Origin Story

Every Business Should Have a Good Tail

Every company has an origin story. Tantus’ was a joke. Literally. We were in Sausalito goofing off and wandered into a small gallery with an acrylic sculpture that was slightly phallic and I made a joke. Kris Victor was an artist who was working for a used record company, Streetlight Records, making furniture and epoxying floors and really doing what ever odd jobs needed to be done (tote, load and bale, oh and sell electronics parts at the San Jose Flea Market on the weekend). He seemed pretty happy go lucky, definitely the fool stepping one foot off the cliff per your favorite tarot deck. I was a graduate student not really very centered on my studies. I knew what I wanted but didn’t feel like I had all the skill set and definitely not the confidence… so I’d settled into a safe program and I had regrets. I didn’t do the work. I stopped going to school. I was pretty done, but I was working weekends at crafts festivals and had hooked up with Kris and together we were co-conspirators.

We signed a partnership agreement. We were going to keep each other out of trouble; or we were going to get into trouble together… whichever. We were sleeping together, but it wasn’t serious. We wanted to make things. We wanted to make aesthetic objects that made people happy. We wanted to make Neo Furniture.

Yes, Tantus was to be a furniture company doing over the top outrageous metal and lush velvet furniture that would sell for top dollar if you could find the clientele that was into that. Meanwhile, we just got together and looked at art, talked, ate good food and drank. Damn he could drink and for a short while I tried to keep up. Of course, we weren’t Tantus back then, we didn’t have a name.

Kris drove an Edsel. A 1959 lemon faced Edsel land yacht. I was up in San Francisco and he was down in Pacific Grove, west of Monterey. He’d come up in the Edsel and we’d search for parking. I remember one memorable evening in the Mission district. We were at this club where the sake was hot, the bar tender wore only a black slip, and we were imbibing. It was a good time. Around midnight we left to go back to my place and low and behold the Edsel was gone. Now the last known car theft of an Edsel was back in the mid 60’s and this was the early 90’s. We walked the block and no Edsel where we’d parked it. No Edsel a block up. We walked back. We noticed an Edsel on the opposite side of the street but Kris assured me that was not his Edsel. We repeated our walk and I finally said I was checking the Edsel out… just in case it actually was his. Yup. And no, we shouldn’t have been driving.

So, I’d made a joke about a sculpture in Sausalito, “Look it’s a dildo”. And the next night I called him up and said “Remember my joke? That is viable.” I’d thought about it and dildos were easier to sell than $10,000 pieces of furniture no matter how fun they looked.

We thought of ourselves as artists, not as Adult Business people. We were going to make artwork you could lay on your coffee table and reach for just in case your evening was going right. LOL We would make objects d’art that you wouldn’t want to hide in a nightstand. They would be acrylic and colorful and funny or beautiful depending. We started making plans.

We had a list: we would cast around objects: Goddess would have a plastic Marilyn Monroe in it, Porker would have various plastic pigs, Impersonator an Elvis. We bought licensed figures awaiting when we’d actually start to make prototypes and figure them out… meanwhile we drank and laughed and brainstormed. I had a drawing of a panther in some art book. It was in deco style and I thought oh how beautiful that would be… not funny, but really classical. Kris began doing due diligence with that.

He started with a wooden dowel that he put a wooden ball on. The ball would be the handle the panther laying up the rod, his tail wrapping around the ball. It was beautiful in our minds and really stunning when Kris got 80-90% done with the clay overlay. He needed to streamline a couple parts both so they’d cast well and not hurt anyone. Perhaps I critiqued a bit too harshly, perhaps he’d been drinking a bit too much. What ever it was the panther was thrown across the room and I was heartbroken. Kris said he could just sculpt it again but he never did.

Things were often volatile with Kris. We were characters and we were dreamers. This was probably 1993. We had plans for a gallery at one point “Fools Rush In”, even had a business logo and business cards printed for that… He would have had so much fun with that, but it wouldn’t have lasted, somehow or another he’d have smashed that too. We didn’t really begin getting a sex toy business together until 4 years later. By that time I realized silicone was a better material for toys. But that is another story.