Adam & Eve, founded in 1970 by Phil Harvey Enterprises, Inc., grew from a small mail order contraceptive seller into a giant marketer with a rich catalog of all manner of adult goods. And the multi-faceted corporation keeps sprouting new divisions and expanding existing operations.
According to founder and president Phil Harvey, the past two years have not been “a period of rapid growth” for the company’s core mail order operation, “because conventional mail order sales have been more and more difficult to get, in large part because of the Internet. But we have managed to replace the declines in conventional mail order sale by increases on the Internet. To some extent, we’re competing with ourselves with those two modes of advertising."
Harvey added, “That has been one of our major shifts: an increasing amount of Internet sales and a corresponding decreasing amount from conventional catalog sales — although catalog sales are still more than half.”
Harvey these days works mostly with Washington D.C.-based DKT International, a non-profit organization that provides condoms and sexual education materials to Third World nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. With Adam & Eve, he’s involved mostly in strategy planning, leaving the company’s day to day operation under the direction of Vice-President David Groves.
Groves, Harvey said, “has done a remarkable job of financial discipline and planning, of marketing analysis, and of working with me and with others on getting new divisions and new enterprises started.”
One of the most important of those new enterprises is the Adam & Eve franchising. According to Harvey, it is “coming along slowly but with reasonable progress.” Some 13 retail stores now bear the Adam & Eve name, most of them in North Carolina, but seven in Florida, one in Connecticut, and a brand new one in Dearborn, Michigan.
Perhaps the most visible growth has been in the production company, Adam & Eve Pictures. It can be measured by the fact that a West Coast office in Chatsworth was opened just last month. In charge is Bob Christian, Director of New Business Development, who will oversee both movie production and distributor sales.
According to Christian, everything will be running at full strength by early fall. “We have some warehousing there, and we’ll be able to better serve the many local distributors,” he said. “For years we’ve been shipping to them across the country, and now we’ll be right there. It is a very big and exciting and energizing step for us.”
The movie division has grown by leaps and bounds. “Five years ago,” Christian said, “we were producing 24 movies a year and about 12 one-a-month comps. Today, we’ll be producing 60 new pictures this year and about 48 comps.”
Nothing, of course, may be on the scale of last year’s Pirates, their co-production with Digital Playground that flew off the shelves of stores around the country and won just about every major adult award in the process (including a record-setting 11 at January’s AVN annual gala). Christian called its triumph “unprecedented in terms of sales and winning awards. I think there is room in every year for some blockbusters, just like there is in Hollywood.”
Though they’re not planning a full slate of Pirates-size productions, they do have a big one coming up: Tailgunners, a World War II epic starring Carmen Luvana and Austyn Moore, and with no less than Phil Harvey playing the President of the United States. (“He enjoyed himself,” Christian said.) The Nick Orleans production will be released at the end of August.
Contract girl Luvana also stars in Jane Bond DD7, a spy spoof in stores now. So far she’s the company’s only contract girl, but Christian said they’re “a signature away” from signing another and, in fact, plan to add two more by the end of the year. He added that the company has benefited enormously from its relationship with the beauteous Puerto Rican blonde.
Traditionally feature-oriented, the movie division last year introduced Bad Seed, a harder-edged line of “high-quality gonzo” product. “It has been doing very well,” Christian said, “not quite reaching the expectations we had for it, so we’ll be perking it up and making some packaging modifications to make it work even better.”
The company has also done well over the years in the pro-am or “real people” genre, with such lines as Luc Wilder’s Amateur Angels (now clocking in at Vol. 22) and Sex Across America.
The ultimate in that niche may be The Search for Adam & Eve, an American Idol-style reality show whose seven episodes were shown on the In Demand pay-per-view network beginning late last year. It was shot on location in New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Tampa, with a finale at Hedonism III in Jamaica. A DVD with all the episodes in an explicit cut was released in June, and mainstream distribution of the “mature” version is being done through Starlight.
