Why Pleasure Products Need More Engineers

There's a moment, when you take apart a $180 vibrator from a "design-led" brand, where you realise something a little embarrassing on behalf of the industry: the marketing budget was four times the engineering budget. Maybe more.

I've been opening these things up — gently, carefully, in the lab — for the better part of the last year. The pattern is hard to miss. The shells are beautiful. The packaging is editorial. The motors are the same $1.40 commodity DC motor you'd find in a $14 product, mounted with the same careless rubber grommet, in the same axially-symmetric housing that turns the motor's natural whine into a 7 dB amplifier.

The products women are sold are usually beautiful objects with engineering done to them, instead of for them.

I don't think this is malicious. I think it's a structural problem. Pleasure products were, for decades, a category run by men who didn't use them and then a category run by marketers who didn't make them. Engineering — careful, opinionated, I will lose sleep over this 4 kHz peak engineering — has only recently started to show up to the conversation.

What we leave on the table

When a category goes underengineered for thirty years, you don't notice what you're missing. You just adapt to mediocrity. A non-exhaustive list of things I think are still solvable problems in pleasure products:

• Acoustic signature. The default sound of these objects is mosquito. It does not have to be.
• Charging interfaces. Magnetic pogo pins are still being designed worse than Apple did them in 2012.
• Material hierarchy. Outer skins are routinely a single durometer when a 2-layer system would feel meaningfully different in the hand.
• Off-axis ergonomics. The hand is not a clamp. We design as if it is.

What I'm doing about it

I'm a recent mechanical engineering graduate, and I want to spend the first five years of my career engineering products in this category. Not designing them in a CAD-decorator sense. Engineering them — ruthlessly, with measurement equipment and FEA and stopwatches.

The brands I admire — the women-led ones building for women — already know this is the next frontier. I'd like to help them build it.