Do you believe in premonitions? In psychic influences? In destiny?
I come from a family that has stories. They are mainly from my grandmother, but I was very close to my grandmother Sally, and she saved me more than once. She also gave me the humor to build a dildo business, and she taught me to trust my instincts.
My grandmother had awoken in the middle of the night to a dream one time and then the phone rang—before my grandfather answered, she told him his mother had died. She’d been visited by her, and assured that Rosalie was in a good place.
My grandmother had traveled by greyhound bus once, from her best friend’s in Pasadena to back in the SF Bay Area, and in her luggage she’d carefully wrapped the jewelry she’d traveled with. She’d folded it in tissue (the kind grandma’s always have up their sleeves- or at least mine did) put it in a side silk pocket of her hard sided samsonite and watched them load it. When she got home the jewelry was missing. She checked the pocket, my mother checked the pocket, the tissue wrapped gold and jade and pearls, and what ever she’d brought, had vanished— but she didn’t believe it had been stolen. She didn’t think anyone had gone into her luggage. She went to a psychic to ask about the missing jewels and she was told her mother was trying to speak with her. Ha- she never had had a close relationship with her mother. The psychic was obviously wrong, sister who acted like her mom… maybe. Anyway, for what ever reason, about 5-7 years later my grandmother was leaving for another trip, opened her bag and found the jewelry all wrapped in tissue in the pocket where she’d left it.
When things go missing, I never worry; I figure they’ll turn up. When I feel déjà vu, I think of grandma and smile. When my gut tells me to take pause, I do.
Now, I have been nothing but proud to have founded a dildo company. My grandmother had passed before I started, but my father was still alive. I remember telling him what I’d created (Tantus was new and he and I weren’t very close, my sister said it was because we were too much alike). His reaction— he smirked. I remember that lopsided grin which said “Of course you did Metis. Who else!” So, I was kind of surprised when the Tantus phone rang and the woman on the other end asked for the owner of Tantus and I quickly handed the phone to Kris.
It wasn’t a warm, friendly voice. It was business through and through voice and I just knew it wasn’t good.
The legal cease-and-desist certified letter came to Kris Victor a few days later. It was bullshit, but it was drama. I hate lawyers.
It was early 2000. We weren’t quite two years into sales. We knew no one. We hadn’t done a trade show. We were just starting to employ people like Aimee, who was like a daughter and stayed at our home when she wasn’t on the road following the Renaissance circuit, and Zack, Kris’ son who lived with us, with various Renaissance friends lending a helping hand when needed (a henna artist, a seamstress, a stained glass artist, a sword maker, your average group of nomadic crafters), we may have hired Raina by then but maybe it was later that year. We had originally lived in our 1200 square foot warehouse (shh don’t tell anyone), taking whore showers in the bathroom sink and at lunch, taking our dogs out for hikes in the Garden of the Gods, but by 2000 we’d bought our 1926 bungalow in Pueblo.
Colorado Springs was a weird place to start a dildo empire, less than ten miles from Focus on the Family in its hay day, but it was inexpensive rent and we had some land we’d bought not too far away, up on Pikes Peak. Colorado was conservative back then, all but Boulder. And mainly the Springs was a military town. When the evangelical church moved from Orange County California, the home of Disney Land, to this sleepy city, you could get houses on the cheap, but once they moved in they found there were no jobs that paid like those in California. They marketed the town and lured lucrative telecommunications industries to move there. Cell phones, the wave of the future. Hahaha
Anyway, if you want to know how a red state turns blue, lure tech companies. Tech industries have young educated employees who are mostly introverts and a lot of queer people! You want the quality of life, expect the politics. Next thing you know they’ll make pot legal. LMAO
Now when we’d first come up with the idea of making dildos in 1993, I’d gone to the SFSU library to do research. I was a student there trying a bad attempt at English Lit and really regretting I hadn’t stuck to my guns with Humanities. Humanities students- we make small talk at cocktail parties and we research things. Regarding dildos, I’d found a book which had Roman phallic artwork in the library. I’d taken the book over to the photo copier and took the page as reference.
In May of 1998 Kris and I had been working full time getting Tantus together since November. We had made our sculptures, sourced our silicone, found and purchased our machinery, produced a flier sheet and put together welcome packets. After we posted the packets, we found immediately we had sales. Truly, we mailed them all on a Thursday and Monday we had our first faxed order.
