I thought it was very interesting and revealing and wanted to share it with you, hope you enjoy it.
Deep Inside The Biggest Little Dildo Factory In America
The sex toy business has never been more profitable or female-driven, thanks in no small part to Fifty Shades of Grey.
But while most of the industry’s manufacturing takes place in China,
Doc Johnson is doing its patriotic duty, one giant rubber penis at a
time.
posted on May 3, 2013, at 3:07 p.m.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper
BuzzFeed Contributor
The chaotic space of the main production floor looks like a meth cook’s dream: a battery of industrial-sized vats standing as they swirl and pump 100,000 pounds of synthesized chemicals into the hoses and small cook pots of 300 hair-netted employees who mostly lie to their families about what they do for a living. Rows and rows of short, squat workers — predominantly Latinas, many wearing tiny gold or silver crucifixes dangling from their necks — pour molten streams of electric green, neon blue, and milky pink rubber into copper molds shaped like crooked cucumbers, girthy cones, long twisting wands, and slender pouches with small folds at their openings. The steaming, seething rubber quickly cools inside these metal castings and is soon yanked out and plunked into giant tubs of water to harden. While the fleshy cones and waxy pouches bob and wade in their lukewarm pools, a second line of production is simultaneously grinding away in another room inside this innocuous-looking 10-building complex nestled in the grimier part of North Hollywood, 10 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
The silicone room is much quieter, airy with crisp white walls and earbud-sporting employees. It has the sleekness and sterility of a suburban Apple store. One worker, a young man with the slight suggestion of facial hair, pours Day-Glo-colored powder into a bucket filled with a translucent syrup; this gives the silicone spires, nubs, and pockets their shimmery, swirling, iridescent coloring. He ladles the goopy, glowing mixture into thick plastic molds. At the 20-minute mark, the jelly molds harden and the young man wraps his fingers around the flared base of each mold, flexes his forearm, gives a quick tug, and POP! The silicone emerges from its casing, matte, wiggling, and warm. The pieces are wheeled away to join their rubbery brethren in the paint room. Here, lit up with shafts of sunlight, a battalion of workers hunker over long wooden tables as they dip, brush, powder, and detail the rubbery jumbles carted in from the production lines.
It is here, in this cavernous warehouse vibrating with the hums and murmurs of a bustling 500-person workforce, that one of the last bastions of old-fashioned American manufacturing labors on, using 2.5 million pounds of rubber per year to churn out a staggering 15,000 sex toys per eight-hour day, which amounts to 5 million a year. Dongs, cock rings, dick pumps, pocket pussies, strokers, suckers, strap-ons, ticklers, teasers, vibrators, ropes, whips, ball gags, anal invaders, pussy trainers, and “love spit ” lubricant pour out of here at a rate that would wow Henry Ford.
But if you look at almost any rubber vagina or string of anal beads today, they will be embossed with the epitaph that decimated much of American manufacturing: “MADE IN CHINA.” According to a 2010 estimate, 70% of sex toys produced in the world are made there; 50% of those were imported to four U.S. companies — California Exotics Novelties, Pipedream, Doc Johnson, and to a lesser extent, Topco — that dominate American sex toy sales. While the others do the bulk of their manufacturing overseas, Doc Johnson is the only one manufacturing most of its products here in the U.S. of A.
The vein station.
