What I learned about pleasure from three years on the sales floor

There's a kind of customer I've gotten used to seeing.

She's older. She comes in alone, usually in the afternoon. She walks a slow loop around the store before she works up the nerve to ask me anything. When she does ask, it's almost always about lubricants. And sometimes, in the middle of a conversation about lube, she'll mention, half by accident, that she's never owned a vibrator. Or that her late husband didn't allow it. Or that she's never had an orgasm.

I'm twenty-two years old. I work at Adam & Eve. And I still don't know what to do with how often this happens.

I took this job freshman year of college. I was in a chemistry class when my professor said something that, in retrospect, was offhand and obvious: everything you see has been engineered. Every chair, every cup, every phone. Someone designed all of it.

I had been the friend my friends came to with questions about their bodies and their boyfriends and their vibrators since high school. The thing I'd somehow never connected was that the products themselves, the ones I was recommending to my friends, the ones I'd grown up understanding better than most people my age, had been engineered too. By someone. Probably not by anyone who'd ever talked to my friends.

That was the moment my degree got a direction.

I applied at Adam & Eve a few months later. They almost didn't hire me. I was too young, and the manager was nervous I was looking for a discount on free vibrators. I told her, very seriously for an eighteen-year-old, that I wanted to engineer pleasure products and I needed to understand the industry from inside it. She gave me the job.

The first day was a lot. The training was standard retail — registers, inventory, opening procedures — but the unwritten curriculum was different. The manager I had then sat me down and told me to handle the products. Open the testers. Feel the silicones. Read the boxes. Whatever a customer brought to the register, I needed to be the person who didn't flinch.

Three years in, I rarely flinch at the products. I flinch at the customers' stories.

Demographic patterns

The demographic patterns are the part of this job nobody outside it understands.

The younger customers, late teens, early twenties, come in because they don't want a package shipped to their parents' house. They have maybe thirty dollars. They want something cute. We sell a vibrator shaped like a unicorn and one shaped like a little octopus, and those move constantly. When the cute options are out of budget, they go for whatever is cheapest and discreet. The cheap ones tend to be poorly made, bad materials, motor dies in a few months, and I always try to talk them up a tier if I can, but the budget is the budget. They are getting the worst-engineered products in the store because that is what they can afford. And the engineering of a thirty-dollar vibrator could be so much better than it is. The market has decided that cheap means disposable. It doesn't have to.

Couples are more evenly matched than people expect. In straight couples, the woman usually leads the conversation, and the man is more visibly uncomfortable being in the store — not because he doesn't want to be there, but because talking about sex with a stranger is harder than he expected. In same-sex couples the dynamic shifts purely on personality. I recommend cock rings, wearables, things designed for two people. I have gotten very good at reading which partner is going to veto the conversation in the parking lot.

Older customers who already know what they want are the easiest customers in the store. They walk in, they go to the battery-operated eggs, they buy the same one they've bought before. I used to wonder why. Now I think it's everything at once: they're familiar with how they work, they're under twenty dollars, they're discreet, and they don't require a charging cable that's been discontinued. The form factor is forty years old and the industry has done almost nothing to give that customer a real reason to switch.

And then there's the group nobody talks about: women going through menopause, post-hysterectomy, or otherwise navigating bodies that have changed on them. They almost always come in for lubricant specific to use with their body changing. They rarely ask about toys. Their hormones have shifted, their lubrication has dropped, and the only product in the store that's been designed for what they're going through is the bottle of lube I'm handing them. The vibrator section, with its hundreds of options, has essentially nothing engineered for their bodies as they exist now.

The ones I see are the ones who already knew they could come in and ask. The ones I don't see — the ones still figuring out something is wrong, still embarrassed to bring it up at a doctor's appointment, still assuming that this is just what happens — are the customers this industry has failed completely.

What customers complain about

The customer complaints, after three years, are predictable enough that I could list them in my sleep.

Cleanability is the one customers don't always voice but should. It's the one my coworkers and I notice most. A product that isn't waterproof is a product you can't actually clean. A product with seams and crevices is a hygiene problem. The fact that this isn't the first thing engineers solve for tells you something about who's been designing these products.

Noise is the complaint customers do voice. They want something quieter. They want a panty vibrator they can wear to dinner. They want toys that don't echo through an apartment wall. The acoustic performance of a small DC motor is a solvable engineering problem, and the industry has mostly just shrugged at it.

Charging is the third one. We get customers all the time asking if we sell charging cables, and we don't, because every company uses a different proprietary connector. USB-C would fix this. It is 2026. There is no reason this isn't already standard.

And then price. The customers who can drop a hundred dollars on something they might not like are not most of our customers. Most of our customers are choosing between one product and nothing. The idea that good engineering is a luxury feature for this category is a failure of the category, not of the customer.

What I keep coming back to

Here is what I keep coming back to.

The products in this store have been engineered, but most of them have not been engineered by anyone who has spent an afternoon listening to the people who buy them. The bigger companies do user trials. The user trials are not the same thing as standing behind a register for three years. The user trials don't include the woman who has come in for the fourth time and finally asked, in a near-whisper, what would be good for her first vibrator at sixty-eight. The user trials don't include the customer who left without buying anything because the choices overwhelmed her and nobody helped. The user trials don't include the patterns I've watched for three years across thousands of conversations.

I want to be one of the engineers who has done both. Who has stood at the register and who has done the CAD. Who has handed someone a lubricant, and who has also designed the seal that lets the next product clean properly.

If you are someone who has been nervous to walk into a store like this, I want you to know that the people working there mostly want you to feel okay. The stigma is shrinking. The store I work at, and a lot of stores now, is meant to be a place where you can ask questions without being judged, and where someone behind the counter probably knows more about what would actually work for you than the internet does.

And if you are someone who designs these products, or hires the people who do: the person you most need to talk to is not the user-research panel. It's the woman who has walked the loop around the store three times and hasn't asked her question yet. She is the customer this industry has been failing the longest.

I'd like to help build the products that finally show up for her.