When it comes to the adult industry, porn and sex toys are often linked not just because of their shared goals of pleasure and entertainment, but also because it’s smart business! As performers have expanded their reach and found new and innovative ways to connect with fans, they’ve partnered with sex toy companies to incorporate their most famous attributes into pleasure products and taken advantage of the international reach that adult retail offers — especially online.
Adult stars offer manufacturers a direct channel to some of the most motivated and active customers in the world. Having a sex toy deal with a performer makes them the face — and often the body — of the products while providing a direct sales conduit to a fan base that’s ready and eager to support their favorite stars in any way they can. Let’s take a look at how star-powered, star-branded products can benefit you and your customers.
These kinds of likeness-centered products give consumers a tangible way to connect with their favorite stars, which can lead to big sales for you.
What Are Star-Powered or -Branded Products?
These are sex toys that have an association or affiliation with an adult performer, whether through a licensing deal or a collaboration. These products can include dildos molded from adult stars’ famous penises to handheld masturbators and strokers molded from performers’ legendary mouths, vulvas and anuses. They even go big-time with life-size replicas molded out of soft and supple TPR, offering large-scale masturbators and full-size love dolls. These kinds of likeness-centered products give consumers a tangible way to connect with their favorite stars, which can lead to big sales for you.
In the past, these products were the domain of big-name performers with exclusive studio contracts, often with several big-budget features under their belts. Today, however, driven, savvy performers might use camming or social media to build a motivated fanbase that prefers to connect with their faves on a personal level. For those performers, branded products are especially worthwhile because their fan relationships rival most others.
What Are the Benefits of Branded Products?
Perhaps the most obvious benefit of branded products is name recognition. While a consumer might not know to look for specific toys or brands, they will recognize their favorite performer’s name and likeness on packaging, which will draw them to it. When a toy is associated with a specific performer, they will promote it. Most have specific marketing requirements built into their contracts, which offers a kind of built-in marketing that we rarely see with non-branded products.
As far as the products go, working with a performer allows manufacturers to cater to specific demographics according to performers' audiences. Performers know what they are renowned for and what their audience loves about their work, which can help guide which products they connect themselves to. For example, a performer who is known for anal scenes may want to brand strokers and masturbators with an anal orifice — or even have an exact mold taken of their own.
Molding a toy from a performer’s body can result in the most realistic, lifelike product possible. While many sex toys are getting more realistic every day, nothing can match the realism of a product that is literally sculpted from a specific body part. Tom of Finland Pleasure Tools are known for their dildos hand-sculpted from the artist’s famous illustrations and it doesn’t get more lifelike than that!
Bring Shoppers’ Fantasies to Life
When working with shoppers to select a product, there are several ways to successfully approach star-branded toys. First off, find out if they are looking for something specific, like a stroker or a dildo, and always be sure to include a star-branded product when available to see how they connect to the idea. Never assume shoppers know that the porn stars they see online have products with their likenesses; surprise the right shopper with this news and you may end up with an instant sale.
Experience has shown us that even people who aren’t specifically porn fans often purchase performer-branded products. While they may not have recognized the performer, shoppers often select items with packaging that features people they feel drawn or connected to. So always make sure to display performer toys with the photograph facing out.
On the other hand, some shoppers come in just to browse or only have a vague idea of what they’d like. This is your opportunity to ask questions, including, “Are there any performers you particularly enjoy?” This opens the conversation in a permissive way while also highlighting an entire category of products they may not have known existed. For folks who don’t have a favorite performer, branded products can serve as a gateway to all that the adult entertainment industry has to offer. Pointing them towards a performer’s products may help them connect with that performer and, moving forward, seek out their movies and clips, social media and, of course, more branded products.
Star-powered products create unparalleled opportunities for retailers. They bring fans into your store, they come with the built-in marketing power of the performers behind them and they connect customers with performers they may now come to love. This can all lead to big sales and attract lifelong customers who will keep coming back for years to come.
Rebecca Weinberg is the president of XR Brands.