posted on May 3, 2013, at 3:07 p.m.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper
BuzzFeed Contributor
The chaotic space of the main production floor looks like a meth cook’s dream: a battery of industrial-sized vats standing as they swirl and pump 100,000 pounds of synthesized chemicals into the hoses and small cook pots of 300 hair-netted employees who mostly lie to their families about what they do for a living. Rows and rows of short, squat workers — predominantly Latinas, many wearing tiny gold or silver crucifixes dangling from their necks — pour molten streams of electric green, neon blue, and milky pink rubber into copper molds shaped like crooked cucumbers, girthy cones, long twisting wands, and slender pouches with small folds at their openings. The steaming, seething rubber quickly cools inside these metal castings and is soon yanked out and plunked into giant tubs of water to harden. While the fleshy cones and waxy pouches bob and wade in their lukewarm pools, a second line of production is simultaneously grinding away in another room inside this innocuous-looking 10-building complex nestled in the grimier part of North Hollywood, 10 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
The silicone room is much quieter, airy with crisp white walls and earbud-sporting employees. It has the sleekness and sterility of a suburban Apple store. One worker, a young man with the slight suggestion of facial hair, pours Day-Glo-colored powder into a bucket filled with a translucent syrup; this gives the silicone spires, nubs, and pockets their shimmery, swirling, iridescent coloring. He ladles the goopy, glowing mixture into thick plastic molds. At the 20-minute mark, the jelly molds harden and the young man wraps his fingers around the flared base of each mold, flexes his forearm, gives a quick tug, and POP! The silicone emerges from its casing, matte, wiggling, and warm. The pieces are wheeled away to join their rubbery brethren in the paint room. Here, lit up with shafts of sunlight, a battalion of workers hunker over long wooden tables as they dip, brush, powder, and detail the rubbery jumbles carted in from the production lines.
It is here, in this cavernous warehouse vibrating with the hums and murmurs of a bustling 500-person workforce, that one of the last bastions of old-fashioned American manufacturing labors on, using 2.5 million pounds of rubber per year to churn out a staggering 15,000 sex toys per eight-hour day, which amounts to 5 million a year. Dongs, cock rings, dick pumps, pocket pussies, strokers, suckers, strap-ons, ticklers, teasers, vibrators, ropes, whips, ball gags, anal invaders, pussy trainers, and “love spit ” lubricant pour out of here at a rate that would wow Henry Ford.
But if you look at almost any rubber vagina or string of anal beads today, they will be embossed with the epitaph that decimated much of American manufacturing: “MADE IN CHINA.” According to a 2010 estimate, 70% of sex toys produced in the world are made there; 50% of those were imported to four U.S. companies — California Exotics Novelties, Pipedream, Doc Johnson, and to a lesser extent, Topco — that dominate American sex toy sales. While the others do the bulk of their manufacturing overseas, Doc Johnson is the only one manufacturing most of its products here in the U.S. of A.
The vein station.
”There’s no question we could make more money if we packed up and went
to China like our competitors,” says Chad Braverman, 30, Doc Johnson’s
COO, as we walk by the vein station, where workers with small, precise
brushes apply spidery red and blue lines to the rubber shafts. Doc
Johnson is not immune from the benefit of cheap outsourced labor: It
contracts with a Chinese manufacturer to produce 25% of the rubber
products and motors for Doc Johnson items. I ask Braverman if, as time
goes on, he would consider increasing that percentage. “No,” he says. “I
remain committed to our current ratio. We think it’s important to stay
loyal to the country and values that allow this kind of product and
manufacturing to take place.” While Doc Johnson’s products are not
luxury items, its American workforce does result in a hike in retail
prices; Braverman says that price increase reflects “quality.”
More than just a quirky side story in this country’s neurotic, if
profitable, relationship with sex, Doc Johnson is a symbol of a
revolution. While the porn industry is still reeling from piracy and
amateurs willing to give it away for free on YouPorn, the sex toy
industry has, in the past decade, undergone its own perestroika and
emerged as a $15 billion a year gold mine. Once crudely designed
oddities shelved alongside dusty VHS tapes in seedy, dimly lit adult
shops, the new generation of sleekly designed sex toys have migrated to
upscale female-friendly boutiques like Fred Segal and into mainstream
pop culture. With breakthroughs in design and materials, along with a
general loosening of attitudes toward battery-assisted sexual pleasure —
and an unforeseen boost from the Fifty Shades of Grey softcore juggernaut — the little dildo factory that could is making the most of the boom. 
