I guess I will also introduce myself in this thread too. My name is Brian Sloan, and I have been running this business for 18 years. This all started when I was in law school in 2003, and I became obsessed with buying things at antique auctions in southcentral Pennsylvania and selling them on eBay. After I graduated, I expanded into buying anything from any kind of auction (and selling) and I ultimately discovered the latex fetishwear market with the help of eBay. I moved to China in 2007, where I lived for 10 years.
Beijing is where I had the idea for the first Autoblow, and I started building that in 2008. The first one was bad. I crowdfunded the second version on Indiegogo in 2014, and that crowdfunding campaign went viral all over the world because at that time no one was really focused on making something that actually worked for men. Plus I starred in the pitch video, and it was so cringe-worthy that people shared it.
At that time, male sex toys (minus Fleshlight) were all garbage and gimmicks. In hindsight, that second version wasn’t amazing, but it was better than whatever else was available at the time.
From then, I got really serious about improving the devices that I was making. I think our current two machines, the Vacuglide2 and the Autoblow Ultra, are probably at least 10 versions or more from what I started out making 18 years ago. I never thought that our machines would sync with videos or have AI girlfriends or any of this. I thought this was stuff that would happen well into the 2030s, but it’s happened now, and I’m really happy about that.
What drives us as a business is delighting our customers and offering men not just the most realistic sexual experiences they can have by themselves, but new sexual experiences as well. While there is certainly a lot of discovery that comes with sex with another person, there is also important and erotic discovery one can do by themselves, and we’ve gotten pretty deep into understanding how to enable that discovery. We’ve also learned how to create that feeling of something new happening in a sexual way that is enabled by the latest technologies, like VR. The VR video sync we added to our library capabilities is one of the most exciting areas for our future development because of the realistic sensations (physical and emotional) it creates.
I’ll be around here on the forum and will reply when I can.
As Sy Sperling said in the Hairclub for Men’s commercial I still remember from my childhood,
“by the way, I’m not only the Autoblow president, I’m also a client”