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Sex, of course, always sells. Pornography websites were among the first to turn a profit in e-commerce. So-called adult material accounts for 69% of the $1.5 billion worth of online content--services that can be downloaded, including music and games--in the U.S. and Western Europe, according to a May 1999 study by research firm Datamonitor. But taking sanitized sex to the masses--and particularly to women--has given purveyors of erotica an entirely new audience. "Taking the smut out of sex is a clever thing to do," says Michael Poyner, retailing expert with London consultants Credo Group.
And the Net provides a nearly perfect vehicle for reaching well-heeled customers with a taste for vinyl pushup bras or fur-lined handcuffs. Ann Summers got into Internet sales in the past two years and says its site www.annsummers.com averages a million hits a month. In August 1997 the company's monthly Internet sales stood at a mere $6,100; by last August the figure had climbed to $42,575. Beate Uhse expects online sales www.beate-uhse.com to hit $32.8 million this year.
Beate Uhse is the grandmother of safe sex in Europe, having opened her first sex shop in the northwestern town of Flensburg in 1962. At 79, she still heads the company's board. Unlike those of Ann Summers, only 30% of Beate Uhse sales are to women. "We are working on new concepts to bring more women into the shops, like including more lingerie," explains Ulrich Hulle, chief financial officer.
Beate likewise hasn't tried anything like the at-home parties that established Ann Summers' female client base. Ironically, the first two Ann Summers shops were opened in London in 1970 by Swinging '60s man-about-town Kim Caborn-Waterfield, an actor who squired the now deceased blond bombshell Diana Dors. Caborn-Waterfield envisioned a chain of sex supermarkets patterned after Beate Uhse's. The shops were bought a year later by Gold Group International, whose holdings include a number of British soft-porn magazines and which is owned by managing director Gold's father and uncle. It was the woman of the family who came up with the innovative sales strategy. After joining the family business in 1979, Gold, 39, attended a home-sales party for a line of clothing and decided erotic goods could be sold to women the same way. She was soon running Ann Summers. Gold began with eight women "party planners" and now employs more than 7,500 people in that role. (Of her 332 full-time staff members and executives, 95% are women.) Each year 2.3 million women attend Ann Summers parties.
But success didn't come easy. The stores languished until 1984, when Gold's efforts finally began to pay off, in large measure because of the introduction of more wholesome goods. "[Gold] took the shops away from their run-down, seedy image," notes Kim Rawlings, editor of Contours, a lingerie trade magazine. "They sell a lot more basic lingerie now."