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Private enterprise
While the product lines are certainly a little hair-raising (and it's not just hair being raised), Lovehoney.co.uk is in many ways a typical e-commerce success story. And like any retail business, on or offline, its success stems to a large degree from having the right products available to customers. But how the hell do you become a sex toy buyer and is there any such thing as an average day? Calum MacLeod went to find out.
I was standing in front of an anonymous-looking industrial unit about five minutes from the centre of Bath. In this city of architectural gems the warehouse before me could hardly have provoked less interest or attention...at least for those innocents unaware of what lay inside. But I knew and, despite the cold of the day, I was sweating.
And when the first thing my eyes settled on was a large cardboard box marked "Tracey - Anal" it confirmed that I'd ventured out of the mainstream.
Every second of my first five minutes at Lovehoney.co.uk took me several hundred light years further away from my comfort zone. Bonny Hall, Lovehoney's head buyer and the person I was there to interview, was giving me a brief tour of the warehousing part of the etailer's head office...and I was weighing up how unprofessional it would be to run away.
You know that scene at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' when the Ark of the Covenant was boxed-up and buried in a huge US government warehouse full of nearly identical boxes? OK, now reduce the size of the warehouse a bit and replace the anonymous boxes with row upon row, shelf upon shelf of colourful devices with names like the Vibratex Snugglepuss, the Eroscillator 2, the Jelly Double Dildo and the truly terrifying sounding Screaming O BongO Cock Ring. It is little wonder then that for that opening five minutes as we passed from sex toys, to fetish and bondage gear [aaaahhh my eyes, my eyes], to hen/stag night gear, to lingerie, I managed to say very little other than "Oh, right", "Blimey" and "Err, OK". The possibility for intelligent questioning was non-existent...I was just trying not to snigger like Beavis or Butthead, trying not to look too interested in/too startled by any product and trying to put one foot in front of another.
Perhaps sensing my unease, Bonny escorted me away from the products to a large room on a mezzanine level above. The whole of the back wall was a rather familiar, unvarying shade of green as was a large semi-circular area of the floor. Hang on, that looks like the green-screen stuff they use for special effects I thought. As if reading my mind my host confirmed, "Yes, this is our studio where we shoot Sex Toys TV". It turns out that the responsibilities of a head buyer at Lovehoney include being a TV presenter. No doubt about it, this looked like it was going to be an unusual career profile.
Q: So, back to that nagging question, just how did you end up as head buyer for an online sex toys company?
"I was just friends with Neal and Rich [Neal Slateford and Richard Longhurst, founders of Lovehoney] and was looking for a change of jobs. They had set up the business in April of 2002 and for that first year they were picking and packing the orders, ordering stock...they were doing everything from a lock-up. It got to the point where they were getting around 50 orders a day and they needed someone else to come in and help. They needed someone to help organise them!"
Q: What had you been doing before?
"I worked for a wine company, Great Western Wines, in a support role in the buying team. It was a similar set up to this: a local business with 20 - 25 people so everyone got involved everything. It was a lot of fun but I needed a change."
Q: So what was your first role with the company?
"To start with I was handling the customer service side along with the picking and packing. For that first six months to a year after I joined we were all working from home connected on Messenger and Skype."
Q: Was it a difficult sell to get you on board [given the nature of the products involved] or did you buy in to the idea straight away?
"I liked the idea of it being a new company, it being a start-up. In my previous job you knew each year your pay could rise a set amount and you might be given a set amount of new responsibilities whereas with Lovehoney it was a risk, it could have fallen flat but I would have the chance to use all my knowledge and experience doing everything right from the start."
Q: But the products didn't put you off at all?
(laughs) "No, no it didn't. When you're doing it every day, you just see it as any other product really. It's only occasionally when you're in the pub and someone asks you where you work, you say 'Lovehoney' and they're like 'Sex toys?! No way, that's so rude!' I think people think we're in here using all the toys everyday [for the record I saw no evidence of such practices - CM] but whenever anyone comes to visit and sees everyone hard at work at their computers they always say 'God it's so quiet in here!'"
