From small mail-order company defying the law to award-winning adult producers to Web entrepreneurs, Adam & Eve continues to evolve.
If you are one of the people who is more familiar with Adam & Eve’s reputation as one of the leading producers of AVN award-winning adult films such as Rawhide (2004 award for Best Video) and Pirates (2005 Best Video), you might be surprised to learn that the long-running company is also renowned for making excursions into the Internet.
With its website (AdamEve.com), the popular brick-and-mortar company has built upon its tried-and-true formula of offering high-quality products in an attractive and sleek presentation. From an extensive library of its popular video titles to an eclectic array of vibrators, sex toys, condoms, and lubes and lotions, AdamEve.com offers a plethora of guilty pleasures for fans of “the forbidden fruit” while also providing a virtual blueprint for how to explore additional avenues of commerce. According to the company, the effort has been paying off.
“We have several different kinds of traffic, and they all perform well,” says Jennifer Alberry, director of Internet marketing for Adam & Eve parent company Phil Harvey Enterprises Inc. “Our repeat buyers are very good for us, but we have focused so much on customer acquisition in the last six months that we have seen our sales increase dramatically due to this effort.”
Alberry says this is due to the company’s mission to “take care of our customers all the way through their order and product experience. We want them to be happy with the shopping, the purchasing, and with their product.” She adds that this is partly achieved by Adam & Eve’s 90-day, risk-free guarantee on every product, but also by offering products that enhance human sexuality. “Our message to our customers is that we will do anything to create a sex-positive and healthy experience for them with our products.”
This has been Adam & Eve’s manifesto from the beginning, when Phil Harvey and his business partner Tim Black launched the small North Carolina-based company in 1971. Back then it was called Population Planning Associates (PPA), and – as the company’s name suggests – its focus was on “family planning”—specifically, the sale of condoms. Tame stuff by today’s standards, of course, but in the early ’70s, Harvey was, in fact, treading on thin ice with the law. “There was no particular resistance, but quite remarkably, it was illegal,” Harvey explains. “There was an 1873 law called the Comstock Law that had been on the books for a century. They defined all contraceptives and all information about contraceptives and abortion obscene and therefore unmailable.”
Although the Comstock Law was overturned in 1936, it was still on the books in several states—North Carolina being one of them. It wasn’t until 1974 that the law finally was stricken from the books for good. But for those first couple years, Adam & Eve flew in the face of the law by openly advertising its product—to the chagrin of the company’s attorneys. “We were unquestionably violating the law when we began,” Harvey chuckles. “There was nothing vague about it like there is with obscenity. We consulted with our lawyers, and they said, ‘You’re taking a real risk here.’ Tim had two young daughters and a nervous wife, so he was quite concerned that we could have gone to jail.”
For his part, Harvey recalls that it was quite exciting to be going up against the Man. “I was kind of intrigued with the idea of being put in jail for selling condoms,” he laughs. “I wasn’t all that worried about it, because I considered myself to be a martyr for the cause.” Luckily, he adds, it never came to that, as he and Black had friends in high places: “The post office authorities said they couldn’t tell us that they wouldn’t prosecute us, but they led us to believe it wouldn’t be a high priority for them.”
The company avoided prosecution, and eventually added sex toys, magazines, and some lingerie to its roster of products. Meanwhile, the advent of the VCR signaled an exciting new direction for entrepreneurs, and Harvey decided to jump on the bandwagon. “For the first time, people who wanted to see movies no longer had to go to adult theaters, but could see explicit material on their own TV sets,” he remembers. The company added adult titles to its catalog and relaunched as Adam & Eve—a sort of one-stop shopping place for all things adult. Within three years, Harvey says, "our business quadrupled."
For the next decade, Adam & Eve became one of the biggest players in the mail-order catalog business. Then, in the mid-’90s, the option of shopping on the Internet caused many catalog businesses to rethink their strategies. “The future was certainly clear to that extent,” Harvey says. “Any company in almost any field that wanted to stay in the mail-order business had to be out there on the Internet—or die. If you don’t have the increase in the Internet sales to make up for the fall-off of catalog sales, you’re going to be in trouble. And we knew that.”
The Adam & Eve team quickly set to work on creating a website that would build upon the strengths of the catalog: a large selection of quality products, sleek design, and superior customer service. Supported by Coremetrics and back-end tools that were written inhouse, AdamEve.com is extremely user-friendly, which Harvey says is essential. “We’re constantly working on it to make it more user-friendly. Finding your way around the site is getting easier and easier—the way products are sorted so you can sort them by price and by best-sellers and by performers in the videos. All of that is very much to the credit of our Web division, and is paramount to the site’s success.”
Harvey admits that at first growth was slow and modest. Luckily, he notes, the mail-order catalog had given them a slight advantage. “We’re quite confident because we can back it up with years of experience in filling orders and keeping customers happy. It’s been crucial to keeping us growing. It’s been modest, but without the website, we wouldn’t be growing at all.
“One thing that sets us apart from our other competitors is that [the site] is backed by a really good fulfillment and customer service operation,” Harvey continues. “That’s one area where the traditional mail-order catalogs – the L.L. Beans, the Land’s Ends, and the Adam & Eves – have a big advantage, because it takes years to build a really good, efficient fulfillment operation and a good customer service company. I think that is a crucial part. Once you put something in your AdamEve.com shopping cart, the chances are 99-plus percent that that’s what you’re going to be getting and you’re going to get it right away. And if anything goes wrong, you’ve got a phone number to call and a knowledgeable person to tell you what’s going on.”
Since the company began producing its own films, Adam & Eve’s profile has become glossier than ever. Both Rawhide and Pirates (the latter a co-production with Digital Playground) have cemented the company’s reputation for producing high-quality original films, and other releases – from features like The Contractor, Barnyard Babes, and The Other Woman to popular series such as Dinner Party and Amateur Angels – have helped cement Adam & Eve’s reputation as a serious contender in video production.
Like most ventures, the move to producing original content came late in the game—as recently as 2000. “We were doing fine selling other people’s work,” Harvey says. “The technological advances made it possible for our company to grow, and during times of growth, you tend to stick with what you’re doing well and not worry about what’s going to happen in 10 years down the line. But as we got through the 1980s and the competition – particularly the online competition – began heating up in the ’90s, we became increasingly aware of the importance of producing our own content.”
Harvey stresses that the most important thing to him is maintaining Adam & Eve’s solid reputation. “The adult business has taught me and all of us at Adam & Eve that if you want to build a profitable business for the long haul, you can’t cut corners [to get something done faster],” he explains. “Also, pay your bills, be straight with people—don’t promise things you can’t deliver. All of those things we have learned over and over again, and we believe in them very deeply. We have built an image as a straight-shooting company: sometimes a little bureaucratic and slow to react, but unquestionably honest and forthright. And that makes a big difference to profitability in the long run.”
Pictured: Phil Harvey, co-founder of Adam & Eve
