How Women Made Sextech The Next Great Frontier For Growth (Forbes)

Read the full article by Andrea Barrica at Forbes.com

Sextech, the much-hyped market which encompasses seemingly everything from smart vibrators to VR porn, is estimated at $30 billion a year. While that might sound impressive, leaders in the industry, many of them women, argue that the real market is much larger, and growing much faster than many realize.

One only needs to look at the broader sexual wellness market — encompassing not only sex toys, but sex ed, contraception and erectile dysfunction medications — to see the full potential. The sexual wellness market alone is estimated at $40 billion, and much of it remains stubbornly offline. Bringing it online is shows the challenge, and the true growth potential of sextech.

Sexual wellness has certainly benefited from tech and e-commerce, but not as dramatically as one might think. Amazon features nearly 60,000 sexual wellness products, and as much as $800 million in annual sexual wellness sales, according to my estimates. But the company’s own rules keep them from corralling sex and pleasure products the way they have with, say, books.

That’s because Amazon’s secret sauce is cookies — the kind that allow them to track and target you for similar products, and serve you ads that resurface when you visit outside sites. When it comes to sexual wellness, Amazon uses them sparingly, if at all. No one wants an ad for lube or a pregnancy test popping up when they’re at work.

On Amazon itself, the company’s search restriction keeps many products from appearing at all — unless you know to specifically search within the largely buried Sexual Wellness category.

That’s why the largest markets for sexual wellness — and the sextech that will get us there — are likely to grow in the parts of the country that are only beginning to ponder shame and stigma-free sexuality.

We talk about sextech as if we’re talking about the market for smartphones. But sex isn’t reserved for a particular economic class, and the technology behind it isn’t separate from the product it delivers. Sextech coverage has focused on the potential for specific product, when the real story is the growing market behind it. In other words, we’re not selling smartphones, we’re selling the internet. 

Andrea Barrica is CEO/co-founder of O.school, an online shame-free platform for pleasure education, powered by live-streaming and chat. Previously, Andrea co-founded YC-backed accounting and tax platform, inDinero.com, where she led sales and operations. She also served as a venture partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at 500 Startups, one of the world’s most active, global seed funds.