In 2018, plusOne made its U.S. debut on a massive scale, landing on the shelves of Walmart stores nationwide and the mega-retailer’s website with a small selection of basic yet refined sexual wellness devices. A New York Times profile on CEO Jamie Leventhal, titled “The Man Who’s Putting More Sex Toys on Walmart’s Shelves,” reported that plusOne had sold over a million units in less than a year since its launch, and thus, sexual wellness would become the new focus for the brand’s beauty-based parent company, clio. With the goal of “democratizing” the sexual wellness category with affordable and accessible products, plusOne is now available at over 20,000 retail locations nationwide and online, including not only Walmart but also Target, CVS Pharmacy, Walgreens, Meijer and Amazon.
Leventhal founded Newton, Massachusetts-based clio in 2002 with a focus on grooming products, and expanded further into beauty before arriving at sexual wellness. Leventhal sees this as a natural progression and ultimately what sets clio apart from other brands. With its roots embedded in beauty and personal care, plusOne has been marketed based on similar strategies and held to the same standards; the company has commissioned multiple clinical studies to offer credible data regarding how female orgasms can improve skin condition and appearance, as well as sleep.
We like to play a meaningful role in the evolution of sexual wellness at retail — or, the evolution of the acceptance at traditional retail.
PlusOne’s initial assortment of products included a personal massager, vibrating C-ring, a mini bullet and a dual-stim vibe. This quickly expanded with the company’s uniquely shaped Vibrating Feather Tickler, Air Pulsing Arouser, Fluttering Arouser and more. All plusOne products are manufactured with hygienic, body-safe silicone and are waterproof. The packaging also is strategically designed to catch the eye of the everyday shoppers of big-box retailers, showcasing product design while still being discreet. The bottom corner of plusOne box packaging playfully invites the shopper to take a closer look at the toy by lifting the front flap.
“When we were just developing these products in theory at first, we thought, let’s not show them. Let’s choose this sort of mysterious silhouette,” Leventhal told XBIZ about the packaging. “We’ll top it with a spot UV varnish, but let’s make it a magnetic peekaboo box, which I love. I love that mom rolling her kids in a cart down the aisle can actually take it off the shelf and look at it. They can peek inside and see the product or certainly read about it without it looking overtly sexual.”
With their affordable prices and impressive quality, plusOne products are viewed as the ultimate introductory products, luring mainstream consumers towards sexual wellness devices in the comfort of their local Targets and Walmarts. However, clio also recently launched a more sophisticated range called Deia. Described as “a beautifully crafted collection of devices perfect for solo and couples’ use,” the line retails at higher price points compared to plusOne, offering premium features that customers — particularly veteran pleasure product shoppers — will be willing to invest in.
As plusOne and Deia continue to uniquely walk the line between mainstream and taboo, clio is breaking barriers and Leventhal says he’s hoping to overcome any misconceptions regarding sexual wellness products in big-box retailers and how this impacts adult stores. In this exclusive interview, Leventhal shares his insights about the industry and how it could benefit from growing the mass appeal of sexual wellness products.
XBIZ: What expectations did you have venturing into this industry, and how have they changed? Has anything surprised you about the pleasure products industry?
JAMIE LEVENTHAL: We really didn’t have any expectations. We knew so little, and I love that we knew so little (laughs). I’m going to go off on a crazy tangent right off the bat … We were, historically, here for many years. We were a beauty business, selling mostly beauty and personal care devices. So, rather than change, we decided — from the very first second — before we even had products in mind, we thought, “Let’s look at this category through the lens of beauty and not follow the same path that everyone else has.” I think that’s part of what makes it so different, even though many of the products are very much the same. We really, from minute one, looked at the category from the lens of both beauty and wellness. We paid for some really interesting clinical studies — six-week and eight-week clinical studies on the actual health and wellness benefits of using our products. We let that be the centerpiece of the development, but we let the branding and the identity be something that could see it through. We’re not traditional in any way.
