The gap is closing. Here's what we need engineers to do.

I work at a sex toy store. I've spent three years standing two feet from these products, watching customers pick them up and put them down, opening the boxes when they come in, sitting through vendor trainings, comparing what's in our store to what's in the catalog. If you do that for long enough, you start to see the industry the way a mechanical engineer would: as a category of small, sealed, battery-powered, body-contact electronics that has been allowed to skip most of the engineering standards we hold every other category to.

The category is called "adult novelty." That word, novelty, is doing a lot of damage.

Novelty means disposable. Novelty means lightweight, fun, not serious. Novelty means you don't need to worry about IP ratings or motor selection or biocompatibility or charging standards or repairability. The word itself gives the industry permission to be unserious. And the engineering shows.

What a $30 vibrator and a $150 vibrator are actually buying you

The price gap in this category is not vanity. You can feel it in your hands the second you pick both products up.

The $30 product is using PVC or TPE — sticky materials that require lubricant just to feel decent, that degrade in months, that are not the body-safe medical-grade silicone the higher tier uses. The motor is an ERM with a scroll wheel for speed control. The seal is splash-resistant if it's anything at all; you cannot bring it into the shower. The charging port is proprietary, and when the cable goes missing — which is when, not if — the product is dead. The battery is not replaceable. The whole thing is built to fail inside a year, and it does.

The $150 product is doing actual engineering. We-Vibe and Womanizer (both under Lovehoney Group) are good examples. Medical-grade platinum-cured silicone. IPX7 waterproofing. Magnetic charging that doesn't require a port at all, which solves both the sealing problem and the lost-cable problem in one decision. App connectivity over Bluetooth. Womanizer holds the Pleasure Air patent — a genuinely novel piece of mechanical engineering that uses pulsing air pressure instead of vibration — and it took mechanical engineers to develop it. We-Vibe's couples products work because someone thought hard about how two bodies actually share space.

There's a middle tier, too. I respect Playboy and Evolved more than people expect me to. They make products that aren't trying to be the most premium thing on the shelf, but they hit a quality bar — waterproof, USB-C on the newer products, five-year warranties — that the cheap end doesn't bother with. Engineering doesn't have to mean luxury pricing. It just means someone, somewhere, decided the product had to actually work.

And then there's the bottom of the market. The budget-tier brands that, from what I've learned, don't really design their products in-house. They send a brief to a Chinese OEM, they get a prototype back, they tweak it over email, they ship it. There is no mechanical engineer in dialogue with the manufacturer. There is no design review where someone says "the seal here will fail in six months" or "the motor's resonant frequency is going to make this thing scream." The engineering happens at a third party with no one accountable for the outcome. The products break. The customers complain. Nobody learns anything because the feedback loop doesn't close.

This is most of the budget tier of the industry.

The specific problems being skipped

If you stand in this store long enough, the problems sort themselves into categories.

Noise. This is the complaint I hear most. People want quieter products — for partners, for roommates, for the apartment wall, for the panty vibrator they want to wear to dinner. Womanizer has solved this; some others have. Most haven't. The acoustic performance of a small DC motor is a solved problem in adjacent industries — hearing aids, insulin pumps, premium consumer audio. It is a mechanical engineering problem. It involves motor selection, mounting, vibration isolation, and housing design. The fact that most products in this category sound like a power tool is a choice. The industry chose noise.

Cleanability. This is the complaint customers don't always make but should. There's a popular dual-stimulation product on the market — the kind with one arm for internal stimulation and one for clitoral — where the gap between the two arms is narrow enough that fluids get in and you can't get them out. Beautiful product on the shelf, beloved by customers, real cleanability failure. That's a design failure a mechanical engineer designing for cleanability would have caught in the second review. Cleanability is the thing my coworkers and I notice first when a new product comes in, because we know what's about to be true a year later. If you can't fully submerge a product, you can't actually clean it. If you can fully submerge it but it has crevices that don't drain, you still can't clean it. This isn't hard. It's just not prioritized.

Materials. A customer holding a vibrator in our store cannot tell whether it's medical-grade silicone or PVC. The packaging often doesn't say. The price doesn't always say either — there are cheap products with good materials and overpriced products with bad ones. There is a real difference: medical-grade silicone is smoother, lasts longer, doesn't require lubricant just to feel okay, and doesn't degrade. Some brands consistently use it; Shaft is one. Most don't. Body-safe materials should not be a feature you have to research; it should be a category standard.

