‘My parents helped me pack lube’: from sex toys to bidets, the lockdown businesses that boomed

For most businesses, the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic were an economic horror story measured in job losses and plummeting sales graphs. But this was not the case for everyone. As lockdown measures were imposed around the globe, certain companies struggled to cope with sudden demand from a confined populace with new, highly specific needs.

So what was it like to be the focus of such frenzied consumer interest? How did they cope with self-isolating staff and faltering supply chains? And what are their hopes now the world is tentatively reopening? Here, five different companies reflect on their accidental boom.

‘We’ve donated product to nurses’

Polly Rodriguez, CEO and co-founder of Unbound, in New York

At the beginning of Covid-19, on 31 March, someone tweeted: “All my strongest soldiers on life support” with a video of all these vibrators charging. She tagged us, and it went viral; I think a million people watched it. Suddenly we had all this traffic. The second surge happened on 15 April, which, it so happens, was the day the US federal government gave a lot of people a cheque to get through the crisis. People had this discretionary income that they were spending on our products.

From then we were at a new normal: sales were up by 150% compared with this time last year. This is usually our slowest time of year, because people are travelling and spending on vacations, but every day we’d wake up and say, “Are the numbers going to go down? Is this the day it ends?” It’s like being on a rollercoaster, thinking, it’s got to stop somewhere. And it honestly hasn’t.

We have a stimulating lubricant that has sold really well – 8,500 units in three months – which is probably down to couples trying to make sex a little more interesting. I moved back to the Midwest to stay with my parents for a while, and my mom, dad and boyfriend had to help me get about 2,000 lubricants into packaging. Vibrators are our bestsellers – particularly Bender, a £55 dual stimulation product; pretty soon we ran out of inventory. We were scrambling to set up remote working systems and paying an exorbitant amount to ship product from China, because so many of the commercial flights we use were grounded.

Morale has been tough. We’re a small startup and it has been hard to hear people on the team say that they miss being in the office and seeing other people. I’ve encouraged staff to take a mental health day when they need it. For me, there was one day when I was working from home, I had no groceries, an investor call in 10 minutes and a new, five-month-old puppy. I ran downstairs to grab some delivered food, the puppy freaked out because he didn’t know where I was, and when I came back up he had sprayed diarrhoea everywhere. I burst into tears.

We made more than $400,000 in April which, traditionally, is our slowest month; there was a wholesale order for $70,000 in a single day. It’s weird to have your business doing well during such a sombre time. But I don’t feel guilty; I feel proud. We’ve donated product to nurses. It’s a remarkable thing, that in such a horrific time people are still giving themselves permission to experience pleasure. I think [sex toy] sales will stay at this level until there is a vaccine. It’s going to take a while before normal human behaviour – and the option to have sex with someone you don’t know that well – returns. Humans are sexual by nature. That’s not going to change.

‘Bidets used to scare people. Suddenly it was like we were on a rocket ship’

Miki Agrawal, founder, and Jason Ojalvo, CEO of Tushy, a bidet attachment company based in New York

JO In early March, we started to see a little uptick in sales and my first instinct was that [because of the virus] everyone wanted to be more hygienic, and that a bidet would give them that. We ship internationally, and the Tushy Classic – our bestselling bidet attachment – costs $79 and takes 10 minutes to install [it fits under the seat and is attached to the cistern with a hose]. Then the viral videos of people fighting over toilet paper came out. On 9 March, we did twice what we’d normally sell; the next day it was three times; the day after that it was maybe 20 times, and we had a million dollar sales day when we sold more than 10,000 bidets.

We had a team night out – we call it Forced Fun – and it was this last hurrah, where everyone was on edge and weirded out in this empty bar. The early challenge was production capacity, which we managed to up by about six times. A big part of that was convincing our factories in Asia that it wasn’t just one crazy day, or one crazy week. In April, we changed our revenue target for the year, from $20m to $50m. We also had to hire a dozen new people.