Chad
Braverman in his office at Doc Johnson. “We think it’s important to stay
loyal to the country and values that allow this kind of product and
manufacturing to take place.” Natasha Vargas-Cooper
Braverman leads me into Doc Johnson’s creative nerve center: the mold
room. Starting in the ’90s, Doc Johnson began to cultivate its own
in-house group artists plucked from art schools, cosmetic companies, and
weirdly enough, baby product design shops. Anjani Hunaman,
a vivacious Columbian-born artist with Edo-era influences, has been
sculpting molds from gray clay for Doc Johnson since 1994. “My favorite
designs are the ones where I’m just inspired by the anatomy and
pleasure,” Hunaman says as she carves slender ribbons into a whimsical
clay dong that could double as a Harry Potter–style wand. Her prototype
will then take a 10-minute ride to a Van Nuys copper foundry where it
will be forged in a metal cast then brought back to the factory floor.
Mold room artisan Anjani Hunaman: “My favorite designs are the ones where I’m just inspired by the anatomy and pleasure.” Natasha Vargas-Cooper
Diana
has been at Doc Johnson for 30 years. “When I first started working
here, I lied to my family and said I got a job in a plastics factory.” Natasha Vargas-Cooper
“When I first started working here, I lied to my family and said I got a
job in a plastics factory,” says Diana, smiling and blushing a bit. She
is a 30-year Doc Johnson veteran and supervisor of the mold room. She
started as an assembly line worker in her twenties and has since worked
in every room of the factory compound — from pouring to packaging, to
art design and shipping; Diana even plaster-casted porn megastar James
Deen for his vibrating silicone mold. Doc Johnson’s convenient location
in the San Fernando Valley, the epicenter of pornography, makes it easy
for performers to take a couple-minute drive from the ranch house
location shoot in Sherman Oaks to the mold room in North Hollywood.
After three decades in the business, Diana has seen it all, and almost
nothing shocks her. “Except sometimes during pitch name meetings,” Diana
says. “One time we were coming up for names for a new masturbator and
someone said, ‘The Fuck Me Silly Sally!’ and I just rolled my eyes.”
Frank, a longtime worker, lost a finger in one of the machines. “But you know, it’s a steady job, what can I do?” Natasha Vargas-Cooper
Though the factory provides steady employment with decent benefits and
an opportunity to ascend to the ranks of middle management like Diana
did, it is not a workers’ utopia. Just ask the machinist named Frank,
who builds the bases for the copper molds. “I lost a finger to this
machine, blood everywhere,” he says in front of his hulking, puke-green
steel contraption housed in the back of the mold room. He was back at
work four days later with a doctor’s note, reluctant to lose his perfect
attendance record. (The company credited him for the days missed,
keeping his record intact.) Like most privately owned American
companies, Doc Johnson is a non-union operation that starts its workers
at minimum wage, and not all get health benefits or medical leave. “But
you know,” Frank says at the end of his afternoon shift, “it’s a steady
job, what can I do?”
Doc Johnson’s early success came partly because of its close ties to
pornography, thanks to an enterprising Ohio man named Rueben Sturman.
What Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt built is tiddlywinks compared with
Sturman’s once vast porn empire — he is credited with inventing peep
booths, those sticky-floored, single-serve coin-operated locked closets
where a man could masturbate to hardcore pornography for change. The
demand in sex shops skyrocketed, and Sturman not only created a company
to manufacture booths but others to produce the hardcore flicks that
played inside of them, an endeavor that proved to be four times more
profitable than hardcore theaters in the ’70s.
Sturman then sunk his teeth into sex toys. He bought out Marche’s
Manufacturing factory, after owner Ted Marche declared bankruptcy when a
jury forced him to pay out $1.4 million in damages to man whose colon
was ripped by one of Marche’s wire-reinforced plastic phalluses.
