Coming into the adult industry, I hadn’t a clue to what it really looked like, not that it looks anything now like it looked like in the late 1990’s. But honestly, I’m not so sure all those changes are good. It’s hard to discern whether that opinion is nostalgia or actually real. Change happens.
Now I was in a very nitch segment of the sex toy industry. Dildos were for everybody, but silicone dildos were for the elite consumer. They really were only available in big cities with a feminist store, except for the fact that Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence had gone on a big road trip doing sex education classes and leaving Good Vibration catalogs, and helpful hints for fisting, in remote communities. You could buy silicone in stores in SF, LA, Seattle, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Providence, Portland and not that many other places. But even then you were most likely a lesbian or a very liberated women, silicone wasn’t marketed to men at all. Also, silicone toy sculptures were all dolphins or goddesses or abstracts and mainly they came in muted pastels. All the other places, the video stores and the magazine shops, you got rubber, latex, and PVC. Really, silicone people didn’t mix with the rest of the industry— not until Tantus came along.
From our early ideas about making penetrative art you’d set atop your night stand to enjoy, not in the drawer, we had sat with the ideas awhile- and we watched. It was 4 years until we really decided to give it a go and our concept by the end was much bolder.
When we started playing with the idea of creating sex toys, I really hadn’t a clue what Kris Victor, my business partner’s, background was, but once I did, we put his knowledge to good use. He was an artist who painted and did metal work and sculpted. He had no formal training but he had chutzpah and he had a fulltime job making art.
Kris had been originally from Ohio where he’d become a machinist. He hated making the same thing 8 hours a day. Newly divorced, he left for Florida where he landed in Ocala and got a job with a company called Museum Services. They were a job shop making sculptures for theme parks and museum displays. They worked a lot at Universal and Trump’s tacky Taj Mahal.
It was at Universal that he had cast the largest silicone mold in the world at that time (early 1980’s). It was the redwood tree for the ET ride.
This was in Florida so the tree didn’t just go up 100- 200 ft, the structure had to withstand hurricane winds. Kris told me the mold was poured in two parts and because silicone is a two-part material that starts setting when they mix, he had to do each pour without stopping over 18 hours for one side and over 24 for the other. He was the mold maker so it was a lot of overtime. The silicone got hot having so much volume pour constantly through the static mixers, to keep it from setting up in the nozzle they had to wrap the hose in rags soaked in a solvent.
Museum Services at the time was the biggest purchaser of silicone in the US. They bought from GE and it was GE who had given, yes according to Kris “given” them a machine to mix the silicone. Kris knew what it looked like but had no idea who made it.
We searched and searched online for the machine. When our search was futile, Kris drew a diagram of the machinery and what it consisted of and we priced out making it ourselves- the parts purchased one by one out of catalogs came to well over $100,000 and almost made us think again about the whole project. Luckily, silicone people know everyone in the field. When we did research on material sourcing, we also got the lead to Fluid Automation, the brothers who’d designed the machine Kris had used back in Florida for GE.
What this machinery did was take two silicone components (a part A and a part B) and mix them together through a static mixer up at the nozzle. The liquid silicone material was under pressure in the machine and had already been vacuumed in a vacuum chamber so, as long as everything was kosher, we had no bubbles in our dildos. Once mixed, the silicone began to cure and set up. We also had low heat ovens to speed up the 24 hour cure to 1 hour. We were certain at the time none of the US manufacturers of silicone dildos were doing it this way, manufacturing this efficiently. We could pour hundreds of butt plugs a day. Really, we were only constrained by the number of molds we made and the hands to help trim and packaging them.
Because we’d traveled to cities that didn’t have silicone toys available, I quickly reset the goal post. We weren’t just going to make art, we were going to mainstream silicone dildos— and that’s what we did.
Three years in, I happened to find an article Anne Semans wrote where she shared Vixen Creations silicone sales numbers (Ms Semans was an employee of Vixen at the time and I think this was PR she did for them). Vixen had sold 30,000 units the previous year with 9 employees. I crunched my numbers. We had sold 30,000 units with 3 of us- Kris, myself and one other employee, Raina. We kept erratic hours and sometimes didn’t make a thing just hung out and waited for orders. We had tons of backstock. We could easily have done more. We were scalable. That’s when I decided we were going after distributors.
I’d done our first ANME and it had been nerve wracking, but I had learned so much. We had two small distributors by then, JT Stockroom and Venus Envy in Canada but they didn’t get the industry’s traditional discounts. I think they were getting something like 20% off wholesale. I’d crunched the number to see exactly what we could do, and at our second year at AMNE, I set my sights a little higher.
