The Women’s Room seminar, geared toward retailers, fascinated a packed conference room of AEE trade attenders. The lively discussion featured a panel of highly articulate women, each with long experience in selling novelties and videos to their own sex.
Phyllis Heppenstall, creator of Peekay, Inc., turned a home party business in Washington 25 years ago into a chain of 32 Lovers Package stores on the West Coast. Rachel Venning co-founded Babeland, a 15 year-old Seattle-based online retailer with four brick and mortar stores and a 75% female customer base.
Carol Queen is staff sexologist with San Francisco-based Good Vibrations, the worker-owned doyenne of feminist sex retailers. Donna Tietz manages Video Dimensions in Glenville, Ill., a mom and pop store that stocks 35,000 adult titles.
Needing no introduction to anyone with an interest in adult video was Candida Royalle, founder of Femme Productions, the first company to specifically create porn for women and couples.
The discussion was chaired by Kathee Brewer, an editor with AVN Online, who laid out the seminar’s theme, that recent years have seen a considerable growth in female consumers of adult products, and that these consumers have to be approached differently than men. She also pointed out that 20-25% of visitors to porn websites are women, "and those figures are rising."
Stores like Good Vibes and Babeland, Venning said, evolved out of the feeling that all sex emporiums were just for men. Women realized they were entitled to have sextoy stores of their own, just as they realized they were entitled to have orgasms of their own. Heppenstall said she too opened her store because "women had no place to shop" for sex-related merchandise. "We want women to say, I accept and embrace that it is my right [to have access to such material]," she added. She cautioned against taking a one size fits all approach toward selling to women.
"The women’s market is segmented demographically just like the larger market. You can’t be everything to everybody." Queen pointed out that "lousy sex education" is one of the driving forces behind women’s curiosity about adult materials. "People just out of high school want to get their hands on porn" to see what they haven’t been taught about.
As for the content of those videos, Royalle said that showing a woman enjoying herself sexually is far more important than a romantic setting or a soap opera plot. Queen emphasized that "women are shoppers. It’s not profoundly different to shop for sextoys once they get it into their heads that it’s all OK." She and Venning stressed the importance of having a sales staff that is knowledgeable about the products and about sexuality in general. "If you can train your staff to help the customers, they are more likely to return," Venning said. Royalle pointed out that selling gonzo porn featuring circus-style sex feats is easy, but "to sell to a market that’s a little bit resistant" requires more creativity. "It’s got to be personal," Tietz said about dealing with female customers. "All women are different."
Heppenstall defined marketing as "everything you do that touches the customer." Other topics included the importance of sex-ed training for the sales staff. "Do the training yourself if you have to," Venning said. "Get to know the product you’re selling," Royalle recommended, noting that many male directors consistently make product that would appeal to women, and many don’t, and a retailer should be aware of the difference. Tietz said that a must for any video store is to organize the product clearly by section, genre by genre. "You’ve got to break everything down," she said. "When customers are interested in a certain thing you can point them toward what they want."
Another subject addressed was location, with Heppenstall pointing out that "landlord bias and local jurisdiction law are the biggest inhibitors of growth. Learn your [local] ordinances and understand them," she recommended. As for the future, Queen predicted, "We’re going to see more and more women-oriented shops in small cities around the country."
Photo of Kathee Brewer and Candida Royalle by G.P.