We also sell bamboo butt towels, for people who want to stop buying toilet paper and pat dry. A new, two-month shipment sold out in two or three days. So people are going zero waste and to the next level. I don’t think people will go back now they have discovered bidets, because it’s a game changer – it’s like being given an iPhone and then having to go back to using a rotary dial.

MA It’s a weird product that scares some people. A lot of the negative connotations come from the fact that US soldiers in the second world war associated bidets with the French brothels they visited, so they came back to puritanical America and shunned them. We fully launched Tushy in 2016; the last four years have been about getting people to go against generational attachment to toilet paper and say, “OK, I’ll wash my butt.” We’ve been using humour and a ton of education to lead them towards that cliff edge. So the whole coronavirus thing was just like everyone jumping off at once.

I was in California on sabbatical when everything exploded. I remember FaceTiming the team and everyone was like, this is fun. But after a few days, we were trying to forecast how much stock we needed – and we just couldn’t; I felt the pressure and sadness of the world. It was like we were on a rocket ship, so after a few weeks of the insanity I decided to come back to New York.

If we hit the $50m target, the team will earn a double bonus. Down the road, we’re planning a heated bidet seat. Even though the toilet paper shortage has passed, things are not going back. That part of our body has been neglected and deemed taboo for societal reasons for so long. What we’re saying is, clean it properly, respect it and honour it.

‘Two refurbished rowing machines sold in the 60 seconds it took to put them online’

Paul Bodger, MD of Origin Fitness, an exercise equipment company in Edinburgh

A lot of our products are manufactured in China and Taiwan, so we started hearing about factories shutting in January, and that home fitness sales were taking off in Asia. But in early March, our website went bananas. Online sales jumped 1,900%; revenue from those jumped 2,300%, an increase of more than £1m. We were getting a million page views a day and our website, which isn’t built for that traffic, kept crashing. We put a couple of refurbished rowing machines on the site one day and in the 60 seconds it took our web manager to add them, they were sold.

On 17 March, we stopped accepting new orders online, and did the same for two weeks in April. It took the heat and emotion out of the situation. We don’t specialise in retail – about 98% of our business is commercial sales to gyms and other organisations. So I had to furlough most of the staff; when gyms do reopen, the market is going to be slow. Before we ran out of stock, the e-commerce was a lifeline. And I, with other senior management, have been working dispatch, driving forklifts and packing 100kg weights. It’s tough work, but has helped me understand the business again.

Our product range covers everything from £8 dumbbells to exercise bikes costing £5,000; a lot is high-end and not designed for home use. Equipment for online or app-based circuit training – medicine balls especially – exploded. Olympic bars ran out; I thought that would mean the plates that go with them would stop selling, but they didn’t. I imagine there are a lot of people out there lifting our weights with broom handles.

For a lot of customers, it was almost like we were sending their medicine. They would tell us we were helping not just their physical health but their mental health. A good home gym will set you back £10,000, but we had people spending twice that. I keep thinking, are people going to keep this stuff, or is eBay going to be flooded with it? I hope they will keep hold of it, because they won’t want to get caught out again.

‘People can’t believe you’ve transformed their bike from a garden ornament into something useful’

Lincoln Romain and Georgina Taylor, workers at Brixton Cycles, a staff-owned bike shop in London

LR I’ve been here 30 years. When the pandemic started, I remember thinking that if we had to shut for three months, I didn’t know how we would survive. We’re a non-profit organisation and it’s hand-to-mouth.

Then after Boris Johnson’s announcement about the lockdown [on 23 March], we found out bike shops were an essential business. People started turning up with bikes for repair, left, right and centre. You couldn’t move in the shop for bikes. One morning in April, we sold six in 30 minutes. They were shotgun sales, where people just wanted to ride out on something.

