Lingerie and sex toy chain’s boss tapped into the female market by embracing Britain’s peculiar erotic humour
hen Jacqueline Gold arrived to shake up Ann Summers, the company had already been in the family for a decade, bought by her father, David, and uncle Ralph Gold. They had made the initial leap from sex shop to what they styled as a “lingerie boutique”; it would be more accurate to say they took it from a shop women never went into to a shop women did go into, while still selling the same sex toys and lucky knickers., went far beyond the shops themselves or even the operation.
First, she leaned right into the smut, sought to wear it with pride, and this was the source of most of the controversy: a few ad campaigns fell foul of the Advertising Standards Authority for being too much for the high street. Other objections ran a bit deeper than obscenity: a blowup doll, Mustafa Shag, was considered a needless provocation to Muslim groups.
There was never any attempt to make the displays look discreet or classy, and in the 80s and 90s they were quite incongruous.
Second, recognising there was a big untapped market of women who wanted the goods but would not step inside the shops, Gold created the party plan as soon as she arrived: basically Tupperware parties, except with sex toys, underwear, my guess is quite a lot of prosecco or, back in the day, Babycham. By 2003 there were 4,000 parties a week in the UK. They were eventually capsized, partly by the internet, partly by the growing realisation among party planners that it was quite hard.
That sex toy trajectory, where vibrators went from being a thing women were too embarrassed to be caught shopping for, to a thing they would give each other as a gift, is often put down to theand the City effect, one episode in particular, The Turtle and the Hare, where Miranda lends Charlotte her Rabbit. But more influential in the UK was the grassroots effect, thousands of women a week, over two decades, talking about sex toys quite freely in a social setting.
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