We stuck to our heritage, and that forced us to do some things that were different. I think that’s resonated with our middle-America mom or our middle-America 20-something woman. And it’s certainly resonated with our traditional brick-and-mortar retailers — your Walmart or Target or CVS or Walgreens of the world. Those retailers felt a certain comfort level. As we were developing the products, we were big on what we call co-opting the buyer. We spent a lot of time with our retail partners talking about how we envisioned bringing the product to retail. So, I’ll answer your question to say: we had no expectations, and we forced ourselves from the get-go to look at this category through the lens of beauty and wellness. As far as what surprised us? I would say, not that much. How have our expectations changed? Nothing much has changed in terms of our strategy. As a matter of fact, we’ve forced ourselves to follow a short list of rules. We don’t refer to these products as sex toys — not because retail doesn’t want that, but because… they’re not toys. They’re wellness devices. Some of them are intricate; our electronics development people have created motors and managed different user interfaces. So, nothing has really changed. And the part about what surprised us about the pleasure products industry — nothing really surprised us. I guess, from a business standpoint, I was surprised how many niche players there were in the category. When we picked up your magazine, for example, we found that “Holy shit, there are so many niche players in this category!” A lot of me-too products, a lot of similar sourcing in China. So, that was sort of interesting from a business standpoint. But no real surprises otherwise.
XBIZ: What core values for clio’s beauty brands can be translated into sexual wellness?
LEVENTHAL: Marketing, we follow the exact same path. Again, we treated it as if it were a beauty brand. The same channels, the same influencers, the same digital platforms, the same exact strategy. Core values, I would say we plugged plusOne into the exact same system that our beauty and personal care brands follow. We did, however, hit a brick wall. We love print, but only for the weeklies, and the weeklies say they don't advertise sexual wellness. They never have. So, we were actually the first sexual wellness company to get to advertise in the weeklies. I think it might have been Life & Style that first said yes. And then, once they said yes, all the other weeklies came and said, “We’ll let you advertise.” So, that was nice. And then digital and social media — it’s weird. They’re progressive, but years behind everybody else. It’s weird that we can’t advertise these products on much of social media — which is frustrating, because that’s where our consumers are. That’s where we are. That’s where we want to be. So, I would say, fundamentally, we follow the same values, and did our best to navigate a bit of a minefield in terms of where we could market our products and in terms of strategy.
Another one of our core values that is important to talk about as well, similar like we did with beauty, is we go out and find what I would consider “aspirational products.” We look at these ridiculously expensive products that women love, and then we sit around the table and figure out: How can we make that product, or something similar to it, but for like a fraction of the cost? And therefore, for a fraction of the retail? We refer to that as democratizing a category. We do that within beauty, and it’s been successful for us, with our beauty brands. So, we did pretty much the same thing here, going out into the market and finding beautiful product and great high-performance items. Product that we felt or feel is a bit overpriced for retail — or certainly for our middle-America mom. Finding a way to bring great product, affordable luxury to market that anyone can afford is phenomenal. It’s been a lot of fun doing that. And again, that’s resonating. We probably have like 40,000 reviews online for our product and I think that when women see they can buy these products for $10 or $15 or $25 — or the best that we do for $50 — and they take it home and are blown away by the performance, they tend to be very vocal. They go online and write these reviews, and it’s awesome. How great to do that, especially nowadays, when inflation is at record highs. Everything is more expensive today. It’s so great to deliver phenomenal sexual wellness products for less.
XBIZ: Do you foresee your pleasure product brands meeting or surpassing the success of clio’s beauty brands?
LEVENTHAL: I would say it’s quite possible. I mean, our Plum Beauty brand has as many as 30 SKUs at retail. Beauty is a major part of our business, but in many ways, we split the company into our beauty and personal care division and our sexual wellness team. So, there’s a little bit of a competition for bandwidth and resources internally. But right now, we split it roughly 50-50. But I wouldn’t be surprised, because the acceptance of sexual wellness devices is still very low in North America compared to Europe or other parts of the world. So, as our business is growing, it’s possible that sexual wellness outgrows beauty. We also just love the category. You know, beauty is fun, but sexual wellness is more fun. With the partnership with Yellow Wood, right now we're actively seeking add-on acquisitions almost exclusively within sexual wellness, not within beauty. So, obviously, that will cause the business to grow beyond the size of the beauty business fairly quickly.
