The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Good Vibrations Sold to Midwestern Sex Toy Distributor

The big news this week in the San Francisco sex-positive community is that groundbreaking sex toy store, onetime cooperative and Blowfish competitor Good Vibrations has been sold to an adult industry conglomerate with a disturbingly cyberpunk name: GVA-TWN, which I am assuredly not alone in thinking sounds kind of like “Megacorp, Inc.”

Here in the Bay Area, where anti-corporate sentiment is practically a religion (or a disease, depending on your perspective), person-on-the-street reaction is, at least initially, far from positive despite the predictably neutral-positive spin given by local and adult-industry news sources.

After initially being broken by Joanne Cachapero at adult industry news source XBiz last Thursday, the story was reported Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate in a story headlined Good News for Good Vibrations: It’s Being Sold. The story read, in part: “Good Vibrations, the pioneering San Francisco sex toy retailer that had stumbled recently due to Internet competition, is being sold to a nationwide distributor of adult products, a move that will save the store and help it expand in other cities.” Good Vibrations board member Dr. Carol Queen told SFGate: “The stores are getting restocked even as we speak,” referring to an oft-commented-on shortage of product on GV’s shelves over the last few months.

But grumbles were heard in an avalanche of emails from throughout the nation; my inbox swelled to bursting with people who didn’t want to be quoted. “I have mixed feelings” seemed to be the general sentiment among former employees. Sex-positive folks in other cities were more unreservedly sad, and one person told me “It’s the end of an era.” Histrionic outrage was at a surprising low, but still wasn’t hard to find: one commenter on local blog SFSist almost immediately posted a link to the SFGate story under the subject line: “Hey, SFSIst, Good Vibrations sold out.”

I came of age punk rock community, anti-corporate and pro-DIY from my early days; I also worked in medical advertising for six years and was even Good Vibrations’ Marketing Manager from 2001-2004, so I’m either diverse of mind or one hell of a hippocrite, quite possibly both. I lived through the dot-com tech boom which, not to put too fine a point on it, was the unprecedented and at times utterly bizarre expansion — actually, “explosion” is a better term — of revenue-poor and cash-rich internet-related businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area round about 1999-2001, resulting in many high-paying jobs with stunningly vague job descriptions and titles like “Minister of Six Degrees” and “Deputy Vice President In Charge of Popcorn.” It was kind of like some divine prankster had gotten really fuckin’ high and started handing out revolving credit and corner offices.

The dot-com orgy was followed by the equally rapid crash known as the “dot-bomb,” which resulted in an almost daily vanishing of repossessed Audis and BMWs from my block in the Mission, not to mention a huge number of my acquaintances who decided it’d be just, oh, a swell time to go back to graduate school. Business, while she might be a whore, is never easy.

Perhaps more importantly, I’ve seen countless worthy creative and/or sex-related business endeavors, from book publishers to retail stores to online magazines to clothing designers to art galleries, go belly-up for reasons that were sometimes ambiguous, sometimes obvious. “Sold out” seems like a relative concept to me. It’s an accusation that’s easy to hurl and hard to deflect — but easy to ignore, because when a business is sold under duress, there are bigger concerns afoot than the disapproving snarks of one’s detractors. A September 7, 2007 SFGate story headlined Competition Has Shaken Good Vibrations detailed essentially the same information that was sent out in a letter to GV supporters in a letter from GV board members Dr. Charlie Glickman and Queen, that read, in part, “a growing outside challenge to our online model, plus a surprise blow resulting from changes made by the main internet search engine, combined to seriously undermine our web business, which has since gone down by almost 50%.”

The new parent company has asserted that it will retain all GV employees and keep its current management in place, which means essentially nothing — the details of a deal like this won’t ever be made clear to the general public, and everything could quietly change next month or next year after the deal is in place and things have quieted down.

But I doubt that’s the plan. Cachapero’s XBiz article quoted GVA-TWN CEO Rondee Kamins that the company “needs” Good Vibrations, referring to the challenge faced by the adult novelty industry in marketing to women, who, as a marketing demographic, seem to be less than eager to purchase products meant to go into one’s coochie that smell like urinal cake and sport packaging with phrases like “PUSSY-FUCKIN’ BEER CAN COCK” and “ENORMO-MASSIVE THROBBING FUCK DONG.” Presumably GVA-TWN’s strategy going forward is going to include a marketing push to women, and the acquisition is part of that.

Ultimately, though, if GV’s web business “has since gone down by almost 50%,” there’s no way GV-TWN needed Good Vibes as much as Good Vibes needed them. Given that GV was already quite publicly in dire financial straits, what’s the takeaway for the sex-positive community in San Francisco, of which Good Vibrations has long been an important part?

The answer is that nobody knows — probably not even the folks at Good Vibrations who even now must be uttering a sigh of relief. For the rest of us, Good Vibes is still around, and will be, in some form. It’s either the end of an era, or not. Either way, sex in the Bay Area goes on.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 2 October 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.