Q: How many product areas do you currently buy for?
"Well let's see, there's sex toys, books, lingerie, novelties & gifts...oh and pharmacy too - condoms, lubes, that sort of thing."
Q: Lovehoney operates a website containing reviews of and discussion forums about sex toys (orgasmarmy.com) but what sway (if any) do the reviews of the Orgasm Army have on your decision to stock a given product?
"The Orgasm Army is owned and run by us but it's an independent review site - we list all of Ann Summers toys not just our own for example - and it contains around 10,000 reviews. People can join and write reviews of their sex toys and part of my job is to monitor the site daily for new content. If a customer's reviews are consistently well written and if they start joining in the forums, maybe giving other customers advice, you know actually playing a real part on the site, they'll get picked and sent toys by us for feedback. There's currently a group of around 20 - 25 people we'll contact if we've got a product we're not sure whether to take. These are people who have written 50 - 60 reviews each.
"Their reviews do have some sway over some of the more...kind of...unique products that we're not really sure how they will hit the market."
Q: For example?
"Well recently there was one called the Stud Strap, that was one we were really unsure about. It was just this bit of curved foam that goes around the scrotum and to delay ejaculation you or your partner tugs on it. It was just one of those products that everyone was saying 'I'm not trying that, I don't understand' so we sent that out to a couple of people on Orgasm Army because we knew from the other things they had been writing about that they'd be up for trying it out. Through that we had really good response and decided to stock it: in fact it has now become a Lovehoney branded item."
[At this point my legs were so firmly crossed it would have taken a dozen wild horses to pry them apart - CM]
Q: Can you take me through your typical day?
(laughs) "Typical day...it changes pretty much every single day, there are a lot projects as well as the day-to day stuff..."
Q: OK, so what's the first thing you do when you come in each morning?
"When I come in each morning I have a meeting with the stock manager, the warehouse manager and product manager...basically to check who's in the building today, who's on holiday, who's off sick, what jobs is everyone going to do, how many orders have we got to get out and how many orders have we got coming in. Each day, because of the environment we're in, we don't want our pickers & packers to be stood there every day of the week so we vary all of their jobs."
Q: Not all of that seems buying related!
"No, part of my role remains working on the HR side of things...I do the recruitment for Lovehoney as well! But once we've worked out what everyone is doing, I usually move on to looking at my low stock. I've got all of my stock levels in sections of what is going to run out in the next week, the next month and the next six months - I've got some suppliers that will do next day delivery, some will take a month and some take six months so I need to stay on top of it. Every day I'll check the seven day stock level of course. We always try to keep everything in stock but sometimes you'll get run on a product if - particularly it's been featured in a magazine or on TV and you don't know about it! So before I do anything else I make sure the orders for stock needed go out each morning. Of course, when I'm ordering from a supplier I'll also check whether they've got any new things in - there are certain suppliers where I'll know as soon as they've got something new in I'll take it: it's a brand, it's well made and we know it's going to sell.
"I also have to check the products we have listed on Amazon. It's a marketplace on Amazon with lots of people competing on prices so I need to make sure that our products are correctly priced, - that is, matching or beating everyone else."
Q: You said your days involve a lot of projects, what sort of thing?
"One of my things at the moment is looking at our products and making sure our best-sellers are phthalate-free. Phthalates are chemicals used to help set latex and keep it flexible [there have been some entirely unproven health concerns about them - CM]. Lots and lots of manufacturers are now moving away from using them, making elastimer, silicone, skin-safe products and we try to work with them as much as possible. So that's one project, but there are so many different things: looking at sourcing replacements for any products that look a bit old or tatty; we'll look at companies in the US because sometimes they're ahead of us as toys often get released quicker in the US, so we need to make sure we're not falling behind. Then of course there is trying to find new and interesting products that haven't yet hit the market."
Q: So what are your criteria for selecting a new toy?