Very quickly we had to bring in social distancing, allowing only four people in the shop at a time. I had one guy approach me, so I put my hand out to get him to stay back, and he was offended. I was like, “Wow. There’s so much going on, people are dying, and people of colour like me are high risk. But you’re getting your nose slightly twisted because you didn’t want me to put my hand up?” On the whole, though, people have been good. More people are cycling, and I’m seeing local families out on bikes with their kids. I like that.

For many people, buying a new bike is not an option. So when you can revive a rusty old thing by giving it new cables and tyres, and oiling up the chain, their eyes light up. They can’t believe you’ve transformed this garden ornament into something useful.

GT It started with fixing zombie bikes: things that had been pulled from gardens and still had snails living on them. Now, a lot of new bikes in Europe and the UK seem to have sold out, so it’s incredibly frustrating – if our suppliers had more bikes, we’d be selling them. You develop a skill for letting people down gently. Every day people would call and ask for the same thing – a hybrid bike that costs around £400 – and I could hear in their voices that they had already phoned around 20 shops and were distraught.

All the money we’ve made has gone into future-proofing the co-op rather than on bonuses or pay rises, because you never know what’s round the corner. Even though we wish it was under different circumstances, it has been important for us to be open and help so many people. We pushed NHS staff up the queue, and we gave a second-hand bike to a psychiatrist who offered us free group therapy as part payment. I said I’d have to talk to the other co-op members, but maybe after this, it might be quite good.

I’m a cynic, and think maybe only 20% of people will stick with cycling. But those of us who rode a bike during lockdown all saw what a pleasant place the city could be with cleaner air and fewer cars on the road. I don’t like the idea of going back to how things were. The world has got a chance to make things a lot nicer – and riding bicycles can be a big part of that.

‘A pool table isn’t a miracle product, but it brings families together’

Jamie Stanford, managing director of Liberty Games, a game table retailer in Epsom, Surrey

Our business started with renting coin-operated equipment to pubs and clubs 20 years ago. But, of course, the pool machine in a pub has been replaced by a dining table now. What we’ve found is that people want to replicate the experience at home, with air hockey, football tables and table tennis sets that start at under £100 and top out at £50,000.

In early March, people started asking, “Can you deliver before lockdown?” When the announcement came, people piled in. Demand was spiking at around four times the average level. A normal March might mean 80 transactions each day – we were selling more than 400 in a 24-hour period. We didn’t run out of stock immediately. I’d love to say that was because I’d been some wizard and predicted it; really, it was because after Christmas you have leftover stock. But then that got depleted, and, working from home, we were a company with one hand tied behind our backs.

I can picture a moment about two weeks into lockdown when I got back from the office at about 7pm, and looked at the sales graph. I refreshed and it jumped up by the equivalent of a week’s sales in one day. I had dinner, thought about how we’d manage that volume. Then I refreshed it again, and another week’s worth of sales had happened in an hour. That was overwhelming. But our delivery companies were set up to deal with seasonal changes in demand, so took on extra staff and vans. My staff were clocking overtime; our more experienced suppliers ringfenced stock; and I was driving sackloads of pool cue chalk to the post office. It was seven days a week, but we muddled through. There was a slightly guilty, awkward feeling to it, when things are so desperate for other businesses. But this stuff does give people a bit of a lift.

One lady who bought a table tennis top said, “This is the first time I’ve seen a smile on my teenager’s face in three years.” Most of us are introduced to games tables on holiday. They are not a miracle product, but they bring families together. If you’ve got a kid playing Xbox all day and not interacting with his dad or his mum, and a pool table turns up, the family has a communal, enjoyable game that they can try to master.

When restrictions started to ease on 13 May, we thought, OK, that’s it, things will settle down. But we still had the same level of demand. I think this [crisis] is changing the psychology of a lot of people. Going to a restaurant, you’ll just become hypersensitive to every cough, every droplet in the air. It will probably take as long as lockdown lasted for these attitudes to wear off. I’m sure the desire to buy a pool table or a football table will eventually wane. But this has surprised me every single day. So I’m done making predictions.