"I never saw myself as the sex-toy tycoon. I know my family and high school teachers didn't see it coming, either. The whole thing just developed from a personal need, seeing a niche that was unfilled."
As Joel Tucker sits back in his office and talks modestly about his personal and professional history, he immediately strikes you as a laid-back kinda guy, wearing casual yet, nonetheless, stylish clothes and speaking in an easy, relaxed, articulate manner. Yet there's also a professional - far from negative - sheen to this 41-year-old man: He's calm yet extremely thorough in the manner he handles things, from cutting a check for an employee, to scanning a business card, to downloading images of himself for this very article. In turn, you distinctly sense that it's this same cool, steady, methodical manner that inevitably helped Tucker become the CEO of one of the most successful fetish-wear companies in the world: Stockroom.com, now celebrating its 20th year.
Tucker himself describes Stockroom as "the largest vertically integrated kink-toy company for BDSM in the world because we're at all levels: We do manufacturing and distribution and, of course, direct-to-consumers through the websites, the stores and our mail catalog."
And since Tucker is also the founder of Stockroom, he's the definitely the expert at tracing the evolution of the company, starting way back in the late 1980's when he was a college student in LA (a political science major, to be exact) looking for some kicks.
"I went to a local Hollywood shop with a girlfriend and about 50 dollars in my pocket," Tucker vividly recalls, "with the intention of buying some basic bondage gear: wrist cuffs, ankle cuffs and collar. You know, I was a young, 21-year-old kinky kid who thought, ‘I need this equipment.' (laughs) But the products I had in mind to purchase actually turned out to be five times the price I thought they'd be. So that was my ‘oh, I can't afford to be kinky' realization.
"And I remember expressing my disappointment to my girlfriend who said, ‘You know, I took a leather-working class last year at the Fashion Institute at IBM, and I still have the tools sitting in a box in my closet. If you want to borrow them, maybe you should try making your own equipment.' So that's what I did, because I wanted to create a place where a college student could afford to be kinky; where he could get the basic bondage gear, the basic dildos, the basic vibrators, the basic safe-sex supplies.
While Tucker started off in 1988 as a one-man operation producing bondage gear in what he acutely describes as a "ratty, second-floor office on Hollywood Boulevard," he now has a staff of 50 in his own four-story, 30,000 square foot building ("For an adult company, it's nice not have to worry about a landlord suddenly getting Jesus," Tucker jokes) in the heart of Silver Lake, a hilly community that's an odd blend of barrio and art district, on the outskirts of Hollywood.
But it's, of course, far easier to describe the 20-year evolution of a company in one or two sentences than it is actually experiencing those tremendous ups and downs during such an intense ongoing venture. Understandably, Joel is more than willing to elaborate on precisely the exhilarating crests and tumultuous crevices he encountered while working his way, ever gradually and with incredible focus, to a plateau of S&M success.
Born in Oregon and raised in southern Illinois, Tucker basically learned the ropes of running a business by helping his dad operate the family farm back in Carbondale, Illinois, when he was just a youngster.
"I've always had an entrepreneurial inclination," he says, "and I'd been involved in the family produce business since the time I was 9 years old. That was kind of a sabbatical for my father, a math professor, who decided to get out of academia for a while. So, he went back to the family farm, looked around, and said, ‘Well, I feel like doing something, and since I'm on a farm, I guess I'll do some farming.' And I got involved in that, which proved to be a really good start in business at an early age."
Indeed, the farm was an eye-opener for Joel in terms of his education about self-sufficiency in the face of self-employment, which he assiduously applied to his upstart bondage-gear business after graduating from college.
Recalls Tucker: "When I went to start making toys, I searched out sources for leather and rivets and D rings and tools. And just thinking about economies and scale and being entrepreneurial, I was selling product to my friends and making extra money pretty quick."
But it ultimately wasn't enough: Bills were barreling into his one-man operation faster than profits. Tucker, therefore, decided to make a drastic move, giving up his Hollywood apartment and moving into the same "ratty" Hollywood office to save money.
Yet that bold move still wasn't enough to keep Joel's new business afloat. At that point, Joel actually moved back to the family farm in southern Illinois.
"It was a 200-acre farm, and I used that farmhouse as an incubator for the business for two years, while building it up."
