How it all started

So how did it all start? Wayne talks about the beginnings of E-Stim Systems, how an idea built into a business, with some of the ups and downs on the way.

From a garage to a a multi award winning company, with Grannies, smoke alarm batteries and more along the way.

Possibly not the idea way to start a company, but it worked for us, and not a business plan or financial advisor in sight.

If I can do it, so can you!! 

"I make sex toys" is the personal podcast of Wayne Allen, the Director of E-Stim Systems. Creating E-Stim Technology since 2004, Find out what really happens behind the doors of a specialist sex toy company.

Please Note the content of these podcasts are not designed to be Explicit or Erotic but we may discuss adult topics and therefore these podcasts are not suitable for children or those of a nervous disposition. You have been warned.

If you are interested in E-Stim Systems the company, or any of our products, have a look at https://estim.store

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'd like to thank you for coming to my first podcast, first official podcast. I've done a few little test ones before this, but this is the first podcast of I Make Sex Toys. Well, the first question you're going to ask is, who am I and what do you mean I make sex toys? The answer to that is my name is Wayne. I am the director of a company called East Im Systems. And for the last 20 years, all we've ever done is make sex toys. Not just any sex toys. These are sex toys that actually electrocute you. Yep. Electrocute you. Not quite like Frankenstein, but give you sort of sensations beyond what you would find for something like a vibrator. And that's what we do. Normally when we say this at parties or when we meet people, the next question they're going to ask is, well, how did you start? And that's what I'm going to tell you about. How did you start? The simple answer is by accident. Back in 2004, which is quite a while ago now, my girlfriend, who's now my wife, and I were, let's say, adventurous when it comes to our personal lifestyles. We were discovering what worked for us. We looked at fetish, we looked at light bondage, we looked at all the sort of things that most adults go through. Based on that, we attended a few things called fetish fairs, normally held generally on a Sunday in a venue, and lots of vendors turn up, then try and sell you something. And these can be from rubber leather clothing to fetish cakes in funny shapes to leather work to whips, canes, all sorts of things. And when I say all sorts of things, I mean all sorts of things. So we went to a couple of these fetish fairs. We came across these devices. Now these were black little little black boxes with a few knobs on the top, and you either stuck them to an electrode, which you then inserted in obvious places, or you stuck sticky pads on the skin, and you felt a sensation when the box was turned on. Problem was, these boxes were very expensive. The adult industry in general, things are more expensive than you would expect, although these days you probably expect it, but everything seemed to have this premium put on it, which was adult. So you could go to your local DIY center, buy a piece of wood, put two little bits of rings on the end, and that becomes a spreader bar, and then they put a big price tag on it and it's a£50 spreader bar or$50 spreader bar. You get the idea. Anyway, these little boxes were quite expensive, and these were tens units. Now, tens units are generally used for pain relief. If you're ever pregnant, you'll find that your doctor might prescribe one because they give you pain relief without drugs, which if you're pregnant, I'm told is quite a good thing. I've never been pregnant, so I wouldn't know. However, I have used them for stimulation purposes, and they're okay, they sort of work, but they're tens units, they're not designed for that. At the time, I was working in electronics, I'd worked in electronics for about 10 years, I'd also worked for a medical company, and I was a bit of an engineer, I used to do engineering type things. I did the classic thing, I went, oh, I could make one of these, and I could probably make it cheaper than they were selling them. So I went and did. That was what we called at the time a series one. What happened then is we would take this out to the various play clubs, shall we say, and the fetish fairs that we went to, people would see it, and friends of ours saw it, and they said, Oh, we like this. Could we have one? Could you make us one? So I made another one, and another one, and another one, and another one, and quite a few more. Pretty soon our weekends were taken up by making these boxes. We would make the PCBs in the fish tank, the holes would be manually drilled on a pillar drill, 287 holes on every board, then the components would be put in, we'd solder them together, put them in a box, and there you are. There's a series one. And we were selling a couple, and then we decided to look a little bit further and ended up going to one of these fetish fairs as a vendor. The first couple we went to were they weren't too bad. We certainly paid for our stand fees. Then suddenly we found more and more people were buying