XBIZ: To what do you attribute plusOne’s success? Why do you think it resonates so well with consumers?
LEVENTHAL: I love this question. We like to play a meaningful role in the evolution of sexual wellness at retail — or, the evolution of the acceptance at traditional retail. So, I would say, we attribute our success to what I mentioned about looking at it through the lens of beauty and wellness. But I would also say, there are peers of ours in the business that I think push product. They’re innovative with design and sexuality, and they think they know what women want. I think if you were here in my section of the office, where the marketing and product development teams sit, you'd see that we listen to our customers. From the very first items, where we co-opted a meaningful-size group of women. But I would say that today, we spend a third of our day just listening to consumers and figuring out what they want. We obsess over what our customers want and what they don’t want, and how they want to be marketed to and how they don’t want to be marketed to. We definitely don’t pander to our customers, and we definitely don’t try to change them or their behavior with regard to sexual wellness and the device used. We do our best not just to deliver what our consumers want, but we tend to overpromise and overdeliver. So, we look at, like, how do we give them what they want, but instead of innovating with design, we innovate with price. We talk about innovating with price a lot internally. So, maybe there is a product out there that women love, but it retails on average for $150 or $180. Again, we’re taking something aspirational and innovating with price in a way that we can bring it to market for less than $50.
XBIZ: How has the evolution of sexual wellness acceptance, along with an uptick in consumer interest during COVID, also contributed to the brand’s success?
LEVENTHAL: We like to think that we played a meaningful role in that evolution. I guess we benefited in our effort to make it more acceptable. As far as COVID goes, I’m not sure that there’s been an uptick in consumer interest in our brand during COVID. Part of the reason, I think, is because we’re sold in the traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. I bet our peers that sell directly to consumers saw huge growth in sales, because people were at home shopping. I think our business stayed pretty steady. It’s been growing at an awesome pace, but I don’t think that COVID played a major role in that. Maybe there was like a six-week period where things were really strict with lockdowns, and we saw a little bump. But I really don’t think that contributed much to our success.
XBIZ: Discuss the new Deia collection. What sets it apart from other premium brands?
LEVENTHAL: With plusOne, we forced ourselves to look at the brand through a different lens. In the case of Deia, it was tweaked slightly. So, at plusOne, we look at it through a lens of beauty and wellness, but with Deia, we looked at it through the lens of beauty, wellness and couples. With plusOne, we may appeal to more singles; this is mostly women. With Deia, we were focused a lot on couples and relationships, and not necessarily committed relationships. Just couples. We thought a lot about how couples use these products. We wanted to enhance the intimacy between two people, so a major driver in developing Deia was figuring out how we can do that with devices. How can we enhance the intimacy between two people in a committed or noncommitted relationship?
Also, we benefit greatly from amazing economies of scale. We wanted to use components and materials that we were familiar with — and that we could source more cost-effectively than our peers could. We ended up what we call benchmarking; we find products that we think are amazing — again, not necessarily innovating through price, but looking at what they do well and reading their reviews. We’ve read thousands of consumer reviews to figure out where our peers missed the boat. Where did they do great, and where did they do not-so-great? And how can we do better? We’ve never spent more time in the development phase of a brand, launch or product launch than we did with the Deia products. We spent a ton of time — a ton of time — and then, we also did a lot of innovation that we hadn’t done before.
In the past, we didn’t have the bandwidth or the financial means to be able to innovate like we did with Deia. We have products within the Deia range that are innovative on a level that we’ve never done before, that were very complicated to develop. It’s some of the best work we’ve ever done: innovating with electronics, innovating with circuitry and motors, materials and manufacturing techniques. Our benchmarks for that work normally would have been $200-plus at U.S. retail, and our goal was to bring it down to somewhere between $99 and $150. Some items bumped over $150, but they’re averaging less than $150 at retail.
The products are beautiful. The packaging. Every detail we obsessed over, because, we want these products to sit on the shelf at traditional brick-and-mortar — Bloomingdales or Nordstrom, as well as in your traditional adult stores. Not competitive with Walmart, but a little more accessible for their shoppers. I think the adult retail category seems to be much more interested in Deia, although I think the adult channel is missing some spectacular opportunities with plusOne. But I’ll come back to that later.