Then, in 1990, he put out his first electronic catalog in a new and strange medium called "the Internet."
"No one had even heard of an e-commerce company at that time 20 years ago," Joel ironically notes. "People would ask me, ‘Where are you selling these fetish products?' and I'd say, ‘Well, mostly on the Internet.' And their next question would be, ‘What's the Internet?' (laughs) My answer to that would be, ‘Never mind. You'll hear about it eventually.' It was really a very underground thing to do business on the Internet at that time.
"But after the release of that electronic catalog in 1990, the Internet became my main market. And now we're in our 19th year as an e-commerce company, which makes us one of the oldest e-commerce companies in the world, and definitely the oldest adult-toy company on the Internet."
Now Tucker helms an entire empire of fetish-based websites and their related companies including - aside from Stockroom.com and its gay counterpart, MaleStockroom.com - KinkLab.com ("product that we're already making," notes Joel, "but it's repackaged and repositioned for more of a mass market to get us into mainstream adult stores"); DaedalusPublishing.com (a publishing firm which prints how-to books, memoirs and erotic fiction from the kink community at large); StormyLeather.com (a fetish-wear/adult-toy outfit in San Francisco); SandM.com (a site with articles, reviews, personal ads and news about the S&M scene); and two of Tucker's hottest acquisitions as of 2006, Syren.com and SyrenCouture.com.
"Syren is really all about latex wear," explains Tucker, "and Syren Couture is where we send the film industry people, to whom we've supplied latex wear for a number of feature films and television shows." Such Tinsel Town commissions have included shows the likes of Ugly Betty and CSI Miami, as well as music videos for The Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears, and a recent Jessica Alba print ad. (For the record, Syren Couture also designed the Catwoman outfit Michelle Pfeiffer lusciously flaunted in Batman Returns, as well as the Poison Ivy gear Uma Thurman brilliantly modeled in Batman & Robin. Wow!)
And yet with this entire kink kingdom to operate, Tucker is not your static businessman who wears suit and tie; carries a briefcase; drives to work in a BMW; and unreasonably inundates himself in his work, while cultivating high blood pressure and a heart attack about to happen. Indeed, Tucker's office is, surprisingly (and refreshingly) not overloaded with tools of the trade, i.e., shock wands, mouth gags, and jelly vibrators. Rather, his modestly sized home-away-from-home contains an eclectic collection of DVDs, ranging from the big-scale political satire of Dr. Strangelove, to the cheesy psycho-mania of Dementia 13; along with a wide range of books, covering such varied topics as business strategies to native-American history (Tucker is actually one-eighth American Indian; the remaining ethnic makeup being English and German). There's also a bike in one corner of his office ("I live about two miles from here, so I figure, ‘why not ride to work?'"), and a portable keyboard in the other ("I've been playing piano since I was 3; I also write and record music that's basically jazz-influenced rock").
However, bikes, books ‘n' boogie-woogie aside, what's most unique about Tucker is his staying true to the original - highly laudable - mantra upon which Stockroom was based. Granted, Stockroom and its various subsidiaries like Syren Couture and KinkLab have a wonderful, unsurpassed selection of high-end, esoteric, expensive fetish gear and toys. But there's still that young, far-from-loaded (with money, at least) college kid, whom Tucker has always kept in mind.
"We wanted to be the kink store that the college student could go to and buy the basics - and we still are," Tucker proudly states, with no little degree of enthusiasm. "But now we also want to be the kink store that everyone can go to and find the best value, the best aesthetic, the best designs, by offering the most respectful and civilized way of marketing fetish wear and dealing with customers.
"A lot of people get into various aspects of the sex industry," Tucker can't help from noting, "with mercenary intent. It's a great way for them to make a quick buck. For me, it's always been more of a labor of love. I mean, there are people in our industry who don't understand kink, who have products knocked-off and mass-produced overseas which come back and are just a step above cardboard. They put it in pretty packaging, along with a pretty model, and slap on a high price. The consumer takes it home and maybe they can use it once or twice, and then it falls apart. But, I mean, the first pair of cuffs that I made for my company in 1988? - I still have them! (laughs) Our material is quality stuff that's built to last."
This article originally appeared in the February issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