Sturman, so the legend goes, made Marche an offer on his North Hollywood
factory that he couldn’t refuse. Sturman renamed the factory Doc
Johnson and installed his loyal then-30-year-old financial assistant
(and Chad’s father), Ronald Braverman.
When the feds finally came after Sturman for evading taxes — Sturman
refused to pay on the grounds that he was constantly being persecuted
for obscenity laws — Braverman took some of the fall; he was indicted in
1985 for perjuring, it seems to protect Sturman, and has served time.
God bless America: Doc Johnson’s 1977 Patriotic Dong (and Her Heart’s Desire “womb broom”)
But that was then, and this is now. Chad is a clean-cut, private
school–educated sports fanatic who has plunged into his dad’s business
with great aplomb. “There are some minor changes I’ve wanted to make
here and there,” he says in the lube-bottling room. “Sometimes I’ve
thought we should change our name. But in general I think we’ve thrived
because we’re able to stick to what we do best while simultaneously
innovate.” He has even designed his own collection of patriotic marital
aids, perhaps a nod to the company’s 1977 Patriotic Dong model. The
American Bombshell line is a streamlined set of gunmetal-gray sex toys
with a World War II weapons theme: The Bunker Buster is a 10-inch cock
with a suction-cup base, and there’s a knobby butt plug called Little
Boy and a veined shaft with a set of weighty balls named, of course,
Ballistic. Like they say, if it weren’t for the United States, we’d all
be saying “cock ring” in German.
Ronald Braverman remains a behind-the-scenes sort of guy. On the day I
tour the factory, he says quick hello and escorts an elderly Korean
couple out of the door and is not seen again.
As we pass the three female pube specialists — they spend their
eight-hour day sewing curly synthetic hairs onto the bare rubber vaginas
that retail for $19 — I ask Chad when the big breakthrough came for sex
toys. When did they go from being gag items in sticky adult bookstores
to a must-have item tittered over on the Today show with Hoda and Kathie Lee? “All these barriers were slowly coming down throughout the ’90s,” Braverman says, “then Sex and the City’s Rabbit episode happened and things have never been the same.”
Journey back to a more idyllic time, when the exploits of a lightly
fictionalized thirtysomething freelance writer named Carrie Bradshaw
represented the vanguard of female sexuality in pop culture. It’s 1998
and Carrie and her three pals sit gobbling down brunch when Miranda, the
no-nonsense, no-cuddling-after-coitus career woman announces her new
love: the Rabbit vibrator. Brunch ends and the ladies spring into a
novelty shop peddling bachelorette-party swag like pecker candy rings
and penis-shaped pasta. Carrie fixates on the $92 translucent mauve
gizmo with a pearl-studded rotating mid-section and clit-tickling pair
of bunny ears. “Look, it’s so cute!” squeals Charlotte, the prim and
Waspish one, before she ponies up her cash. Soon she cannot be separated
from her quivering little bunny until Carrie and Miranda stage an
intervention.
“The day after that episode aired, it was like a telethon,” says
Peter Serratore of Holiday Products, a sex toy distributor serving over
2,000 retail stores across the country. Serratore, a small, sweet man
and former Southern California punk rocker who got into the sex toy
trade in the ’80s, has witnessed the business’s various sea changes from
the vantage of his nondescript San Fernando Valley shipping warehouse.
“The phones would not stop ringing.” The cacophony signaled a tectonic
shift in the marketing and manufacturing of sex toys: Henceforth they
would cater to the delicate tastes of the female consumer who would no
longer blush at the suggestion she might have a secret little — or not
so little — friend.
