As porn companies search for a way to diversify their dwindling portfolios, many have turned to adult novelties. After all, a dildo is hard to pirate and there aren’t too many street vendors selling knockoff Rolex vibrators. Now a Chinese company (that looks suspiciously like the manufacturer of branded high-end toys for your favorite studios) has announced two innovative lines of its own.
XMYBOX has launched its Ultrazone and Funzone products, both of which are brightly-colored, phthalate-free and, according to the literature and my own testing in underground labs, eerily contoured to the shape of a woman’s nether regions, from gigantic women to small, birdlike women. And, because they’re phthalate-free, you’ll have to search elsewhere for that endocrine-disrupting rush you got from Clinton-era dildos. Fucking guy owes me money.
What is fascinating about the XMYBOX products, in addition to their shape and uses, is their marketing. UltraZone is geared toward the elegant, arch, no-nonsense sex toy consumer who wants scroll wheels with his or her toys, perhaps to feel like he or she is populating an Excel chart.
The FunZone line, on the other hand, is “aimed at the beginning toy buyer” and features a dumbbell-shaped masturbator that could very likely be used while its user is eating McNuggets.
So both sides of the market are cornered; those consumers who like to feel like they’re masturbating with the very concept of Infinite Space and those who wants to jill off to a seahorse.
XMYBOX Marketing Manager Steven Lee said that, while the adult world may be bound by clannish tradition as in ancient China, there is still ample room for innovation.
“What XMYBOX brings with the UltraZone and FunZone toys are high quality products made to exacting standards in fresh and novel takes
on classic designs,” Lee said.
I think these are beautiful products, but you know who might really like them? Aquaman.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Does Cyberskin April Flores dream of electric sheep?
See also: XMYBOX
I would think that there is, for at least a little while, some fat profit margins to be had in the sex toy industry. For example, look at the tenga flip hole pocket pussy–it retails in my hometown’s finest sex toy boutique, the smitten kitten, at $110. I found it online for $80, shipped. I’m guessing it costs less than $5 to make for the materials. No doubt there are labor and equipment costs, shipping, etc etc etc, but nonetheless, I would expect there are some fat, fat margins packed into that $80 price, too.
That said, I would expect that as sex and porn further splatter our societal fabric (thanks internets!), more people will want to buy sex toys, spurring more companies to produce and design them, which will drive down costs.
Damn, did I just voice a free-market sex toy opinion? Now I feel dirty. I had better grab my Flip Hole and hit the shower.