My Dad Created a Sex Toy Empire

The dildos, vibrators and other gyrating sex-related tools and horny serums we’ve got now are available in part thanks to the bravery and business cunning of a few. That includes Ron Braverman, the American entrepreneur who started Doc Johnson in 1976 along with co-founder Reuben Sturman, the self-styled “Walt Disney of porn”. Before then, the sex toy landscape was totally different: Most toys were somewhat illegal and centred around aiding erectile dysfunction. (Plus, everything looked like a penis, because that’s what men thought women wanted.) Sturman and Ron inherited all this risk when they acquired the company from an inventor in ‘76 and pushed ahead with Doc Johnson, which would sell things like dildos, vibrators and butt plugs, and later, a whole plethora of sex stuff, including porn star-specific replica sex toys.

While successful with their then-innovative method of individually packaging sex toys, the company came squarely in the crosshairs of the government. There was a conservative reaction in the 70s and 80s to the sexual revolution, and when Ronald Reagan won power in 1981, he set his sights on the world of sex toys to appease the evangelicals – subsequently, both Sturman and Braverman would serve jail time, the former for tax-related charges – only to break out of prison, possibly stop by In-N-Out and then live life on the lam for five months – and the latter, twice, for perjury and then financial irregularities. 

Today, Doc Johnson is one of the largest sex toy companies in the world, employing around 250 workers and manufacturing most of the items in its Mexicali warehouse in Baja California. Ron is CEO, while his son Chad is COO. With Doc Johnson featuring in the new VICE TV series of Sex Before the Internet, we thought we’d speak to Chad to find out about the history of the company, what it’s like being the son of a towering figure in sex toys, and where it’s all going in the future.

VICE: Hey Chad, so what was it like growing up the son of “the father” of the sex toy industry?
Chad Braverman: I didn’t really know for a long time. A lot of the company is pre-internet days, you know? I’ll be 42 this year. For the better part of my childhood, I didn’t really have access to information at my fingertips. I tried to piece little things together throughout the years, overhearing little tidbits or things that just didn’t 100 percent add up. When I was about 12, or 13, I had an older stepbrother who was 16 or 17. He overheard me telling a friend what my dad did, and he was like, “That’s not what your dad does… Your dad makes fake dicks and vaginas for a living.”

My defence mechanism was: “Oh, that’s really cool.” I was never very embarrassed about it. I just kind of felt like that’s what my dad does. He’s successful and my life is wanting for nothing, so like, cool, you know? He’s not a criminal, he’s not in the mob, which was definitely an idea that ran through my head at one point in time. At school there was giggling and joking – we all thought it was funny. When I went to college, obviously telling people your family makes sex toys for a living is like the coolest profession anyone in college can have.

There was a reaction to the sexual revolution in the 70s and 80s, and your dad, Sturman and the wider industry were targeted by politicians and Reagan’s government. How did that all go down?
The government tried to enforce laws that were based around obscenity. The concept was to mess with the store level… You can hurt the stores [using] zoning laws – [i.e] when they’re allowed to be open – or just shutting them down or finding that they sold something in that wasn’t supposed to be sold because that’s now deemed obscene, or whatever it may be. If you targeted the stores, you could bring down the industry because there was no other way to get these products to people. 

One of the things that my dad did, along with a bunch of other players in the industry, was form a group called the Free Speech Coalition to band together as an industry and help not only themselves, but some of the mom and pop stores that couldn’t afford to fight the government in court. No one had deep pockets at the time to do something like that, but if we grouped together, we’re stronger as a unit. They were able to win some cases and make sure that stores stayed open. In those days, you’re talking about an industry that had, unbeknownst to anybody, massive demand and very, very limited supply. So the industry grew quite quickly.

Sturman survived multiple obscenity cases, so the IRS started looking into his finances, and he was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1989 for tax evasion. He later broke out, but was caught five months later. 
Legend.

Not before getting an In-N-Out burger?
Absolute legend.

I mean, that’s all mad, isn’t it?
Yeah. I mean…

No, it’s cool, though.
Obviously, it’s kind of cool. But it’s also complicated – he was a complicated man. I grew up with Reuben, like, that was my uncle, basically. Also, in fairness to him, it wasn’t… yes, obviously you can’t walk away from a prison, but he wasn’t in a maximum security prison. He didn’t Shawshank himself out of this prison, he walked off the property. 

They put your dad away for couple of short stints, plus Sturman’s sentence was extended to 19 years when they found more tax fraud. But it seems business really picked up in the 90s, helped in part by mail order and Charlotte’s fixation on her Rabbit vibrator in Sex and the City circa 1998.
We always talk about sort of the Sex and the City moment. That was the tipping point – women are the buyers now. It’s not taboo anymore, or it’s at least a lot less taboo than it ever was. The internet is coming into full steam. That, in turn, is forcing stores to redo their concept of what a store is: make it more welcoming, make it more inviting, make it more normal. That’s the rocket fuel right there. That’s the explosion.

Where do you see the world of sex toys going?
We’re all going to be connected in with our fucking goggles, and all that stuff. But there’s not a lot of exit strategies in this business. The only real exit strategy is to another company in the business. I think what you’re gonna see is a lot of mergers and acquisitions. You’re gonna see some biggies get really big, and you’re gonna see a lot of middle to smalls probably get eaten up or get pushed out.

If you try to come in with this hedge fund, private equity traditional model of building a business and then exiting for some crazy number, you better hope there’s somebody in the industry that can give you that crazy number. Because it’s not gonna be fucking Procter and Gamble. That’s what I think is gonna be really interesting. The future of the sex toy industry is going to be written in the next five years.

What are some of the most important products in the history of Doc Johnson?
The joke around Doc Johnson for a while was that 8” Classic Dong is what signs the cheques. So that’s gotta be 1.A on the list of major Doc Johnson products from history. The only reason I say 1.A is because years later you have the Rabbit. The truth is we’ve probably sold more Rabbits in less time than we’ve sold the 8” Classic Dongs. So I’ll put those as like 1.A and 1.B. 

Is there anything you’d like to say about how fulfilling is to do what you do, considering the kind of service Doc Johnson provides humanity?
We had a T-shirt one time that said Doc Johnson on the front and on the back it said “Changing the world, one orgasm at a time.”

There you go.
We still have to fight the good fight sometimes: We don’t get insurance the same way that people do. We can’t bank with the same banks that other people do – it’s still a bitch in some ways. But the conversation about sex toys, I’m not fighting the fight that Ron was fighting at all. People love what we do. We make people feel good. I’ve watched this business go from “marital aids” to “sex toys” to “pleasure products” to “sexual health and wellness”. It’s researched and documented and very factual now that what we do for people helps them. It’s good for you, literally. There’s nothing more to say.

The new season of Sex Before the Internet is out now on VICE TV.

@nichet