After Carrie Bradshaw threw open the gates to the plasticine pleasure
dome, the next major breakthrough in the sex toy trade came in the last
decade with a renaissance in materials and design. UR3®, Doc Johnson’s
third-generation “Ultra Realistic” material is used to produce pussy
pockets, palm pleasers, realistic dildos, and Spread Eagle Sallies —
this ultra-porous, squishy substance gives sex toys their extra push and
pull when friction is applied. With better materials and savvier
marketing, abstract streamlined silicone designs created by high-end
product designers entered the market, forming a cottage industry of
luxury female-friendly products that look more like hyper-modernist
sculptures designed by Swedish architects (think Constantin Bråncusi’s
“Bird in Space”) than gross vibrating mechanical dicks. “We used to be
second-class citizens making strawberry lube,” Serratore says, grinning.
“Now it’s posh.”
The newest pop-culture sensation to set off another unanticipated tsunami in sales is Fifty Shades of Grey,
the B-grade whips-and-chains erotica phenomenon self-published by
cheeky English housewife E. L. James. “After the book hit supermarkets,
you could not find a pair of ben wah balls anywhere,” Braverman recalls.
“They sold out internationally.” Ben wah balls are those clanky, steel
balls you’d typically find in a junky Chinese souvenir shop, meant for
twirling around in your hand to help in meditation, but in Fifty Shades, the couple uses the orbs as a sex toy. The balls have been covertly and quietly this way for some time, but Fifty Shades made them completely commonplace and socially acceptable.
With the popularity of Fifty Shades, sex shops that have
typically carried a small assortment of kink gear for leather daddies
and Burning Man attendees were overrun by housewives and co-eds asking
for nipple clamps and leather ankle straps. Attuned to the ever-changing
needs of the public, Doc Johnson is set to release its new line of
female-friendly fetish gear, Black and Blue, sponsored by James Deen.
Deen, who is set to star alongside Lindsay Lohan this summer in The Canyons,
still makes his bread and butter with fetish films. “He helped design
the products, and I think they are going to be popular with his female
fans,” Braverman says. “See, these are as isn’t as intimidating,”
Braverman says, placing a soft pair of suede handcuffs onto my wrists.
“You’re a James Dean fan, right?” Of course I am.
A sampling of vintage Doc Johnson products from 1977. courtesy of Doc Johnson
Given Doc Johnson’s success, why haven’t porn producers gone into the toy trade? If the makers of Iron Man 3
can double their loot with merchandising deals, why can’t major porn
productions enjoy the same sort of marketing perks with a movie-themed
dildo or cock-ring tie-ins?
The short answer: “People don’t want mementos from their sexually
explicit experiences,” Serratore says. Being reminded of seeing a summer
comic-book blockbuster in the theater with your friends is one thing;
being reminded of that time you jerked off to Bus Sluts on a
laptop is another. “Consumers, particularly women, have brand loyalty
[to manufacturers], and they are not certainly not excited or impressed
by a vibrator stamped with a porn company’s logo.”
Digital Playground’s misadventure into toy production underscores the
point. The company, based 10 minutes away from Doc Johnson, financed a
$1 million porn called Pirates (based loosely on the Disney
franchise), making it the most expensive porn flick to date. Digital
Playground then branded a whole line of Pirates-themed
jewel-encrusted dildos and vibrators adorned with tiny skulls. While the
movie swept the AVNs, the Oscars of porn, and smashed sales records,
their toy line was a limp flop.
Porn and toys have found their happiest success together with
individual performers. Indeed, the crowning achievement in a porn
starlet’s career is to have a rubber mold taken of her anatomy — in the
case of porn sensation Bella Donna, her feet were immortalized and
mass-marketed for adoring fans by Doc Johnson. (The company’s mold of
John Holmes’ legendary gigantic dick still sells at least 1,000 units a
month.) Yet the simulated anatomy of real-life performers accounts only
for a sliver of the revenues — the real money, for Doc Johnson and its
competitors, comes from the thousands of anonymous orifices created in
places like the mold room.
