The latest episode of our podcast I Make Sex Toys is out, and it's the one where the plan fell apart before we'd even landed.
We shipped two crates and a pod to Los Angeles a week ahead of the ANME show in Burbank. They got as far as LAX and stopped. Three sets of power of attorney. A form rejected because "managing director" apparently isn't a real job title. A request for a social security number from a British company. An FDA requirement that didn't apply to us. By Thursday it was obvious the crates weren't coming, so we went to plan B.
Plan B was two black hand luggage bags and an iPad.
That was the stand. Everything else, 22 years of workshop footage, ran as a slideshow on the iPad. And it worked. We spent two and a half days in the main ballroom talking to buyers, and the thing they kept coming back to wasn't the packaging or the display. It was that we make the stuff ourselves, in our own UK workshop, rather than pulling it off a container.
We recorded this one in a Burbank hotel room after the stand was packed up, with Ian aka StuntCock . Caz and Rachel had been sent to the pool. Nobody was left to keep either of us check, hence the title.
What's in the episode
- The full customs saga, and why we've started calling them DH Hell
- Fitting an entire trade stand into carry-on
- Frankie the Tankie, a Jeep the size of a London bus, and a car park with a very low roof
- Moving to Shopify the hard way, and saying yes before you know how
- Two award nominations, no wins, and the disco dildo stand next door that did win
- Ian's route from 23 years in the army to reviewing sex toys
- The photo Ian really shouldn't have sent his mum
- Why independent stores and artisan makers still matter
- Who e-stim actually appeals to, and why "everyone" is the wrong answer
The systems failed. The people didn't. That's most of what we took home from it.
Listen
Play it on the episode page, or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. Full transcript is on the episode page if you'd rather read it.
New IMST episodes generally land on the second Tuesday of the month.
source https://estim.store/blogs/news/adult-supervision-required-anme-podcast