping to accomplish. She got a lot of silence and inadequate answers, a lot of hand-waving about old habits and “everybody’s always done this” thinking, and a few solid speculations relating to the avoidance of regulations and tariffs that might apply to a thing that that was labeled as a toy or misidentified by some bureaucrat as a medical device. It’s interesting reading if you’re interested in sex and business:
“For Novelty Use Only” Part 1
“For Novelty Use Only” Part 2
The anecdote that most engaged my dark sense of humor, though, involved a catastrophic sex toy injury from early in the industry’s history, involving a brand name (Doc Johnson) that’s always been synonymous (at least in my mind) with shoddy materials, pedestrian designs, and garish packaging. Lilly got this anecdote from Metis Black of Tantus:
When the industry was a baby Ted Marche made toys in his garage and he sold them very prolifically. This was the first US large manufacturer. He made a toy that had a wire inside the soft latex which rotated, much like the modern rabbits do. On one toy the interior wire was not capped, the edge of the wire as it was being used inside a man’s rectum chewed through the toy and did severe internal damage to his body. I think this was the mid 70’s. He (Marche) was sued and lost. The judge gave the victim a $14 mil settlement- which of course Mr. Marche couldn’t pay. That is how Ruben Sturman, and later Ron Braverman, got Doc Johnson. He took it off Mr. Marche’s hands.
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May 12th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
A Very Ticklish and Horny Girl posted this picture of her sex toy collection on Tumblr, along with the provocative caption “Any ideas what i should do with it?”
Which served to remind me (I’m sure you can follow my breadcrumbs of logic) that May is Masturbation Month, in honor of which several online sex toy emporia are having Masturbation Month sales!
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