10 Years of Loving Joy Sex Toys

Firstly, congratulations on Loving Joy’s 10 th anniversary – do you have any plans to mark the occasion with any special events, offers, or promotions?

Thank you, yes, we are very happy to celebrate a decade of Loving Joy. So much has changed in the industry in these 10 years so to have an in-house brand that is going the distance and capable of keeping both retailers and consumers interested, is a great source of pride for us. We have a couple of new products coming out at the end of August that are promising to be real smash hits so basically that is our way of celebrating – just do what we, and Loving Joy does best and release great toys that our customers can make great margins on.

We are also thinking about doing a fantastic introductory offer for these products so early birds really can catch the worm and make even more profit when they sell Loving Joy items.

When Loving Joy was launched in November 2009, then-Net 1on1 director Monique Carty said: “We wanted to create a cool brand that our customers would associate with good quality and good value for money. Price often reflects the quality and we wanted to create something that was good for your budget but didn’t look ‘budget’.” Do you think that original mission statement is still applicable to the brand?

Very much so! We have updated this mission statement since 2009, but excellence in quality and value in sales are still very much at the core of every decision we make in regards to Loving Joy. We keep our ears to the ground and our fingers on the pulse of the adult industry to ensure that our products are priced just right.

The brand has also done extremely well in mainstream magazines like Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan over recent years, proving that affordable and accessible products that do not compromise on quality have a very important place on the market right now. Both the Power Bullet and the Versa landed in the top 10 of the prestigious Good Housekeeping Tried and Tested panel’s yearly vibrator review and they both retail under £50 – the perfect marriage of quality and price, I’d say.

We kept the same philosophy in mind when we decided to launch higher end toys like the VITA and the TUX too – they look luxurious, packaged elegantly and come with unique selling points, but their prices are at a fraction of what most people are used to when it comes to this level of quality. We believe that this makes them very attractive to retailers and consumers alike.

Another statement from the launch (from Claire Jacques) was “We set out to produce good quality best sellers with attractive packaging and a big margin” – is this still a key objective?

Absolutely, if anything, this statement is even truer now as we had focused our entire product

sourcing strategy in the last couple of years around chasing the best margins for our customers.

A great example would be the Precious Metals range. It existed as a sub-brand of Loving Joy for a while, but it was in need of a re-think so in 2016 we discontinued the original range, upped the quality, re-vamped the packaging, re-organised the pricing and voila, sales increased exponentially.

We also updated, modernised and simplified the packaging of our classic bestsellers like the Loving Joy Anal Beads or the Bound to Please Nipple Clamps and have seen the sales increase. This proves that combining the right pricing with the right branding is the best ongoing objective and goal for us to maintain and improve sales of the range.

Loving Joy was launched with four sub-brands; Jessica Rabbits, Handbag Handies, Bathtime Buddies and Pocket Pleasers. Are they all still alive and kicking?

We re-organised the whole umbrella brand that is Loving Joy so the bestselling toys from

Handbag Handies, Bathtime Buddies and Pocket Pleasers have all been merged into our Basics or Silicone Selection lines. Our Basics range covers everything from bullet vibrators to our bestselling universal harness so it makes sense that classic toys from those now-dropped sub-brands would find a new home there.

On the other hand, Jessica Rabbits are still going strong, they are constantly in our bestselling lists even after 10 years! Can’t say we are not surprised from time to time that these oldies are still kicking it, but I think their classic shape, affordable pricing and easy to use functions offer a much-needed option to consumers who are new to sex toys and don’t necessarily look for a hundred different settings that you need a manual to understand and operate. Ease of use still has an appeal way beyond than what the sex toy industry often takes into account, so we hope that Loving Joy products can bridge this gap.

How many sub-brands does Loving Joy now produce?

We’ve been adding quite a few sub-brands to Loving Joy in recent years. We have a

comprehensive nubuck leather bondage range with Bound and Bound Noir. Bound to Please

features silicone and metal bondage gear while Impound is a male chastity device line up. The earlier mentioned Precious Metals butt plugs are accompanied by our Furry Fantasy brand of fluffy tail plugs and we recently launched a glass dildo line with Spectrum.

