Dot-com evangelism is not dead. Consider the staff of MyPleasure.com, enjoying dinner at a once crowded and trendy, but now sparsely populated, San Francisco dot-com eatery.
Jocelyn Saurini, MyPleasure's Executive Producer, spies a drunken bachlorette party in progress across the restaurant, complete with a requisite male blow-up doll. She unabashedly charges over to offer the bride-to-be a wedding discount on the sex toy of her choice.
To her delight, her instincts are on target - the women proudly give Jocelyn a drawing of what they call the "Childo," apparently the hot topic of conversation that evening. Saurini is proud to inform them that they can find the Childo (actually called The Accomodator) on the site. Mission accomplished.
Before long, that blushing bride might even be able to register for the sex toys of her dreams at MyPleasure. While Web firms continue to crash and burn around them each day, MyPleasure is finding success among the ruins of San Francisco's once profligate dot-com community by hawking "marital aids" with a twist.
"You can look at our site at work," says Lead Engineer Tony Saurini (and husband of Joceyln), "and nobody will know [what you're looking at]."
"We don't even have nudity on our site," adds Dr. S�ndor Gardos, MyPleasure's president and a board-certified sexologist.
While hawking sex toys without the sex might seem paradoxical to some, MyPleasure's Gardos and Saurini are convinced they've found themselves the niche that will allow this dot-com to succeed. "I think it's an audience that people have been trying to capture," says Jocelyn Saurini, "but [they] haven't known how to speak to them."
Who is this new audience? "I think if you were going to draw a picture of one of our most frequent buyers it would be a woman, early 30s, located in a suburban area," says Gardos. "A lot of people aren't within a hundred miles of a sex toy store, and if they are, they sure as hell don't want to tell the clerk, 'No, no, not that one - the bigger one!' The Internet is such the ideal medium for selling this sort of product."
With the popularity of mainstream television shows like HBO's Sex and the City, depicting four horny professional women prowling Manhattan for good sex, it's no surprise that MyPleasure is trying to get a piece of the action by stocking several toys featured on the show. But MyPleasure's clientele is not just City watchers or women reticent to venture to the corner sex shop. "Another large chunk is men buying for women," says Jocelyn Saurini. "That's been a very nice side advantage of having a site that does appeal to a broad audience."
The group isn't just another bunch of venture capital funded vultures looking to make a killing - most of MyPleasure's 10-person staff has both the experience of several other dot-coms under their collective belt (including AOL, Oxygen.com, Quokka.com, Microsoft, Andersen Consulting, and About.com), and at one time or another worked for other San Francisco sex toy retailers, giving them insider knowledge of both industries. It's this experience that led this group to form MyPleasure with their own funds, convinced that they could do it better than the rest.
While some online sex shops embody the seedy corner store, MyPleasure's goal is to make their shoppers feel as if they're in The Gap - clean, organized, upscale, and hip. Says Gardos, "one of the things we're trying to change is that clearly people are interested and curious [in sex toys] - they want to try these products as long as they don't feel dirty. In many circles, [it's still] a little bit too much to actually be premeditated when you go to a site to buy [toys]."
So instead of creating just another online catalog, MyPleasure works at capturing the sex-positive vibe one might find at a clean, well-lit retail store like Good Vibrations or Babes In Toyland by pulling together the best elements of the Web. The result is a combination of content, such as customer reviews, a sex glossary, how-to tips, erotic stories, and online functionality, such as SexLibs (think Mad Libs with a dirty twist) and e-mail postcards you can send to friends.
"They're not like the postcards you'd see in other places," says Jocelyn Saurini. "You don't see any naked cootchie on the postcards, no Flash-animated sex scenes. How can you say no to a golden retriever with a dildo? Lots of people will send that and say, 'Oh, isn't this cute? And by the way, why don't you look at product so-and-so?'"