our product. We they were buying these boxes, and we were making more boxes, and it soon got to the stage where our entire weekend was taken up making these boxes or selling the boxes. We then took the next step, and the next step for us was moving from what at the time was a back bedroom and a garage to a slightly more professional environment when we moved into a business unit. The business unit we were quite lucky with was with an organization called Wenter. Now, the way Wenta works, they're designed for business startup units. So you ended up with a rolling one-month lease. So there wasn't a massive amount of commitment. There was still a bit of commitment because you had to pay a deposit and pay a month's lease up front. But it was a rolling lease. If you're ever thinking about starting a business, look at places like Wenta. They call them incubation units or startup units, where you have that ability to have a proper facility. We had a workshop and a phone line and a couple of PowerPoints, but we could make a mess in there. We could actually start to manufacture. And that's what we did. Now the series one, we took that into a higher level of production. So we ended up getting it tested, went through all the CE testing that it required, ended up with a product that we could sell commercially, and it kept selling. We then created something called the A Box. Now the A box was basically a series one that responded to sound. Things that respond to sound for us are unbelievably attractive. We love playing with sound. And we actually played with sound before we actually went into eStim. If we were in an environment, how do I say this? This is adult. If we were in an environment where we were spanking or caning or something like that, we'd love to do it with music. And that's where the A-Box came from. It was taking the sound that we love. And when we talk about sound with our boxes, we talk about sound music. We don't talk about these hisses and screeches that people use for stereo stimming. That's a whole new kettle of fish, and I'll talk about that in a later podcast. We would use music to actually create sensation. And it was fantastic. I mean, if you think about sitting on a big speaker and feeling the vibrations from the speaker, then that's what you would feel with an A-box, but much more concentrated, much more controlled, and much more intense. So we did the A-Box, then we did a remote because let's face it, everyone likes to play remotely. Then we got into the series two. And whilst all this is happening, this business is building. I did reach the point where I had to bite the bullet. At the time, I had a decent job in the university. I was teaching, I was working in IT, and I was also working in primary school, doing IT as an outreach, which was entertaining. I reached the point where I had to turn around and go, I'm going to do this full-time. And that was a big step. I was going to give up a decent salary, a job I loved, an environment I loved, to go into the big white world of business and hopefully make it work. University, they were fine. The primary school that was entertaining when I walked in and said, uh, yeah, I'm going to go and start my own business. Um, I've been running it as a sideline for a few months. They sort of said, Oh, what is it? And I said, Oh, I'm going to make sex toys. And you could see the drawers drop. It was like, our IT guy in our primary school makes sex toys. And he was like, Yeah, I make sex toys. Okay, thank you. Here's a mug. Bye. So I ended up in the big Y world of we were doing this full time. The next big step was for us to attend an event called Erotica. Now, Erotica in the UK used to be held at Olympia. Um, Olympia is a major exhibition center in the centre of London. It's probably world famous. It's one, it's in London, two, it's expensive, but three, lots and lots of people go. We decided to bite the bullet, we took all the money that we had, plowed it into paying for a stand, turned up at Erotica, and got mobbed. And I mean completely mobbed. We sold out in about six hours. It ended up I had to go back to the workshop, I had to whiz through some more production. I was still working at two o'clock the next morning to get the stock to get back down to Olympia for the next day. It was fantastic. It was manic. But the feedback we were getting from people was unbelievable. I mean, it was just I wouldn't say shocking. Sometimes in life you do things where you suddenly go, I made the right decision. That was the point where I felt we'd made the right decision. When I have a lovely little old lady come up, she must have been in her 70s. Oh dear, I've never knew that these things existed, but I bought one and oh, I love it. My husband, he's never stopped. It was fantastic. We even had a situation where someone had bought one on one day came back to us the next day, and the first thing you think is, oh no, what was wrong with it? They came back to us and said, Can I buy some more electrodes? And uh yeah, have you got any more batteries? Because I actually took the battery out the smoke alarm. It's like, okay, fine, not great. Yeah, here's some batteries. That was actually the point where we decided to put batteries into the