That makes 6 distinct sub-brands, but then we also have the Loving Joy Basics, the Silicone Selection and the Real Feel line – these, with the high end products together make up Loving Joy as a brand on its own.

And how many SKUs are there, in total?

We currently have around 130 different SKUs under the Loving Joy brand with about 10 more coming out soon.

What has been Loving Joy’s most successful ever launch, in terms of unit sales?

Our most successful range launch by far was the Impound male chastity devices – all 4 SKUs in the sub-brand sold out completely after just two weeks of the launch. To be honest, this still puzzles us a bit, we just did not expect this level of interest in chastity, but the outstanding price point we could offer them on to our customers must have something to do with it all. 

In terms of individual products, I’d say the Versa was one of the best launches we have had and it’s probably due to the stylish POS we offered with the item. The acrylic stand allowed retailers to display a unit of Versa in their shops for their customers to touch and feel, showing off the amazing  flexibility and versatility of the toy.

Recent launches – such as Dua, Versa, and Vita – have been more sophisticated than Loving Joy’s previous output. Was this a deliberate strategy to take the brand upmarket? Are you hoping that these products will have a halo effect on the rest of the range? Or were these releases just opportunities that presented themselves?

While recent launches like the DUA, the Versa and the VITA are a bit more upmarket, they also target a real gap. They represent outstanding quality for their price which means that customers who want to invest in their pleasure don’t have to splash out on huge price tags.

These products also appeared in the mainstream press so although we would love to say that we brought them out in order to increase brand awareness, we didn’t – it all just happened organically thanks to the interplay of quality, price and branding.

We are not moving away from affordable, lower-priced products either though, we do not want to alienate consumers who are looking for simpler, more straight-forward items or retailers who make their living on bread-and-butter type of sex toys. I don’t necessarily think that the rest of the range needs a halo effect – classic, lower priced products deserve a place in the market just as much as high end toys do and Loving Joy happens to have both in its expansive catalogue of high-quality items.

When it comes to new additions, do you design the products in-house or do you look for already finished products you can put the Loving Joy brand on?

It’s a combination of both. In-house design and production is a lot more expensive but it does

pay off in the long term. That being said, if we see a new open source product that ticks all the boxes (right price, quality and timing) then we definitely won’t hesitate to slap the much-loved Loving Joy brand name on it.

We receive a lot of samples from manufacturers and most of them just don’t make the cut when it comes to our high standards of quality and criteria around pricing. Admission to the Loving Joy brand does not come easy, and this is how we’ve managed to raise the profile of the brand by not compromising and sticking to our guns when it mattered the most.

What tends to dictate when products get commissioned? Do you wait for customers to ask for something, do you get to work when you spot a gap in the market, or do you try to predict what next year’s consumers will want this year?

We look out for a combination of things really – customer feedback and consumer trends

definitely influence us, but at the end of the day it often boils down to the question: ‘can we sell this?’. Of course, it has happened before that we thought ‘Wow, the crowds will love this!’ and then the launch went down like a lead balloon. Conversely, sometimes when we were less enthused about an item, we ended up tapping into a massive bestseller (see the Impound range mentioned earlier), so you can never know for sure how the market will react to a new product launch.

We have seen a huge increase in the sale of remote-controlled sex toys for both men and women in recent months, so this will be a larger focus for Loving Joy in the final few months of the year. Of course, the release of the TUX remote controlled cock ring is imminent, and we are looking to add a great value remote controlled prostate massager and maybe even a vibrating kegel ball set to the catalogue.

So while we don’t have a crystal ball and cannot predict what consumers will want in 2020, we can watch the trends closely, we can listen to feedback from retailers and we can review our own catalogue for any potential gaps. It’s incredibly important to stay ahead of the curve in our industry and other than having time travelling powers, we think that the above strategy is the best way forward.

Do you think your customers view Loving Joy as a standalone brand?

