Good Vibrations (company)
| Good Vibrations LLC | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Limited Liability Company |
| founding | March 1977 |
| Seat | San Francisco , USA |
| management | Theresa Sparks CEO |
| sales | $ 11.9 million (2006) |
| Branch | Sex shop , publisher |
| Website | www.goodvibes.com |
Good Vibrations LLC is an American company that specializes in the sale of sex toys , vibrators, and erotic literature .
history
Joani Blank opened the first Good Vibrations sex shop in March 1977 in a 19 square meter store in San Francisco . It was the second sex shop ever after Eve's Garden in New York that was specifically geared towards female customers. The facility followed the motto "clean and well-lit" (German: clean and well lit) and should free the sex shop from its greasy image and take away women 's fear of contact. This concept was later adopted by many other sex shops.
Right from the start, the focus of the business was not just on sales, but above all on sex education . In addition to a small selection of vibrators and sex toys, the shop offered a selection of erotic and educational literature. Especially in the early days, when the actual sales were still sluggish, the shop assistants spent a lot of time talking to customers about sex. Some later popular sex educators such as Susie Bright and Violet Blue as well as filmmaker and producer Shine Louise Houston began their careers as sales assistants at Good Vibrations.
Joani Blank represented not only feminist but also socialist ideals and was critical of capitalism . From the beginning, the shop did not have a hierarchical structure. Blank gave the employees a great deal of freedom in making decisions and they could set their own salaries. At the initiative of the employees, Good Vibrations was expanded to include a mail order business in 1985.
The employees did not like the fact that Blank was hardly interested in profits or expansion. Blank responded to the criticism by converting the company into a cooperative . She sold parts of the company to 12 employees, including herself, who were equal and decision-making partners. The conversion process started in 1989 and was completed in 1992.
In 1992, following the idea of the "briarpatch", which was also inspired by socialism, Blank invited two women who wanted to open such a company themselves. She let them study the concept of Good Vibrations and gave them their supplier directory. Both women actually opened sex shops themselves and are as successful today as Good Vibrations.
In the following years Blank, following her philosophy not interested in profits, withdrew further and further from the business and finally left it entirely. The remaining partners - which had grown to 78 in 2002 - were hindered by the unusual form of the company, which prevented the company from expanding, as all partners had to agree to decisions. In addition, most of the partners themselves had no business management experience or training. When it became clear that the company was almost incapable of acting, the partners hired Beth Doyle as manager.
Doyle attempted a change from within without harming the cooperative's ideals. She filled vacant positions with outsiders. One of them was Theresa Sparks , a transgender woman who had great difficulty finding a new job after her sex change . Originally employed in the shipping department, Doyle quickly realized the experience she had gained as a man and after three months promoted her to the post of finance director. After Doyle surrendered to internal resistance in 2005, Sparks took over her position. In one meeting, Sparks demonstrated the lack of prospects for a cooperative to the shareholders and was able to convince them to abandon the model. Good Vibrations has been a corporation since February 1st, 2006 .
In 2007, Good Vibrations ran into financial difficulties after Internet sales collapsed from competition from companies like Amazon.com and Drugstore.com and a poor Google ranking . The wholesaler GVA-TWN bought the company in September 2007.
Group structure
The company is now a Limited Liability Company and consists of three Good Vibrations sex shops in the San Francisco Bay Area and one in Brookline , Massachusetts , a mail order company and the three publishers Down There Press , Passion Press and Sexpositive Productions . The company also runs the GVTV video show and organizes art exhibitions, cultural events and information events.
The CEO is Theresa Sparks, with five women and two men on the board, including comedian Margaret Cho and Carol Queen , who is also the company's sexologist .
literature
- Lynn Comella: Selling sexual liberation: Women-owned sex toy stores and the business of social change , University of Massachusetts Amherst , 2004, ISBN 978-0-496-13215-7
- Dennis Hall: Good Vibrations: Eros and Instrumental Knowledge in: The Journal of Popular Culture , Volume 34, 2000
- Cathy Winks, Anne Semans: The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex: The Most Complete Sex Manual Ever Written , Cleis Press, 2002, ISBN 1-57344-158-9
- Paula Kamen: Her way: young women remake the sexual revolution , New York University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8147-4733-7
- Leslie Heywood: The women's movement today: an encyclopedia of third-wave feminism , Volume 1, Greenwood Press, 2006, ISBN 0-313-33134-0
- Meika Loe: Good vibrations: case study of a pro-sex feminist sex toy business , Dissertation, 1998.
Web links
- Good Vibrations website
- A sex toy story by Lessley Anderson in Business 2.0 Magazine
Individual evidence
- ^ Good Vibrations LLC. EDGAR , accessed May 15, 2014 .
- ↑ SFGate.com
- ^ Good news for Good Vibrations - it's being sold, San Francisco Chronicle, Sep. 28, 2007