We didn’t have connections to get packaging, we didn’t know what we were doing yet. But we did find ready-made clam shells and so we bought them and printed out a back for each. It wasn’t pretty, the toys flopped around a lot and the print backs I’d created myself, but it was a start. We also bought a registered UPC code. We were going BIG! LOL
Kris went with me that year to Universal City Sheraton and the ANME show. He made quite an impression on everyone. Kris was an extravert and a character with no fear. Plus, his home away from home was a bar, and in an industry that makes deals in the bar, he felt a bit too comfortable. First night after set up he challenged one of the biggest men in the bar- Bob Wolf. I was in bed but everyone was laughing about it the next day, telling me how this big mouthed, 5’5” and 135-pound guy took on the notorious ex bouncer and equally loud mouth Bob. And somehow the small guy, he won.
One of the advantages for me to being the face of Tantus, besides not having your business partner pounded for his outrageous mouth in the bar, was that I was a secular Jew. The adult industry in the late 1990’s was with few exceptions- Jewish. I fit in. It felt like I was tolerated and maybe even mentored, because I looked like one of the tribe. Kris, on the other hand looked like the Scandinavian gnome he was. I could have been anyone’s niece or daughter at that show. The first year, even with the critique, it felt like I had an air of protection around me. I met people and they liked me, some even bought from me, others waited for me to grow up a little… and get packaging.
So here we were year 2 at the main sex toy trade show in the country, and I had more than a little anxiety about what antics Kris would get into.
There was an older dapper man who had come by the booth the year before. This year he gave me his card. I wish I had kept it (I put it in a rolodex- remember those), I think (and others thought it probable) it was Ted Marche1. Unfortunately, at the time, his name meant nothing to me. But he was very interested in Tantus and he was on Doc Johnsons board.
While it was a nice bonus being Jewish, it wasn’t being a woman. They invited Kris to the North Hollywood factory, and so the second day of the show I held down the fort (booth) and off he went.
They wanted to acquire us… US. They saw the future or they saw a deal.
Kris spent that evening figuring out how to scale up to meet the numbers they talked about and we got very nervous. What would this even look like? Would we get any money yet? Neither one of us knew how to write future earnings into a contract. Hell, we’d never signed more than a lease agreement. We were babes in the woods. The one good thing with Kris having been the partner they scooped to their lair was that he knew absolutely nothing about the business other than the process. He had no idea what our sales were or profit or any other number- it wasn’t his jam. They’d asked and his reply- I have no idea!
I remember hearing Kris talk on the phone with them the next day morning, making light that they wouldn’t kill our business if we said no, right??? This was a real question. It was something we were very unclear about. We distinctly had the feeling if they wanted to push us out, they totally could.
Luckily the board wasn’t sold on the idea of silicone and the vision that Mr. Marche saw.
I picked up 3 distributors that show. Eldorado, Entrenue and the company Bob Wolf bought for, General Video West.
Connie, the sales manager for Eldorado, took me aside before we left and suggested I never bring Kris back to ANME. I never did.
Ted Marche owned Marche Manufacturing which he started out of his garage in 1965, having taken over John Francis’ business of hollow prosthetics meant for ED sufferers. He was a retired ventriloquist. He took big chances and sold through the mail which was a federal offence but a big opportunity and Marche Manufacturing became the largest name in sex toys.
When one of his anal toys, a toy that had a rotation device, literally reamed someone for lack of a cap on the wire that held its form (Think rotational toy like a rabbit. Unfortunately, it happens because employees who put toys together are human and sometimes accidents happen) he lost a big settlement in the courts. He had no liability insurance so he closed his factory and as I understand it, Ruben Sturman, who invented the coin operated XXX booth and owned General Video of America (GVA) Distribution, came to North Hollywood and Doc Johnson was created. I’ve never heard the complete tale from someone in the know, but I do understand Ron Braverman was a childhood friend of Sturman and someone he felt he could trust as the Federal Government was closing in on him.
If you’re wondering if “General Video of America (GVA)” and “General Video West (GVW)” were related— absolutely. Sturman’s son David and his “cousin” (their fathers were friends and business partners back in Cleveland at GVA), Joel Kaminsky had drug habits (I was told by a reliable), and the family wanted them out of Ohio where their parties were. Why San Francisco, known for its drugs, I have no idea! But, small world.
For more info on Ted Marche buy Hallie Lieberman’s book Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy. Buy it. It’s full of amazing sex toy tales.