Business Lessons Learned.

The number one thing you must know when selling things to the public: They want everything for nothing.

And as a member of the public myself, I can tell you this, we're serious about it. As a business owner, this unfortunate reality causes me to grind my teeth into dust, because I have to tell you, some members of the public are more irritating about this philosophy than others.

Steve and I first started researching the sex toy industry back in 2000. We looked at successful companies and we looked at unsucessful ones. We looked at more upscale ones and we looked at skeevy ones. We looked at crappy products and fancy ones.

Finally, we decided that we wanted to be a woman-positive toy store that carried high quality sex toys and bath products, and lingerie that men could buy for their wives and girlfriends with the assurance that she wouldn't open up the package on Valentine's Day, roll her eyeballs back into her skull, and ask if he kept the receipt.

A lot of people liked this concept on paper. Considerably fewer people liked it when it actually opened. Why? Sure, there were some screwball reasons that were variations on some weirdo sense of entitlement ("You carry leather/erotica/anal toys/Kalil Gibran? I object to that on the grounds that I don't find it sexy for political/personal/religious/anti-hack writing/feminist/anti-feminist/gay/anti-gay reasons! You suck and I hate you!") but mostly the reason boiled down to this: I want nice, high quality products, but I want them to cost exactly the same as the cheap Chinese slave-labor crap.

And we had a really difficult time making money with all our fancified stuff. We brought in some cheap jelly buttplugs to see what would happen. They sold out. We brought in a cheap, nasty metal vibrator that I would use in my toy demonstrations as an example of a cheap, nasty metal vibrator that one should never buy. They sold out. Sometimes women would buy them in bulk, even when I'd tell them that one Rabbit Pearl costs the same as five cheap vibrators, is better, and lasts just as long. They would look me dead in the eye, nod, agree with everything I said, then buy five cheap ones. The truth is, and you know I'm not talking about you here, but most people just don't care, even when they say they do.

Finally we realized that in order to pay the rent, we had to start bringing in some of this stuff that we didn't particularly care for ourselves, like porn and Chinese made vibrators. As Steve says, even though it's possible to change the way the world thinks on a certain issue, you probably won't get rich doing it. Our problem in the beginning, I think, was that we were taking an enormous and loaded topic, sex, and trying to change everything at once.


Jedmunds, Amanda's new boytoy over at Pandagon, wrote a piece today answering some of Pandagon's recent critics over what they put up on their site. Specifically, former Pandagon blogger Ezra Klein questioned the current Pandagon crew's regular decision to make fun of the Wingnuttery over at Townhall. Within Jedmunds' defense, which essentially is that mockery "is the carrot and the stick of social control," he writes this sentence almost as an aside:

Truth be told, I think we’re slumming it when we mock Townhall columns, not because Townhall is beneath our dignity, but because I don’t think we’re pushing ourselves creatively as bloggers when we rely on what has become a boilerplate style of blogging. It’s beneath us to do because we can do better. But. But! But. There is a fucking market for people who want to read Pandagon mock Townhall columns. Telling us to stop mocking Townhall is like telling Oasis to stop playing “Wonderwall” at their concerts. You give the people what they want. And the people want mockery. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

That, in a nutshell, is exactly what happened to us here at Honeysuckle. Cheap stuff, porn, and bachelorette party gifts are our equivilant of making fun of Townhall. Sure, we've got lots of better stuff, stuff that we highly recommend over shotglasses shaped like dicks, and we'll tell you all about it. But it's not good business sense to tell the public they don't want to drink a slippery nipple out of a ceramic penis shotglass when dammit, yes, they do.

Any time you put yourself out in the public, by opening a store, or writing on a blog, or running for office or doing charitable work, somebody, somewhere is going to have a problem with the way you're doing it. So where do you draw the line?

Probably at the same place Pam, Amanda, and Jedmunds do - if it's going to cause me to lose sleep over selling a particular item or marketing the store a certain way, I won't do it.

What causes me to lose sleep, as an individual, is probably different from what causes you to lose sleep, so your Honeysuckle would probably look different from mine, but here are a few things I won't budge on:

1.) Honeysuckle is, and will always be, 100% pro gay and lesbian.

It's difficult for me to accept that this is a controversial stance, but after watching enough straight people walk by the store and loudly refuse to come inside because of the rainbow sticker on the door, I have to conclude that not only is it considered a radical stance, it's also one that costs us money. How much money? I don't know, and frankly, I don't care, because I hate people like that and I don't want their money.