The biggest difference between the porn and toy industries is in
who’s spending the money. As opposed to porn, women are the roaring
engine that drives the toy industry. Even products that are made for men
are popular among women — a big Doc Johnson seller is a suction-tight
rubber sleeve lined with squiggly massaging nubs, referred to in polite
company as a masturbator, but on the box it’s typically marketed as a
pocket pussy. Men ages 18 to 25 love it because, well, duh. But for
women over 30: Meet Helping Head, the Ultimate BJ Helper. Braverman says
Doc Johnson deliberately tries to produce items he calls “friendly for
couple’s play.”
But is it just that upper-middle-class stratum of women who are
reshaping this economy? The kind with Carrie Bradshaw’s disposable
income, the ones who take high-end pole-dancing classes and possess the
time and mental energy to go on a bull-legged stroll to the kitchen
while Chinese meditation balls rattle inside them? Apparently not.
California company Party Gals has a fleet of dildo-slinging
sweethearts who showcase sex toys from different providers, including
Doc Johnson, in your own living room. Think 1950s Tupperware parties,
but with the housewives debating the merits of anal sex instead of how
to best refrigerate lima beans. Patty Gardner, a former IBM employee
with a teenage son, is Party Gals’ top saleswoman. She is trim and
gregarious with dyed strawberry-blonde hair and an unaffected manner and
can talk up the merits of anything from $8 tubes of China Shrink Cream
(for women to feel like a virgin for three to five hours) to heavy-duty
glass-blown ass wands.
We’re in Whittier, 60 miles and three worlds away from the suburbs of
Los Angeles, packed inside a one-bedroom stucco apartment off the main
drag. The hostess, fresh off her shift from a local clothing store, is
serving her guests Stater Brothers’ ready-made fried chicken and bright
instant-mix tequila cocktails. They are a bubbly group of seven women,
all in their mid- to late twenties, all Latinas, many with Amy
Winehouse–like Bumpits-buttressed bouffants. A few are single, some have
long-term boyfriends, one is set to be married this summer (she asks
the most questions about which items are edible). These women, like
their hostess, are working-class shift employees, daughters of
immigrants. They’ve never been to a party like this before and are
excitedly chattering over Gardner’s product menus.
“I like to go mild to wild,” Gardner says, pulling out lotions,
lubes, and pheromone-scented body glitter from her grab bag of products.
These women are far from virgins, but many of them do not (yet) own sex
toys and seem to regard them as acceptable for couple’s play rather
than solo use. Gardner is hip to this subtlety and tailors her sales
pitch to extolling the benefits of each product as a way to help please
“yourself and your man.” The women pass around squiggling rabbit-eared
vibrators and lick edible lube off their wrists. The mood in the room
thaws from nervous excitement to focused curiosity. “You should be
having orgasms every day,” Gardner says in a reassuring tone. “It’s a
good thing.”
One young woman admits she’s never been penetrated by a vibrator and
asks Gardner if it feels like a tampon. Gardner puts down the
remote-controlled pair of vibrating panties she’s holding up and gently
explains that tampons, while also inserted in your vagina, are dried-up
wads of bleached cotton whereas her products are meant to be lubed up
and used for pleasure. The message seems to get through to the young
woman, but the mechanics still seem to baffle her. This was followed by a
confused chatter about which hole you actually pee out of.
Gardner then brings out a pair of ben wah balls and the ladies start
to squirm and woop. “That’s what Christian uses on Anastasia in Fifty Shades!” one partygoer excitedly tells the group. Gardner sells several pairs to the ladies tittering on the couch.
Still, the biggest hit of the night is the blow job–assisting rubber
sleeve. Half the party purchases the item; the consensus is that this is
the least intimidating, least ego-deflating toy to bring home to their
partner. As much as the toy industry, and Doc Johnson itself, has been
revolutionized by women’s increased comfort with satisfying themselves
and with these products in general, ultimately the people who benefit
most from this are going to be men. As one cackling party gal put it,
grabbing one of the stroker sleeves, “You are not replaceable, and I
need help sucking your big dick.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the
injured factory worker. It also stated that the factory used 25 million
pounds of rubber instead of 2.5 million.
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