First of all I need to talk about the elephant in the middle of the room: Prices straight people are apparently willing to pay toys and gear! Very basic leather harnesses made out of neither deburred nor burnished leather costs more than the soft and exceptionally well made ones from Army of Men or Mr S. For the price of some basic wooden paddles I could get a custom single tail from Alpha Whips. The rubber gear sold was between 0.25mm and 0.5mm grade and thus has a very limited lifetime but priced like a Blackstyle heavy rubber suite. Mass produced vinyl dildos rivaled customized Bad Dragon platinum silicone anal toys. Despite what the stronger presence of alternative lifestyles and sex life in the media, exploring and living out sexual desires beyond the missionary vanilla sex is still considered a taboo. This leads to lower market transparency. So people are paying higher prices. Luckily gays are less afraid to talk about sex with their peers and share shopping tips. Because of this the prices are lower and the product quality is higher because scalpers would quickly be called out. So I urge straight people to jump over their shadows and at least look at gay focused online stores. Yes, the models are male instead of big boobed women but you might be surprised how inexpensive toys get a dude instead of a demimondaine is advertising them.
The Realdoll Sex Doll which Greatly Disturbed Me
There were over a dozen manufacturers from sex dolls. In a world where loneliness is called an epidemic and real intimacy gets harder and harder to get some groups of people, I guess they are the answer when the primal urges which broad over 30,000 people to the expo are not being satisfied. Sex dolls have come a long way from the cheap blowup “air mattresses” and evolved sexy dressed into mannequins which at least for me create a strong uncanny valley effect. But I don’t judge. Everybody has different preferences and kinks and there is actually a growing sex doll fetish scene. Yet my tolerance was tested realdool, a for better lag of words animatronics torso stump. The doll features AI for she can talk, move and responds to the physical and verbal input you are giving. In the PR material the manufacturer claims for skin to have real touch. But for me, it felt like a little bit rougher silicone surface I have on some of my anal toys. It lacked the warm and silky feeling of human skin. Yet some of the straight people who fingered her front hole claimed for it to feel like a real vagina. So far I can understand the fascination with the doll, though it is a pricey one between 11,000€ and 24,000€, depending on the configuration. But what completely threw me off that the doll is stumps where arms and legs are supposed to be. In my eyes, it was just an amputated block of pseudo-flesh, reduced to a being a desemination machine. Maybe I am too deep inside the uncanny valley and am certainly not the target group for this toy, seeing this erotic automaton made me feel uneasy and reminded me of the Spielberg film A.I..
Just before leaving the fair, I have a very unpleasant experience. On my first round through the halls, I did not buy anything, in order not to burden myself with bags. But there were a few interesting things, most for individual order but Weppyland from Bavaria had one thing I wanted to take with me right away: A wooden acupressure toy which could probably also be used for sensation, wax and maybe also knife play and just cost 15€. I approached the sexy athletic porn performer (?) working on the booth, asking where to pay. He directed me to the owner who was operating the card terminal. I already had my phone unlocked, when she told me that card payment is only possible from 20€ on upwards (still a sad standard in Germany despite being 2025). So I put the toy down and pulled out my wallet which hold the typical amount of cash I carry around with me: 5€ and change. So I told her “Sorry, I don’t have 15€ in cash. If you I cannot pay by card, I cannot buy it today.” which she declined. So I said goodbye and wished her a successful fair. While I was still standing next to her, she turned to the guy and said loudly to him “When somebody does not have 15€ in cash in his wallet, he has not real intention on buying anything anyway.”
Wrap Around Eyelet Whip as a Wrist Band and Carabiner Fettered Miniflogger Single Tail
First, if you have to make such a remark, you wait until the person you are talking about is out of earshot! This is one of the fundamental rules of retail: You do not bitch about customers when they or in fact any are around because it reflects back badly on you. Sex and especially kink toys are a luxury good (especially when you look at the prices straight people are apparently willing to pay) so they are an extreme people business. The customer needs to feel good, understood and comfortable with you. In the shopping process you have to dream their sexual dream with them and making your product the key to unlock the fantasy. Anything that disrupts the flow makes a successful current and future transaction unlikely. Personally, I was intrigued by the wrap-around-the-wrist whips both from a toy collector and impact player perspective. Finding a good whip maker from Germany would be great! Maybe they would have offered a deal during Black Friday which might have enticed me to buy both. But frankly, this quickly said short sentence destroyed my positive feelings towards Weppyland and the owner. Why would I now support them by giving them my money and down the road giving them exposure by a review on my website (I guess enough people will now Google them now anyway. I refuse to link them here as the only company in this article)? While their whips would have made an interesting addition to my collection, I currently own north of 40 single whips and flogger. If you live in Germany and want to buy more or less locally, I recommend McHurt and Peitschenhandel. They both have physical stores in Berlin where they carry way more items than they display online and where you can try them on. If you are open to paracord-based whips, Alphawhips in Cologne makes awesome single tails (my gift to myself for my 36th birthday). He is often in Berlin for events, so send him an e-mail if you want to try his stuff for yourself.
Vilain Garcon, their Berlin Store is an Example of how Customer Experience is Done Right in the Kink World
Second, if above-10€ card transactions are uneconomically for you, you on the one hand need a new acquirer! On the other hand, you need to calculate your prices accordingly. If your profit margin is too low to allow for card payments for small take-away articles on trade shows, you are closing yourself off from customers who maybe visit your booth last and spent all the cash. Finally, if all of that is for whatever reason is not viable, calculate how much money you would lose on the few transaction where people really have no cash. In retail marketing, there is a term called the “moment of truth”, where a good personal service experience turns a neutral customer into a positive one. How great would it have been if Mrs. Boyadzhieva said “As I said, we usually only take card from 20€. But I really want you to have this toy and I make an exception for you!” This might have lowered my reservation price for their whips, yet alas it did not happen.
As you can tell from the time I am spending on writing about this, this last interaction I had before leaving the Venus made a big negative impression on me. For over 20 years I have worked in high end luxury retail and luxury good marketing. Bad customer experience for a product nobody really needs really pisses me off because good customer experience is not difficult and expensive, yet is so often treated as a commodity instead of an essential.
Part I: An Expo Review – Part II: The Cool – Part III: The (Non-)Trendy – Part V: The Weird & Final Thoughts
