What Women Actually Want From Their Toys

I spent twelve weeks last fall talking to women about their personal products. Twenty-eight conversations, all anonymised, all an hour long. I was not running a marketing study. I was looking for the things engineers should be optimising for that aren't on any spec sheet.

A few of the patterns surprised me. Most of them did not. None of them had anything to do with motor power.

The pattern I keep coming back to

The number one complaint, by a wide margin, was not about function. It was about storage and retrieval. As in: where does this object live in your home? How do you get it out? How do you put it back without thinking about it?

If you accept that the product needs to be discreet, you accept a whole cascade of constraints that nobody puts on the brief:

• It has to be self-contained. (No loose charger. No loose remote. No accessories that scatter.)
• It has to be putdown-able. (Not just storable in a drawer — set-down-able mid-use.)
• It has to look like it could be on the nightstand without explanation.

Almost nothing in this category is designed around these three ideas. They're treated as marketing problems ("it comes in a discreet bag!") instead of engineering problems.

The bag is not the answer. The object is the answer.

Other things I heard, in roughly descending frequency

• I want it to be quiet enough that my partner doesn't hear it through the wall.
• I want the controls to be obvious without looking. I am not always looking.
• I want the charging system to not be the worst part.
• I want the surface to not feel like a kitchen utensil.
• I want the manufacturer to seem like they thought about my body for more than ten minutes.

Each of these is an engineering problem. Each of these is solvable. None of these are solved well in any of the products I've taken apart this year.

The opportunity

Female-led, female-focused brands are building this category from the ground up right now. The ones that win, in my opinion, are the ones that staff their engineering team like their marketing team. With people who use the products, who care about the quiet 4 kHz peak, who take the chargers personally.

If that's the kind of team you're building, I'd like to talk.