"There are two different sides to it: will it sell well - not always the main question - or will it PR well? As well as the toys we know will sell, we look for products that are unusual but will never sell in volume. For example we had this product called The Vortex that Neal found at a trade show in Vegas: this one lady had invented this purple thing that goes on the end of a vacuum cleaner - now that's PR-able...it was in The Sun, you can get it in magazines, you can get it in newspapers and that attracts attention to Lovehoney. We launched it in the UK and from that many of our competitors started stocking it - missing the point that it was never going to sell in vast numbers but it worked brilliantly in generated PR for us!"
Q: You mentioned trade shows, are there many key shows on your buying calendar?
"Oh yes, and unfortunately they are all at funny times of year! In January, there's the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, in February there's the Spring Fair (in Birmingham) for gifts and novelties, in April there's the lingerie show in Vegas again, in the summer you've the LA Show, then the UK ETO [Erotic Trade Only] show in Birmingham, there's also a massive Berlin Show in October and there's London Erotica in November. And a lot of the manufacturers will invite us to their own warehouse shows...you've got to take care not to waste your time though - I mean it's great to go away so much but the shows have to be relevant."
Q: Not many buyers also have fronting a TV show as part of their responsibilities, so what can you tell me about the evolution of Sex Toys TV and your involvement as a presenter?
"It mainly came about through customer demand and PR necessity. If we had a product in the media [the Jonathan Ross show featured several of their products - CM] we wanted to be able to present it to customers so we'd need a video clip to put on the website. After a while we thought 'great we've got all this content, where are we going to put it and how much content can we build to make it worth making a space on the Lovehoney website for it?' I wasn't actually supposed to be the presenter for it, they were going to get someone else in, and it just happened that when they were setting up all the video equipment they asked me to do it as they tested the lighting. Then Neal and the photographer went 'Oh wow, you're really good. You can do it.'
"So once a month we do a full day's shoot with a professional cameraman and we do about twenty different products. The rest of the time we can do on spec little ones ourselves when new products come in. I do two-minute clips talking about the different products - quite often it's just showing customers how the batteries fit, if it's waterproof, how big it is, how flexible it is, how fast it is, how loud it is - this is quite an important one as through the video is the only time customers can see how discreet a toy is."
Q: How far does Sex Toys TV impact on demand for products?
"For the products that have that video content the difference has been massive."
Q: What do you find most challenging about your role?
"Stock control: you can get a single product from lots of different places, so I need to look at every single supplier, how much do they sell it for and what's our discount with them. I might have ten different suppliers for a Lady Lustfinger product, got all their prices, this one delivers next day, this one delivers in two or three days and this one takes six months. Of course the one who takes six months is the cheapest. So it's making sure you've always got stock in but at the lowest price...and knowing how to make up from shortfalls if they happen."
Q: What do you like most about what you do?
"I really enjoy bringing new products in and watching them grow and actually becoming best-sellers."
Q: What would you say were your key skills that make you good at what you do?
(laughing) "I'd probably have to say multi-tasking! Setting priorities when you're really working by yourself on lots of different projects simultaneously."
Q: Okay, so what are your ambitions? What are you going to be doing in two years, five years, ten years?
"Hopefully working a three-day week! This might appeal to anyone interested in going into etailing; because of the buying role, you don't need to be in the office every day - when I'm sourcing products and making orders I don't need to be sat in the office. Eventually I would love to be able to work part of the time from home."
Q: So, how would you describe the working culture at Lovehoney?
"It's very flexible, every day is different, every day is funny. We all work very hard for this one goal, everyone feels quite strongly about the business. It's exciting, every day really is different."
As I was leaving Lovehoney's premises, one of their pickers came past with what genuinely looked like a miniature, black rugby ball (I hardly need to say that it was designed for another type of game altogther). "Blimey", she laughed, "that'd make your eyes water". I was still smiling at this as I got on my train home. But it did make me reflect that while I still found some of the products slightly frightening, there was nothing even vaguely sleazy or tawdry about Lovehoney's operation. Quite the contrary, it was a model business of the new e-economy: created by a couple of people with a good idea and a bit of know-how; grown into a business with a seven figure turnover by the hard work and endeavour of dedicated, passionate employees like Bonny Hall.
