The Vibrator Goes Mainstream, Again

Last week electronics manufacturer Phillips released the first three products in their newly created “Relationship Care” line. Two of the products are vibrators (to the right is the Intimate Warming Massager) each selling only in the UK for around $150.

Before the official launch a few articles touted the move as radical and without precedent. Given the launch a few years ago of lower quality vibrating toys by both Durex and Trojan (both of which have proved hugely successful for the publicly traded companies SSL and Church and Dwight, respectively) I don’t think this expansion into sexual health can really be called either radical or new. But Phillips is doing it differently and while I haven’t yet got my hands on the products all signs look good.

The toys are not disposable and Phillips has clearly invested more in creating retailing infrastructure than either Durex or Trojan (whose products are selling well despite the fact that there’s no real home for them in most bricks and mortar drug stores and are often crammed in behind condoms and bottles of lubricant).

The best news to my mind is that when a large corporation decides to make sex toys they think about things like customer satisfaction and liability. The result is that we’re going to get safer, better made toys (when compared to the big sex toy manufacturers, but not necessarily better than the smaller boutique companies like Jimmy Jane, OhMiBod, etc…) and we’re going to get the kind of customer service we’re used to only from high end sex toy retailers, but you’re getting it direct from the manufacturer.

Take, for example, the support page for the Warm Intimate Massager. It might not seem like much if you’re used to support pages for software or other consumer goods, but it’s thoroughness is unheard of in the sex toy industry.

It’s also helpful for those of us who believe that sexual pleasure is part of sexual health to have a huge multinational company essentially make a public statement that people have sex and that it can be a good thing for them to experience pleasure when they have sex. While I wish we didn’t have to take these social cues from for profit companies, we do. And the advertising campaigns and media push that accompany each of these moves into mainstream sex toy retailing offers us another opportunity to talk about the importance of sexual pleasure to sexual health.

What isn’t being written about is that this launch comes at a fascinating time in the sex toy industry and sex toy retailing. I’ll be writing more on that later. In the meantime, if I can get my hands on the product and a transformer, I’ll let you know whether the reality lives up to the hype.

Read more – Times Online: Philips changes the mood with Warm Intimate Massager

_{Image of courtesy of Phillips.}