XBIZ: Discuss the team behind clio’s brands. What is the company’s culture like? What are the company’s values and its mission?
LEVENTHAL: What’s it like to work at clio? I think it’s awesome (laughs). It’s so great. I love it. Again, if you went to visit the 10 largest sexual wellness device companies, I guarantee you would say we have a different vibe here compared to anywhere else. Culturally, we’re very flat, even as we grow meaningfully. We’re not big on titles. When I say we’re flat, there aren’t any layers of management and senior management or executive level. I think when people peek under the hood here, when people come in, they can’t believe how small we are. We sit in like, a little less than 15,000 square feet of office space.
We have an office here, we have an office in Hong Kong, and we have an office in mainland China where we have a proper testing lab. Even across all of those, we’re probably just 35 people. Maybe 40 people today. But if there were an all-star team in the retail consumer products industry — and specifically, sexual wellness — I’d assert that there are a handful of people here, colleagues of mine, that would be on that all-star team.
Culturally, we dress very casually. I joke that we’re not casual, but we dress casually. We’re casual, but we’re fierce competitors. We don’t like to lose. We obsess over making our retail partners happy; it’s like the fundamental driver of everything we do. We want both our retail partners and consumers to be giddy with excitement. It’s building all this wonderful incremental business at brick-and-mortar retail, and our consumers love that they’re buying high-performance, high-quality sexual wellness devices for less than $50 at retail. I think the energy is exciting here, and happy, because we’re doing great work.
We sold millions and millions of units last year. We are making millions of people happy — not just by delivering mind-blowing orgasms, but by delivering great quality product. The unboxing experience is exciting when you get home. The products do not underdeliver; they overdeliver. For example, we overengineered our rabbit, our dual vibrating massager. We could use a metal spring, like most of our peers at our price points do. But our peers at the high end use what is called dual silicone or dual-core technology. So, the core of the device is a slightly rigid silicone that feels more human. It feels less mechanical. I think the team here loves what we’re doing and there’s a little bit of jealousy from the beauty personal care team, like my two kids fighting because they think mom or dad is playing favorites a little bit (laughs). They think maybe we’re playing a little bit of favorites here with the sexual wellness team, but it’s only because it’s amazing, everything that we’re launching and developing. Our retailers love it, our consumers love it. So, I’d say the culture is fun and flat but not weak. We’re fierce. We love to win; we hate to lose. Everyone in our office plays a key role, literally. We do all our customer service in-house. We don’t outsource it. Any meeting we have where we’re developing products, we will have customer service in the product development discussions because they’re the first line of defense. They talk to the customers. They see the posts online; they’re responding to emails and social media. We just recruited a new world-class CFO, who we haven’t announced yet. One of the things that we loved about her and one of the things she loved about this opportunity is her ability to play a role in the product development. How many big-company CFOs get to play a role in the product development? But she’s this incredible, dynamic woman, and I am excited about that. I said, “If you want to do that, we would love for you to be involved.”
I think that culture permeates everything we do here. If you make the conscious choice to buy one of our products, we will not let you down. That passion, which I often internally refer to as OCD — I often joke that our OCD is terrible for our personal lives, but it’s great for business. I love that we’ll design a product and we’ll ship, let’s say, 100,000 or 200,000 units. And then we’ll read the reviews, and we’ll see a small trend; 1% or 2% will make a comment — “Oh, I wish it did this.” And so, we go back and open new tooling. We redesign it. Sometimes, we won’t tell our retail partner; we’ll just change it and ship the new one. And our CFO complains that it always results in the cost going up, but the retail stays the same. Our bullet vibe alone, I think we retooled that like five times before we finally said, “Enough.” But we do that for every product we make. We don’t rush to take it to market. We don’t force anything. We listen to our customers, and that’s the proof there. It’s very expensive to open retooling five times for a product, but we want it to be perfect. We want our customers to buy it and go home and tell their friends, “I had low expectations for $30, but wow!” So, that culture, that OCD, that passion — the fact that we love what we do, that we love our customers, that we care deeply about each other and about our customers — I think that permeates everything that we do. And you know what? Our best products ever are new launches for plusOne — which will come out in the fall — they are the best work we have ever done.
