The AbbyWinters.com booth, a rolling expanse of artificial grass — low in the middle, raised on both ends, with rounded corners and bathed in indirect light from a suspended backlit soft box — was the talk of the show.
The AbbyWinters.com models, wearing underwear tastefully embroidered with the AbbyWinters.com logo, spent their days autographing picture cards, posing for pictures, playing speed chess with fans, and engaging in impromptu yoga classes, occasional group gropes and all-girl necking sessions.
One executive making the trans-Pacific trek to Las Vegas was Joanne Mason, vice president of marketing and business development for AbbyWinters.com.
“We’re launching ourselves into the main U.S. industry,” Mason said. “We see ourselves as a significant difference from what has been predominant in U.S. porn for a while, but we are part of the industry, and we’re happy to be here. We realize that we needed to put ourselves on this kind of stage, that we would draw attention, it would create a lot of buzz, and it would make us much better known and carry out our mission of showing the rest of the industry how we do it.”
We were sitting on one of the grass-topped modular benches, so I asked her about the open design of the booth.
“That was a very conscious decision. We don’t shoot in studio environments, we shoot in homes, most often in the model’s own home. We do a lot of shooting outdoors, and we wanted to capture that sense of realness and naturalness here. We also wanted to create an open environment here that was open, rather than having the fans on the outside, making them queue up to work with the models. You see the models inviting fans onto the stand, talking with them, playing chess with them, having their pictures taken. They are really engaged with them.
“We designed the stand to facilitate that kind of openness and interactivity. Everything we’re sitting on moves around. The girls will pick them up and move them around to reposition them for various types of performances. We designed it specifically with that in mind. Tentatively, we’re going to take it to Berlin.”
Mason said that in seven years of operation, AbbyWinters.com has had continuous steady growth, and the growth had increased in the last couple of years. The company had started compiling content from the site for DVDs, which led to more growth in membership, mostly by word of mouth.
“What we keep on hearing for the last year or so is from people who don’t know about us and discover us,” Mason said. “They say, ‘I wish I’d known about you guys earlier.’ We were one of the best kept secrets in the industry.”
Although Abby Winters.com has amateur talent in front of the camera, the rest of the operation, from production to website design, is strictly professional.
“Every one of our girls is an amateurs, but our production is of the highest professional quality. Our facilities in Australia, both in Melbourne and in Sydney, feature exceptional photographers and videographers, many of whom are former models,” Mason said. “We have an exceptionally large and highly qualified professional staff. We provide our customers not just good erotica, but an exceptional experience. That means a highquality website that’s well edited and works well, exceptional customer support, a strong customer community we maintain through the discussion forums where members can interact with models and other features where we really want to provide a meaningful experience for our customers.
“Nowadays the so-called amateur niche is catching up with us,” Mason said. “What we provide is real. We thought there would be a significant market for our girls: They’re happy, they’re real, they have enormous personality. It only takes about 10 seconds here for fans to interact with them, connect with them, realize how much personality they have.”
AbbyWinters.com recently split into three sites, all related and unified by the same philosophy.
“Customers are able to customize their content, and it will allow us to add new content that we have in mind that people will be interested in and excited about,” Mason said.
There are plans to produce more multigirl shoots like the Yoga Girls shoot, which featured 16 models, and the five-model Limo Girls shoot. The company also will produce 24 DVDs in 2008.
