Q&A with Lovehoney's co-founder Neal Slateford

In this week’s column, Kehlan has an exclusive Irish interview with Neal Slateford, co-founder of Lovehoney, one of the largest adult toy sellers in Europe     

With sales hitting £45m (€58m) and a new ‘behind the scenes’ TV series, Lovehoney has had huge growth and now boasts healthy sales in Ireland as well. So Neal, what do you do?

Well, we are the sexual happiness people.

That means we sell an awful lot of sex toys, lingerie, sexy gifts, and games designed to help you have a better love life.

Myself and my business partner Richard Longhurst are nerds basically.

We were working with some magazine publisher — mainly based on PC and Gaming — that kind of thing. We saw lots of people making lots of money on e-commerce websites and we thought why don’t we start an e-commerce business together.

We looked around a lot of different industries to get into and we thought that adult toys were being poorly served at the time.

This was back in 2002. So, we saw there was an opportunity there for people who were going to treat the subject properly and make a website that was informative and fun.

We wanted to convey all the health benefits you can get from having a great sex life using sex toys.

We thought there was a real gap in the market and it would be fun, as it turned out to be.

You talk about fun a lot; is this to combat the impression of the seedy blacked-out shops you see on some streets?

I think the industry is gradually losing that stigma.

I do think that people still associate sex toys with those dingy shops with the blacked-out windows and the dodgy DVDs under the counter.

We couldn’t be further away from that; we’ve never sold pornography ever. What we’re about is the fun you can have and improvement in your sex life by using sex toys, that’s what we’re all about.

Everybody knows that sex is fun, its one of the most fun activities you can do if you’re doing it right. So we’re there to tell people the fun they can have.

All the surveys and all the statistics show that people who use toys within their relationships are much happier.

That’s the message that we’re trying to get across.

You know you have your five a day as part of your wellbeing, people need to pay the same attention to their sex lives. So our message is one of being very positive.

How does a company like yours generate sales of nearly £50m?

I think when we started our approach was very different to anyone else in the market and we stood out.

Because of that, we were able to get a headstart before anybody else realised what we were doing and tried to copy us.

That head-start was four to five years, so we were able to take a sizeable lead and turn that into customers and loyal customers at that.

It has also been helped massively by a big change in attitudes within society as well, particularly in the younger generation. It’s much more talked about, much more a topic of conversation.

I think when we started out in 2002 and you went to your family planning section of Boots or local pharmacy, you would see condoms and maybe some medical applications.

It was all about safety and things that could go wrong. Now you can go into any supermarket and find sex toys.

We’ve also been lucky that society has exploded with thoughts on this as society becomes more tolerant of something like this.

You also have a TV series about the company.

Yes, that’s right; the show is called The Joy of Sex Toys. It’s on the Lifetime Channel which is on SKY/Virgin/BT etc.

We’ve actually done a few series now, three I think at this stage. People love it because it’s fun and they get to see ordinary people in an extraordinary job.

I mean we in the office, we live on planet sex toy so we’re immune to anything and everything that comes across our desk.

It’s very normal to us to have toys lying around the office where as people find it funny.

I think people like to watch the fun we have and the meetings we have about product development.

I think we forget sometimes how lucky we are to be in this business because we do have an awful lot of fun at work so it’s nice to be able to share that with other people.

And it ties in nicely with the message you send to people?

Well, I’m not going to pretend to you that it’s not great for business as well.

But I think it’s good for the whole industry, not just us. Because it kind of normalises the whole industry.

Sometimes you feel that there is a perception that because of the type of industry we’re in and what we’re selling, that people are hanging from harnesses in some sort of dungeon or something like that.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s a very normal office where people send e-mails or fill out paperwork and all of the things that normal offices do.

The only difference is we have some very unusual objects around and some very unusual meetings.

So it’s very quirky and good for business. The show is available in 20 countries and is always on somewhere around the world. So the brand is constantly out there.

So, you’ve positioned yourself as a global brand now?

Yes, we have operations in Australia the US.

That gives us the ability to have 24 hour customer care.

So when the UK call centre operators are tucked up in bed we can then switch to one of the other centres depending on the time.

So we can offer customers 24/7 care for whatever they need. We also have French and German language websites as well as operators and website content producers in those languages as well.

So, yeah, we are an international business now and in the coming years, we’re going to look at the US market and developing the business over there.

We’re also concentrating on Australia and some new territories in the pipeline so it’s a new focus for us in the coming few years.

Do you carry out a lot of search engine optimisation (SEO) to bring people to you?

We don’t really go out of our way to do massive amounts of SEO.

We generate some good content on our site which is attractive to people who want to find out more about topics or products.

We also started doing a lot of TV advertising in the UK and Ireland as well.

We also do a lot PR including our very popular ‘Design Your Own Sex Toy’ competition.

One of the guys who won one of our earlier competitions was Trevor and he’s actually from Ireland.

He was able to basically retire on the royalties and now he works as a stand-up comedian. So, continuing that conversation with people and bringing what we do more into the mainstream will be the key to the future.

We have our plan for expansion and another couple of interesting projects in the pipeline, so the next few years are going to be exciting and, of course, fun.