XBIZ: What are your goals for the plusOne and Deia brands?
LEVENTHAL: To bring great products to consumers that delight, excite and improve overall wellness. Our goals are to continue to change the conversation. We’re sick of the stigma, we’re sick of the taboo. I think some of our peers feel like they’re in an industry that is exciting for that reason. But that’s not us. I don’t know if we upset them for this reason — we’re an outlier. We’re all about showing that it’s good for you. It’s not taboo, it’s not mysterious. We talk about it here so openly. For us, it’s all about delivering amazing performance — and if that equates to mind-blowing orgasms, that’s good for you. We talk about that every single day in every capacity. How do we deliver more mind-blowing orgasms at a great price?
We got into this business, and we found that a lot of our peers were talking about how using these products is good for your skin, but we couldn’t find any data on it. We scoured the internet and couldn’t find any real data. So, we spent a ridiculous amount of money — way too much money — on an eight-week clinical study with a reputable lab in New York, an amazing clinical study on the skin-care benefits of using our products to the point of orgasm. The results were so ridiculously compelling that we got a famous medical doctor — one of the more famous dermatologists, she was the medical doctor on “Extreme Makeover” for three seasons, the famous Dr. Ava Shamban — she reviewed the clinical data and made a comment like, “Your performance is better than a lot of the liquids that I’ve prescribed. The performance is amazing.” And we immediately said, “Would you be willing to partner with us to go out and be a spokesperson?” And so, we’re working with her now. In fairness, we already had a relationship with her because we worked with her to develop a skincare device that she’s selling or will be selling and taking to the market soon under her brand. So, we had that open-dialogue relationship already, but when she looked at the results and found them to be that compelling, we thought, “We’re onto something here.” It’s amazing how good it is for your skin in terms of boosting collagen levels, reducing the appearance of wrinkles and boosting blood flow to the skin, radiant skin — like, all the data was incredibly compelling.
We were also like, “Well, a lot of people say that it also reduces stress if you use these products, so, let’s do another study.” So, we funded a six-week clinical study on stress and anxiety — on the benefits of lowering stress and anxiety using our products to the point of orgasm, with similarly compelling results. We were like, “Wow.” Especially during COVID when these results came out, we were like, “How great that using these products lowers stress and anxiety at a time when people are on edge.” Although we decided to cut it off after the third, because we were spending upwards of $250,000 per clinical study. We spent money on a third clinical study, on sleep disorder and the benefits for quality of sleep from using these products to the point of orgasm. As you can imagine, the results were super compelling. So, we’ll be screaming this from the rooftops during the second half of 2022, in a big media campaign focusing on how not only these products should not be taboo, but using these products is literally good for you. So why not buy more? Or use more? Retailers should carry massive assortments of these products because we’re improving skin quality, we’re lowering stress and anxiety, we’re improving the quality of sleep. We’re thinking this category needs to be highlighted more as a wellness category. So, what are our goals? It’s to develop more product and sell more product, but also to tell a story for those that don’t know that you don’t have to be embarrassed or ashamed. You should be excited to use the products not just for pleasure, but for the actual wellness benefits that come from using them. That’s a lot of our focus for the second half of 2022.
XBIZ: Discuss clio’s growth throughout the years. How do you see the company benefiting from recent strategic moves?
LEVENTHAL: We grew this business organically and never sold any equity; that is why we’ve managed to stay flat and maintain our culture. A lot of our peers followed a very different path. To date, we have not made any acquisitions, but Yellow Wood has invested in this company. And Yellow Wood, in investing in clio — which we have now renamed Beacon Wellness Brands — has made us a platform for acquisitions. So, I won’t share who, but I would say we are actively talking with several companies in the sexual wellness devices space about rolling them into this amazing platform to sort of get together and put more interesting and innovative products on the shelf at retail, and continue to push to change the dialogue at retail. There are so many interesting and dynamic men and women in this category that we would love to have on our team. So, our growth has been different in that to this point, we’ve grown organically and going forward, while keeping the culture the same here, we’ll roll more brands into this platform to continue to push this category in retail.
