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New toys boost sex shops’ Xmas sales

Johannesburg - The sex toy industry is experiencing some interesting sales trends this festive season.

Despite the difficult economic times, more people seem to be splurging on bedroom pleasure.

Patrick Meyer, operations manager at Luvland, which has 45 stores across the country, said the traditional festive best sellers, vibrators and penis pumps, were being outsold by a new innovative product in the market.

“The door swing is in so much demand. Since December I sold more than 1 200 units and have had to order more,” Meyer said of the new product, which had seemingly single-handedly rescued sales of another business City Press spoke to.

Meyer said the swing sold for R1 000 and had proved to be a sensual sensation for many sex toy stores.

Another sale booster, which had been popular this festive season among customers was a clitoral stimulator, called Womanizer, which had a suction technology mechanism and retailed for about R4 000.

Sari Cohen, owner of a Cape Town-based sex toy shop, Allure Sensuality, said this year had been very good for sales of couple’s toys.

“Couple’s toys have been best sellers all year with couples spending as much as R5 000 on various toys,” said Cohen, whose three-year-old shop made most sales online and had a growing number of clients preferring to make discrete appointments.

Cohen said the biggest sellers in her shop this festive period were the Womanizer and the swing.

“The reason for the increased sales of couple’s toys seems to be the Fifty Shades movies because they made a lot of the toys very popular,” she said.

Cohen said her store sold more female toys than male ones and, of the male toys, penis rings had been more popular than pumps.

George Masche, who has had his adult online store PassionFruit for more than 11 years, said vibrators and lubricants were good sellers all year round but this festive season fetish-related toys had been more popular and the trend seemed to have picked up from last month.

“Products like the Womanizer, which are new in the market are very popular and that’s very good for sales,” Masche said.

All three businesses said although their sales indicated more female toys were being bought, men were the clients who paid for the toys and at times spent a small fortune per visit.

The industry is highly unregulated in South Africa but an international research company, Statistic Brain Research Institute, found South Africa had the third-highest number of Google searches for sex toys and was the only African country on the list’s top 10.

Topping the list was the US and second was the UK.

The research, which was conducted in September this year, also showed that the most popular sex toys bought online were vibrators, which made up 19.2% of the overall sales, followed closely by dildos at 16%.

New Zealand had the highest number of owners of vibrators with 38% of the population owning the DIY machine.

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