We hadn’t known what was happening within the small silicone community of dildos, but it turned out one of the less than 10 manufacturers world wide had just announced they would no longer be wholesaling their wares.
Bend With The Wind was #3 in silicone sales in the US at the time, right behind Vixen and Scorpio (and really I think they were #2, I wasn’t seeing as much Scorpio by then, but I didn’t have real info, it’s all just a guess, no one has numbers). If I remember, they were ceramicists who had by far the most artistic dildos, and the best finished masters before Tantus came onto the scene. They had a dildo called Shakti with a snake wrapped around it. They also had a horn, unicorn style. They were similar to what we had aspired to be- artistic dildos. Their most identifiable toy, which was well stocked by all the “Feminist Toy Stores” was the Boomerang (image from Babeland back when it was Toys in Babeland). It was the first silicone double dildo. Stores were scrambling to fill the hole Bend with The Wind was leaving right as we debuted. Our timing was amazing.
Timeline:
We began selling dildos May of 1998.
June 1998, I got a phone call from this woman who had a patent on a toy. Her company was Erogenics and she was interested in Tantus manufacturing and selling the toy through our channel (what channel, we were a month into sells and less than 10 wholesale customers) and she told us she expected 30,000 units of sales per year. I thought she was crazy about those numbers, but I heard her out and was open to her revolutionary idea- which she never fully described. What broke that idea off was when she talked to Kris. Mia Kain was a little pushy in a good ol’ Southern way. She understood mold making and that was Kris’ domain. When she stepped on his toes verbally too hard, he hung up on her. I wrote her a sweet note admitting we were too green and too small. I recommended Vixen or Topco for her project, wishing her well. She contacted both of them. Vixen wasn’t interested and Topco made a prototype that Kain used with her girlfriend and ended up breaking that in one evening’s play. She let her pending patent go through the system and waited for us to grow up.
Early 2000 we got the letter.
It was only after I got the C&D letter that I looked up the patent for the double that became the Feeldoe®. I printed the patent off the internet , grabbed my images of Roman Priapus from the San Francisco State library, an image of Bend With The Wind’s Boomerang, our drawings and pictures of the clayed up Duet artwork, the threatening letter and we met up with a Trademark Patent lawyer to defend ourselves.
The letter claimed we had breached a copyright on our Duet; this was not from Erogenics, nor Bend With The Wind, who was still doing direct to customer sales through their website. It was Vixen defending their Nexus.1
The problem was the products didn’t look the same. And the language in the letter was more intellectual patent which seemed absurd as double dildos had been made by others (and as proven in the images from my research the idea was thousands of years old). Our lawyer gave us a letter on his official Patent Attorney letterhead and thankfully it was only a $500 letter ‘cause we had no money. He warned us though, he was much more concerned with the Erogenics patent.
The Duet was a complicated casting. It was made in two parts, the shorter and the longer phallus. Wacker Silicone had a silicone adhesive, originally made for the aeronautics’ industry. We would cast the two dildos which were both at acute angles (and the smaller one may look sort of familiar as the master was made into the Acute a little later), used the adhesive to glue them, and then we took the sculpture to a sanding machine and cleaned up the seam. Because we polished the masters, the rough surface of the bridge on the Duet seemed less finished.
Honestly, we couldn’t keep up with production on these. They were so labor intensive and the sanding was so awkward to do. They were popular but we couldn’t keep up.
We fought it- the battle of letters. No one contacted us again. For all intents and purposes, we won. Years later, we spoke with Marilyn Bishara, Vixens owner. It was a very friendly conversation.
Legal issues always feel like needless anxiety. Lawyer threats zap you of your desire to create and instead keep you in a state of holding tight what you already have, hoping you don’t lose something vital. And only lawyers can fight lawyers. The response has to come on stationary with a Esq’s letterhead. In truth, I read my lawyers response, it wasn’t very good, I edited it which made it much stronger, and had him sign and send that one. Wish I’d had the stationary… it would have saved me $500.
Anyways, less than a year after, we had a few batches of Duets that didn’t sand well and we eventually thought we didn’t want to go against a real patent. We were worried about stepping back in that legal muck. So, we retired it.
It was a really lovely toy though. I don’t even have one… if you do let me know. I’d love to know what you think of it all these years later.
I thought long and hard how to tell this story without pointing out the other party. I wrote a forward to it and posted it earlier (please read the Forward post). I believe Vixen did what they felt they should to protect themselves. I in no way want to vilify then. We adulted with dildos together.