FLASHBACK: a taste of Honey

Taking our cue from the first line of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, join us for a deep dive into the ETO archive…

Pre-2000, the city of Bath, in England, was perhaps best known for its Georgian architecture, such as the magnificent Royal Crescent, and the still functioning Roman baths from which the city got its name. But as the noughties clicked by, it also became associated with an online retailer which specialised in sex toys.

The story began in 2001 when two ambitious former journalists decided to start a business together. Richard Longhurst had been an editor at Future Publishing, fronting both PC Format and .net, the first magazine about the Internet, and Neal Slateford worked at the publisher in a business development role, focusing on the company’s websites. Prior to this, Neal was a producer/remixer in the music biz, working with the likes of both Minogues and even having a hit himself with Tom’s Diner, under the name DNA, which went to No.1 in eleven countries and sold some 6m copies.

ETO was the first magazine to profile the pair after editor Dale Bradford visited them for a feature that appeared in the February 2004 issue. After the article appeared, Bradford received several ‘Who the hell are these?’ phone calls from industry veterans yet to cross paths with the founders of what became the Lovehoney Group.

It wasn’t long until everyone in the industry knew who the hell they were, but it could have been a very different story…

“For a long time, Neal and I had the idea of doing an online store,” Longhurst told Bradford in the 2004 article. “Initially it was going to be a kitsch toy store, with things like punching nuns, Austin Powers dolls, things like that, but with the success of shows like Sex and the City, it was pretty obvious that there was a huge demand for adult toys in general and women’s toys, such as vibrators, in particular. We also reasoned that there would be a lot of people who would prefer to buy products of this nature online. There aren’t sex shops in every town, and even if there was one in your town you might be a little nervous about going in and buying something. Buying online is completely anonymous for the customer, and we could have a bigger product range with keener prices. So sex toys were ideal products to sell online.”

The online competition at the time didn’t cause too many sleepless nights, according to Slateford: “We looked at the sites that were out there and thought that many of them were pretty ropey and that we could do a better job of making something that would be more appealing to females. Our site is hosted by Honey, a cartoon character, because we thought she would be less threatening to visitors. She’s like Barbarella meets Catwoman.”

“The thrust was to steer the site away from a sex toys site being semipornographic,” added Longhurst, “because they were all aimed at men - buy this and stick it up your girlfriend/wife - rather than being aimed at women. We wanted to say to them it’s okay to masturbate and here’s a great selection of toys to do it with.

“Many of the existing websites at the time would have cheesy, scanned-in pictures of pouting lingerie models, with just a product listing, providing no information. Or it would be on a black background and you couldn’t read the text, or there was badly written product descriptions... For a woman, the experience must have been a bit like going into a shop which had the lights turned off with a load of men heavy breathing behind the counter. So we got decent product pictures, described what the products do, provided advice on how to clean the toys and which ones were too noisy to use in a flat, all these kind of things, and highlighted the rabbits used by Charlotte or Samantha in Sex and the City. Because of our internet backgrounds, we had a pretty decent handle on how to make a website. We knew we could do it better than anyone else. It sounds arrogant but it’s probably true.” At the time, many online stores had names made from combinations of keyword-rich phrases, such as erotic sex toy dido dong store, to attract search engines’ attention, but Lovehoney went down a different road… “The inspiration for our name was a 1970s Russ Meyer film called Mud Honey,” explained Slateford. “We played around with it and came up with Love Honey and decided to create the Honey character. We wanted a name that sounded a bit sexy but which was also something you could use without embarrassment in conversation.”

Business was slow at first, but search engine optimisation, pay-per-click marketing, and partnerships with women’s portals helped the young firm to grow, as did affiliate schemes and clever PR. It developed an email mailing list, which it communicated with on a regular basis, but other than the gender of the person paying for the product, the company knew very little else about its customers, flying in the face of contemporary retail best practice. “From a direct marketeer’s standpoint, we are probably a worst-case scenario, because we ask for so little information,” said Longhurst. “But we don’t think people want to give out personal details in this environment. We don’t even ask how old people are. We know they’re over 18 because they’re using a card to buy with. But what are we going to ask them – do you take it up the arse?”

The only real gripe the pair had with the industry was product packaging. “For the most part, it is awful,” said Slateford, “which is why we photograph as much as possible out of the packaging. We were amazed how bad the packaging was when we got our first delivery, especially products which are going to be used by females. Why are there pictures of naked women on the box? Because it’s obviously been designed by men.”

As for the future, Slateford could only see the industry increasing in size, and he expected Ann Summers to have more competition on the UK High Street. He was correct on the former, less so on the latter.

The cartoon host is now just a distant memory, and looking at the article with fresh eyes, two decades later, the biggest takeaway was how often the pair referred to their customers, and emphasised that everything they did as a business was to make life easier for them. “You’ve got to be nice to your customers,” concluded Slateford. “I read in ETO a letter about a supplier that was in dispute with one of its customers. I was reading that and I just thought, well, they’ve lost that customer. We just want happy customers, because we haven’t got a business without them.”