While Loving Joy is heavily associated with Net1on1 and so making it a standalone brand was always going to be difficult, I think we have managed to do that in the last few years. Most consumers don’t know about Net1on1, and in our experience, brand awareness is still in its infancy when it comes to the general public and sex toy brands. From the consumer’s perspective, when browsing online or in store, Loving Joy appears as an affordable and stylish option, regardless of what company stands behind it.

That being said we have found that the monthly searches for Loving Joy have increased from 12k to 18k this year which is a whopping 40% increase! And with continued press exposure, unique product launches and support from more distributors, we hope that Loving Joy will be seen more and more as an independent brand within the adult industry too. A brand that offers a hefty margin to sellers while not losing sight of what consumers need and want.

What type of outlets does it sell best in?

Loving Joy toys sold especially well in brick and mortar stores during the last fiscal year – I guess the ability to touch and handle the products will always aid sales in shops as consumers can ensure that the quality is exactly what they are looking for. 

Online sales are a completely different beast when it comes to consumer decision-making, especially with the popularity of marketplaces and price comparing sites, but since we managed to increase Loving Joy brand awareness in the last few years, we did experience a huge increase in online sales too.

As we continue to re-design the packaging of the entire range, we are fairly certain that the in-store sales will begin to outshine online sales again, but honestly, we cannot be sure what the future holds, so we’ll continue to try to meet the needs of retailers wherever and whenever we can.

Is Loving Joy an international brand? Do you wholesale it into Europe and beyond?

Loving Joy has always sold well in Europe, and most of the new products continue to sell

throughout the continent, from Portugal to Poland. We also took on an Australian distributor and launched a localised website at www.lovingjoy.com.au hoping to nail down the Oceania region. We are currently looking for distributors in the US, Canada as well as other European countries. We are hoping to continue Loving Joy’s Global Expansion plan that offers distributors exceptional margins and the opportunity to sell an up-and-coming sex toy brand that is only getting bigger and better with each product release.

If there are any distribution companies that would like to discuss exclusive Loving Joy distribution in their country with us, please feel free to get in touch!

Which Loving Joy products are you most proud of?

I think the Loving Joy DUA with its interchangeable attachments is the most expensive product we sell, yet we sell more of it than cheaper rabbit vibrators. It’s a unique product that is extremely well packaged, and loved by reviewers, retailers and consumers alike. It was also voted as the third best vibrator by the Good Housekeeping Tried and Tested panel in 2019. There were so many design decisions to be made when we were developing this product and I feel that we nailed them all. I’m really happy with the end results and the sales speak for themselves too, so we can really feel validated for all the hard-fought choices we made together as a team.

Do you think consumers are aware of Loving Joy as a brand?

As mentioned earlier, we don’t necessarily think that consumers consider brands as a priority

when making a decision about their sex toy purchases. With a few notable exceptions, consumers go after price, reviews and function and so brands like Loving Joy do well in this climate – it’s a catalogue full of well-priced, well-reviewed and innovative products.

That being said, market analysis does show that in the UK the term ‘Loving Joy’ gets around 18k monthly searches while big brands like LELO and Tenga only reach around the 5k mark. If we combine that with the monthly hits that we get on www.lovingjoy.co.uk and our sales figures that show a steady ascent, we can easily deduce that the brand is becoming increasingly popular with the public.

Will you be looking to increase this awareness, perhaps through PR and consumer advertising, in the near future?

Definitely! We have so many (both expected and more… outlandish) ideas for PR, marketing and social media. These things are not necessarily easy in our industry, so many platforms still block content related to sex and pleasure, so it really requires creativity to be able to succeed. Consumer advertising is always at the top of our list alongside targeted remarketing, but in order to effectively do this, we need strategically placed partners who will help us offer a localised service when we market to specific areas.

Finally, can you give us an idea of what can we expect from Loving Joy this year?

We are launching new innovative products with extremely high margins and competitive end retail prices. We also hope to have more distribution partners on board to make our bestselling sex toys available to even more people around the world. Finally, expect to see more Loving Joy in the press and online as we are moving to a more aggressive marketing strategy that will hopefully place the brand in the forefront of the adult industry.

With global ambitions in mind, the next ten years of Loving Joy are bound to be even more eventful, so watch this space, this small, in-house brand is planning to take over the world!