2.) Honeysuckle will not carry items that are racist, hostile to women, or denigrate fat people. Try finding interracial porn that isn't racist or hostile to women. I'm serious, please try to find it, because I've been looking for 5 years and have only found a single dvd - Candida Royalle's Carribean Heat, which I was going to link to, only to discover that it isn't on our website. Which would explain why nobody is buying it. I thought it was just because Royalle's videos have a reputation for being on the dull side, but maybe not. This is also why I don't have porn featuring black performers in general, by the way. The porn industry is unrelentingly racist. The last time I was at the Porn Superstore I got into a discussion with a black woman who owned a toy store on the South side.

"Listen," I said to her, "I'm looking for porn dvds with black actors that aren't racist or hostile to women."

"They don't exist," she said.

"Well, what do your customers buy?" I asked.

She said, "Black people just want to see black people," and she showed me what her best sellers were. I have to tell you, they were horrible. Horrible, abusive, racist language about "black jungle sluts" on the boxes.

"These are horrible," I said.

"I know," she said, "but there's nothing else that I know of."

Now, I'm not in anyway judging this woman - she's a black woman providing for black customers, and she's drawing her line where she has to, just like I am. While I do have black customers, my clientele is overwhelmingly white. I can afford to draw my line where I'm drawing it. I can rest easy feeling good about refusing to stock "black jungle sluts" dvds right next to Digital Playground's dvds featuring white women who are making more money than their black coworkers and presented in a positive, sex-is-fun-and-everyone-loves-me-whee! sort of way. This woman and her customers don't have that choice. If they want to see black people having sex, they have to view it through the eyes of the white racist audience it's being made for. So no, I'm not judging this woman, I just recognize that my stance on this issue can be firm because of white privilege, that's all. (As to whether I'm being racist for not carrying dvds starring black actors regardless of content, I have no idea, but I'm certainly up for discussion about it.)*

3.) I will carry things I don't like, but I will not tell you I like them and I will not recommend them.

Blog reader Laura sent me this superfantastic article the other day about how cheap vibes aren't the healthiest things you can stick up your dainty bits. Unlike the children's toy industry, the adult toy industry is not regulated, so manufacturers can make their toys out of any damned thing they want, and often do. Jelly toys were mentioned as being particularly bad, while my friends at Vibratex once again came through as selling safe, high quality toys. The omission of silicone as being a preferable material was oddly absent from the article, which I think is really weird, but I'll go ahead and add it in as being a safe, high quality material. The downside of buying high quality toys made with nontoxic materials is, of course, the price. And even though I'll recommend silicone over and over again, I'll still sell more jellies for the same reason that people complain about Wal-Mart yet break their necks getting over there to buy an 18 dollar dvd player. So I suppose I'll continue to stock the jellies while simultaneously advising you to buy Vibratex and silicone, and some of you will listen to me and some of you won't. (The article gives a good, reasonably comprehensive list of which manufacturers make their toys with non-toxic materials - if you're shopping, and even if you're not, it's well worth a read.)

The upshot of all this handwringing, I suppose, is the difficulty of finding the balance of not making your business all about you while at the same time keeping that part of it that is all about you that people found appealing in the first place.

And that's easy enough, right?

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*Putting in a footnote here to briefly answer the inevitable question of why there aren't more black porn writers, directors, and producers, but you probably won't like the answer: The use of white women, and yes, I deliberately picked that inflammatory verb choice, is what drives the porn industry. A lot of white porn stars will refuse to have sex with black men on camera because the racist backlash will cause her to get less higher-quality work. White actresses and black actors both have spoken about a white woman doing a scene with a black man, only to find that the jobs she gets offered after that are more "hard core" (read: degrading.) If you aspire to be Jenna Jameson or Jesse Jane, the lesson seems to be, don't go black. I do feel this is less a reflection of the actresses than of the racist beliefs of the audience creating a terrible cycle. Black men, then, are not getting the higher paying roles - roles where they do scenes with big name white female stars - that will enable them to save and invest enough money to start creating their own production companies. Black women run into the same problem when they work strip clubs. (A lot of porn actresses suppliment their income headlining at strip clubs, where they can make as much as 10k a night.) Many of the top-paying clubs will not book black women, and when they do, they won't pay them as much as they'll pay a Bella Donna or a Teagan. Not to mention that black people in general do not have the disposable income that white people have and can not support the industry in quite the same way. The most successful production company aimed at a black audience right now, in fact, is called Afrocentric/Video and is owned by two white guys. To their credit, they consistently hire black directors and black writers.