XBIZ: How has the company been received by adult retailers?
LEVENTHAL: This is a tricky one. PlusOne has been frowned upon as “the range that Walmart carries,” which is a shame. Our products’ wholesale pricing is the same for everyone. The traditional adult retailers are missing an amazing opportunity to bring new consumers into their stores and to keep existing customers coming back into their stores. The millions of people that we’ve sold plusOne products to are looking for our products everywhere — certainly in the traditional adult stores. When they don’t find them there, they’re going across the street or down the street to a local Walmart or Target or CVS Pharmacy. So, not only are the adult retailers missing out on these millions of unit sales, but they’re missing out on future sales because consumers that buy plusOne products love the brand. We get good data from our digital partners, and we’re finding that not only are plusOne customers coming back and buying a second product, they’re coming back and buying a third product, and so many of them are coming to buy a fourth or even a fifth product. You get that kind of data on Amazon, for example, and it’s super compelling. So, not only are they missing out on the initial sale of a unit, but they’re missing out on the lifetime value of that customer.
I think they fear they can’t be competitive, but they can have the product on the shelf for the exact same retail price that Target has, or CVS or Walgreens has. They can make the same margin and drive volume. If the margin is a little bit low, but they’re selling three times the volume because the price points are competitive, it’s margin-accretive — it brings in a new customer that’s going to drive a lot of lifetime value. It makes me sad that the adult channel frowns upon the brand. Though our pricing is quite low, it doesn’t cannibalize the specialized products they sell at higher retails.
XBIZ: Has anything surprised you about the sexual wellness space?
LEVENTHAL: You know, the sexual wellness industry is very close-knit, and it’s also, at the same time, terribly disjointed. There’s a lot of overlap. I’ve mentioned layers of distribution that are unnecessary. We are very much an outsider. It’s been a bit of a challenge, but as an outsider, we’re excited to be part of this world. There’s room for lots of companies in this space and we love our peers. Gosh, I love Lora DiCarlo. I think they’re super innovative and smart, and I love their approach to the business. There’s lots of Lora DiCarlos out there that we just love. I admire these companies. It would be awesome to get a group of these amazing niche players together socially and just talk about this awesome industry that we’re in. I joke oftentimes that if it weren’t for cannabis, this would be the most exciting category at retail.
XBIZ: What is the best way to drive customers to retail stores in today’s digital world?
LEVENTHAL: The best way to drive customers to the stores is to tell them they can buy these products with total anonymity in the stores. You can walk into a Target store, take it off the shelf and look at it with your own eyes; you can self-checkout with cash and go home for literal instant gratification. Online, you can’t touch it, and you have to wait for it to be shipped to you. If you share credit cards with your spouse, you don’t have as much anonymity. Or if it’s on Amazon and you share an account. In stores you can self-checkout with cash and nobody knows. It’s your secret. That’s a good reason to go to the stores: literal instant gratification, total anonymity.
XBIZ: How can big-box retailers that sell sexual wellness products and adult retail co-exist? How is clio breaking down the bias for adult retailers to embrace mainstream-friendly brands?
LEVENTHAL: This is such an easy one to answer. The average mainstream retail assortment of sexual wellness devices is eight SKUs. Some are more, some are less, but the average is eight, even with a big-box retailer like Target. The average adult products store has, what, 800? So again, it’s like: if you need a home repair product, you can run to True Value, but if you need something a little more complicated or a little more involved, or if you want to speak to an expert, you may go to Home Depot. If you want one of our products, you may go to Target or CVS or Walgreens. But if you get into this category and you love it and you want to push the limits, or you want to expand your horizons, or you want something your husband can use or your partner can use, or if you want something more powerful, or if you want to speak to an expert — you’re going to go to the adult store. So, there’s like infinite coexistence. The Walmarts and Targets of the world will never put the adult stores out of business because they’re never going to carry 800 SKUs. So, I think that in many ways, they’re infinitely coexistable.