It's a potent mix, aimed at both educating and engaging customers, while capturing that ever-elusive grail that bankrupted many retail sites before them - stickiness. With stickiness comes repeat customers, and with that, profitability. "It's amazing," remarks Tony Saurini. "All my friends from other sites are like, 'Wow, you actually sell things for more than you bought them.'"
While that may seem like common sense, the demise of so many other online businesses proves that basic logic has been in short order over the past few years, as many were seduced by the belief that all one needed was a smart idea and some good engineers to pave the way to success. "That was one of the tenets of many startups - a group of people who were very devoted to an idea," observes Jocelyn Saurini. "Now unfortunately the fault of many of those was that the idea had no business viability."
"Yeah," adds Tony Saurini. "Don't try to ship a 30-pound bag of kitty litter and not charge them anything. That doesn't work."
At a time when the e-commerce industry is all but endangered, the staff of MyPleasure are bullish about their future prospects. So far they've been able to capitalize on the misfortunes of others; their premium SOMA office space, for example, is subleased from a failed dot-com at a steep discount. "We also bought an awful amount of our stuff at dot-com bankruptcy auctions," says Gardos. "Most of our servers were bought for pennies on the dollar. Some of these places would buy top-of-the-line servers and never even get around to opening the boxes."
Despite their good fortune, they've also faced scrutiny in the adult industry from burned manufacturers and distributors. "We've gotten mixed reactions from the industry," says Jocelyn Saurini. "When we were first putting our inventory together, we weren't getting good credit terms. They were saying, 'We just don't give out good credit terms to Internet sites anymore because we had such a run of Joes who would buy five of a product, put up a site in his basement, sell five of the product, and never pay us back because we'd given him 60-day credit terms.' [They] lost money on a string of small mom-and-pop sites when everybody thought they could make money selling sex on the Internet."
But while they've been busy proving their creditworthiness - "We pay our bills on time," says Gardos - they've also been working on reinventing the rules. According to Jocelyn Saurini, "that was one of the benefits from coming from other dot-coms - a lot of the problem in this industry is that it's been the same players for so long that it's ingrained how you do things."
A new audience, they say, requires new rules, such as understanding the Internet customer's expectation that a product should ship the same day as ordered. The staff also works to change the perception of shoddy sex toys by extensively testing the products they carry and quickly responding to customer concerns if a product does go awry.
And as they aim for an upscale audience, they've found it valuable to repackage products when they don't fit the look and feel of the site. Gone is the cheaply printed packaging that looks as if it were created in 1983 and never changed, replaced with silver cord and wrapping paper that might as easily as come from Victoria's Secret or Nordstrom.
Which is, in fact, one of their longer-term goals - to be to sex toys what Victoria's Secret is to lingerie. "In the sex toy industry, most places have not concentrated [on branding] at all. I think it's very important," says Gardos. "We are trying to do what Victoria's Secret did. I never thought I'd see Midwestern moms taking their teenage daughters into a lingerie store in the mall."
To that end, MyPleasure is playing it safe - next year, for instance, they might grow their staff an additional 10 percent - to 11 employees. And instead of trying to bolster sales with inventory additions such as videos and DVDs, they're keeping their focus to what they feel they do best: creating a premium shopping experience for buyers of sex toys.
"We're shooting for a mainstream audience," explains Gardos, "many of whom find sex toys acceptable, but not pornography. We feel that there are already so many fine adult video sites out there that we would rather partner with one of them than re-create the wheel. [But] several business and marketing partners we are currently speaking to have specifically told us that they could not work with us if we sold adult videos."
While "taking the porn out of pornography" might appear to be an impossible strategy, Gardos says MyPleasure was operating in the black four months after its launch. And after the epilogue written by so many other e-businesses in the past year, that's a major accomplishment.
"The most common question I get from friends still employed in the dot-com industry is, 'Wow, so what happens if you have to execute your exit strategy,'" says Jocelyn Saurini with a laugh. "Our exit strategy is to be here five years from now! We're not working 24/7 in desperation - we're very devoted to this. We want to make it work."