Feminism has been another Adam & Eve hallmark, with two women in particular making high-profile contributions over the years: Candida Royalle and Femme Productions, and Nina Hartley with the long-running Nina Hartley’s Guide line. Those how-to videos, Christian said, “are all Nina, very hot and sexy, and a great way to learn new tips and tricks.”
Royalle, who averages less than one movie a year, has just roared back with two releases planned before year’s end. The first, a comedy called Under the Covers, will be released in September. “It’s a really sexy, fun movie,” Royalle said, with “a lot of New York people” plus Porn Valley’s Lisa Ann and Syren.
“It’s the beginning of my project to bring in new young women,” Royalle pointed out. She is executive-producing the debut video of Lola Davis, an African-American director, for Femme’s first Ethnic Erotica for Couples line, Femme Chocolat.
Unique among porn producers, Adam & Eve has a “panel of advisors,” a loosely linked network of psychologists and sexologists who establish guidelines to, as Christian said, “make sure our movies are positive. We want objective reviews of the material that we make and the material that we sell to make sure we’re selling sex-positive content.”
A couple of years ago they have given the green light to a certain amount of fetish-related material, and the company responded with Anal Kinksters, a line from B&D specialist Ernest Greene, Hartley’s husband, who has also taken over production of her Guides.
Also skewed toward sex-positive consumers is the company’s novelty label, the Adam & Eve Signature line, manufactured by Topco.
“They have been doing a marvelous job,” Christian said. “Ken Lassiter is our person in house who works really closely with Topco, coordinating product and package design. They distribute to some people we don’t, including some mainstream outlets. It’s wonderful to walk into a Spencer’s Gifts and see an Adam & Eve branded product.”
The company also distributes the Natural Contours line, created by Candida Royalle and her Dutch designer partner, featuring a series of vibrators specifically tailored to the contours of the female body, plus the “Energie,” a barbell-like device for doing Kegel exercises.
“Natural Contours is a very growing, very strong division,” Christian said. “They have enjoyed enormous success in mainstream mail order catalogues. That again is an example of our reaching out to other markets.”
But no Adam & Eve division reaches out quite as far and penetrates so deeply into the heartland as its Temptations Parties, an adult home party business adapted from the Tupperware concept with distributors all over the country. “It’s part of the process of having people be more accepting and enjoying talking about sexy stuff and just having fun,” Christian said.
He chuckled. “There was a time, I remember, ‘Wow, we’re in 48 states, we gotta get something in the other two.’ We accomplished that two years ago. I think the number may be in the 4 to 5,000 category for distributors; that’s the order of magnitude. It’s been doin’ real well.”
For Christian, nothing better illustrates increasing mainstream acceptance than the fact that, early this year, PHE was named Business of the Year by the Hillsborough Chamber of Commerce.
“That’s a huge turnaround,” Christian said. “Five years ago we were still a suspect company in our community. We fought battles to be able to open up here. We’ve found community acceptance of diversity along the way. A sexual-related company — in the South — named as Business of the Year. We’re enormously proud of it.”
For Harvey, the future looks bright for all of Adam & Eve’s divisions, starting with mail order. “Competition is going to continue to be fierce, particularly on the Internet,” he said. “That’s one of the major differences between being in business today and being in business 15 years ago. But I think we’re in good shape to compete and to grow.
“We continue to have a key asset which a good deal of our Internet competitors do not have, and that is a very well-seasoned and first-rate fulfillment and customer service operation. So that makes me optimistic. And we’ve learned to be pretty quick on our feet. You have to be,” Harvey said.
Adam & Eve, 302 Meadowland Drive, Hillsborough, NC 27278. 919.644.8100. Adam & Eve Pictures, 9445 De Soto Ave., Chatsworth, CA 91311. adameve.com.
Adam & Eve’s Phil Harvey is also interviewed on page 58 as part of this issue’s cover story.
