“I develop s*x toys for a living”
Could you tell me a little bit about you and your life?
I’m 26 and live with my boyfriend and our two cats. Since 2020 I’ve been working for companies that predominantly sell their products on Amazon 3rd party - which means businesses selling to customers via Amazon, rather than selling to Amazon. It is an entire industry that I didn’t know existed before 2020 and that most people are still unaware of!
How did you land your job working in sex toy development?
I actually started doing a more commercial sales manager-type role, managing a few different existing brands (not including sex toys). I then took on new product development (NPD) responsibilities as an add-on to this when the business wanted to grow our portfolio.
The company I now work for owns a range of brands including a couple of vibrator brands we acquired a few years ago. I wasn’t directly managing the day-to -day of these products, but I did start doing NPD for them when I worked on NPD for the entire category.
We’re just starting out with NPD doing maybe 20 products per year so I can balance it with my existing workload. If you wanted to launch more new products you’d need to have someone doing this full time (which is our plan for 2025, to hire someone in), but that would be at category level - so that person will do NPD for sex toy brands and also other brands we have!
What does it involve?
We started out expanding the current range with new colours or shapes of vibrators, but then grew our plans to include new markets e.g strap ons, dildos, bondage etc. So this now takes up around 40% of my day-to-day work, with the other 60% being commercial/ sales management for the rest of our portfolio.
When i’m working on NPD it involves:
- reviewing potential new markets or product ideas
- doing competitor walks e.g. looking in shops like Ann summers, soho fetish shops etc to see what is selling in retail
- briefing our sourcing team for new products and explaining what we want to develop
- reviewing samples in person that our suppliers send
- Project managing the creative elements, briefing artwork, collaborating with graphic designers on packaging, imagery etc
- Creating forecasts, reviewing unit economics, ensuring the projects are viable at our target price points
- presenting to senior leadership on strategy and plans (yes I have presented to the C suite with dildos on the screen!)
How do you handle telling family/friends about your job? Any horror stories?
I’m fairly open with my family and friends about it, because I personally think it’s hilarious. My parents know, but I haven’t told my nan because she’s 92 and it might push her over the edge! People are generally very interested and think it’s funny that I get paid to have a zoom call at 9am with people all around the world talking about strap-on dildos.
I did have a very testing conversation with my dad (who is not very prudish) explaining the difference between a vibrator and a dildo. We were in a cafe and he’s a naturally loud talker so it must’ve looked horrendous from the outside, but he’s just interested!
Do you enjoy the job?
I love my job! NPD breaks up my commercial role and lets me be a bit more creative, even if it’s working on some untoward products! I would say we’re fairly vanilla though, compared with some of the things I’ve seen from competitors! My colleagues and I always have a laugh about it but I’ve never been made to feel uncomfortable in any scenario - which is really important given the conversations we have to have day to day. As it’s not my full time role, my pay is based on my original sales manager role (which is generally good!). If you were doing NPD full time though, I would expect you could earn around £38-50k as a product development manager, and around £55k-£70k as a senior product development manager for this kind of business.