Charging. Every brand uses a different cable. This is, as far as I can tell, deliberate. Proprietary cables sell replacement cables. They also kill products when the cable gets lost. The whole category could move to USB-C tomorrow and the customer experience would improve overnight. Playboy has done it on some of their newer products. Why this isn't a baseline expectation across the industry in 2026 is a question with no good answer.

Ergonomics. This is the one I think about the most personally. The smaller bullet vibrators that I want to use for precise stimulation are unusable for me because my hand vibrates with the product, and now I'm getting sensation in the wrong place. People that I know who are plus-sized have a different set of problems entirely — products that assume a single body type, that can't be reached or held the way they need to be reached or held. The customers going through menopause and the body changes that come with it run into the same wall. These products are designed for a generic body that does not exist. The packaging photos look great. The product in a real hand, on a real body, often does not work.

Why the gap exists

There are not many mechanical engineers working in this industry. Stigma is part of it — I wrote about that in a prior post. But it's not the whole story.

A pleasure products company only needs two or three mechanical engineers to function. Compare that to automotive, military, aerospace, medical devices — industries that hire thousands every year. The pipeline doesn't exist because the headcount doesn't exist. Engineering schools don't have anyone teaching this. The senior engineers in this space, the ones a new grad could actually learn from, are concentrated at a handful of companies, most of them small. There's no obvious entry point.

The companies that are engineering-led don't appear in stores like mine very often. They market on social media and direct-to-consumer, which means the customer base never gets exposed to the engineering-led alternative. The customer walks into the store, sees what's on the shelf, picks the discreet pink thing, and the engineering decisions of the company that made it determine her entire experience of this category. She doesn't know that a company with mechanical engineers in-house exists. She doesn't know that the alternative is even possible.

And then there's the word itself. Adult novelty. The category names itself as not-serious. The trade press treats it as not-serious. The engineering schools treat it as not-serious. The result is a discipline-wide permission slip to skip the standards that every other body-contact battery-powered consumer device is held to. Hearing aids are not "ear novelty." Insulin pumps are not "diabetes novelty." Pleasure products are body-contact, sealed, electromechanical consumer devices. They should be held to the same engineering standard as the adjacent categories that don't have the stigma attached.

What an engineering-led approach actually changes

Different design brief. That's the whole thing.

A brief that opens with the product must be cleanable, fully submersible, with no crevices that hold fluid produces a different product than a brief that opens with the product should look great in unboxing photos. A brief that says the motor must operate at under X dB at full intensity produces a different product than one that doesn't specify. A brief that includes ergonomic targets for body types outside the median produces a different product. A brief that includes a five-year repairability requirement produces a different product. None of this is hard. It's just not currently the brief.

The most expensive engineering decision being avoided right now is, I think, in-house mechanical engineering itself. The companies that do it — Dame, Lioness, Womanizer, We-Vibe — produce visibly better products. The companies that outsource design to OEMs produce visibly worse products. There is a one-to-one correlation between does this company employ mechanical engineers and does this company make products that work. That correlation is not subtle. It is the loudest signal in the entire industry, and the industry mostly ignores it.

What I want to build

I want to build products for the people who haven't found anything that works for them. Plus-size customers who can't hold what the median product assumes they can hold. People with Parkinson's or other tremor disorders who have been excluded from this category entirely. Women going through menopause whose bodies have changed and whose options have not changed with them. The customers I've watched walk out of my store empty-handed because nothing on the shelf was designed for them.

I want to build products that are quiet, fully sealed, made of materials I can name, and charge over USB-C. I want to do the work the industry has been allowed to skip.

The gap is closing

The thing I want a reader to take away from this, whether you're a founder, an investor, an engineer thinking about your career, or someone who has just never found a product that works for you, is that the gap between this category and the adjacent serious-engineering categories is going to close. The companies that close it first will own the next decade of this market.

Your needs are not wrong because they are different. They are unmet because the industry chose not to engineer for them. That is a fixable problem, and it is the problem I want to spend my career solving.

If you're already doing this work, I want to learn from you. If you want to start doing this work, you should — there are not enough of us yet, and the field needs everyone who is willing to take it seriously.