boxes. But that erotica that led us on the way to producing one, a product that we were seriously proud of, and also a business ethos that worked for us. Now we were competing with businesses that spent millions of pounds potentially. In the UK, if you've heard of places like Love Honey, Bondara, these are companies that spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on advertising. We're a tiny, tiny little company, and we're sitting next to them on their stand and we're selling product and they're selling product. It was stunning and it was working for us. So we carried on. We did a few more fetish fairs, started looking at doing other shows, we started looking at doing business-to-business shows. It just kept working for us. We kept making the right decision at the right time. We made some bad decisions. We were looking to branch out into being stocked in stores, which is a whole new kettle of fish compared with just doing the internet stuff and doing shows where you can actually talk to people. You have to now try and convince the store that they should stock you. And we went into a store in central London, and it was quite embarrassing really because we didn't understand what stores were looking for in terms of pricing at that point. And we went into that situation where fundamentally what we were offering and what they were looking for were two completely different things, and no way would they come close. That was quite a learning experience for us. It was also about the time one of our competitors informed me that I couldn't sustain my pricing structure. Well, 20 years later, I'm still using the pricing structure, Andy, and I'm still here. But we did make some changes and we came up with a formula that seemed to work for us. A number of stores, and I say a number of stores, two or three stores decided to take us on, which was fantastic for them. We started to realize that we were very specialized. We were a niche in a niche. We weren't going to manage to sell our product to your average An summers in the in the street because we weren't just a product you could buy off the shelf. So we started to look at retailers who had a much better reputation in terms of their service to their customers. These retailers knew what their customers wanted. Almost the time they walked in the door, they would talk to the customer, they would demonstrate the product. They weren't just selling a box off the shelf. The customers would return to them. This started to work. We started to have more and more stores. We still don't have hundreds of stores around the world, but the stores that we do have have a very good reputation for offering really good advice, really good product that works for us, and that's where it fits in for us. So we started expanding into stores. We brought out a new box, the series 2, but it soon mutated into the series 2B. The 2B now has been out all 12 years, I think. Because we made some decisions, it's upgradable. It now offers you internet access so you can control it across the web. And you don't need an app to do that. You can just go and visit something that has a web page. You visit a web page, you log into the server, server talks to the box, and you can zap someone from the other side of the world. And we've done demonstrations where we literally have people 3,000 miles away and they're being zapped by someone controlling the unit in front of us. It's a great system. We love it. Now, as well as being upgradable, one of the things we came up with was this concept of a lifetime guarantee. A lifetime guarantee allowed us to provide a better service to our customers. If you broke a box in normal use, and I say normal use figuratively speaking, if you allowed your car to drive over it, we probably wouldn't replace it. We might try and repair it just to see if we could. But if you broke a box in normal use, we would repair it for free. All you needed to do was get it back to the UK, which sometimes that causes issues because yeah, you have to pay for shipping around the world. But if you got it back to us, we would repair it free of charge, get it back out to you. And that worked far better than I expected. Yeah, we've got this commitment to people to we're gonna repair your boxes at infiniteem. However, we've got people coming back to us who's sending their box back for repair and then turning around and going, oh, what else have you got? I'm gonna buy something else. Now we had a store who couldn't understand the concept of a lifetime guarantee. They just saw it as if you're gonna repair the box, they're never gonna buy anything. We pointed out that if you've got a box that is now gonna get thrown away, the likelihood of you buying the same product is slim because they're gonna look at it and go, I don't care if it's three years old, they're gonna look at it and go, it was broken, it died, I don't want to buy the same thing. I mean, sometimes they will buy the same thing, but wouldn't it just be better to have something that was repairable and repaired by the manufacturer and supported? That's one of the key things that eSIM Systems does even now. If you purchase a box from us directly, or if you purchase it from one of our retailers, we will repair it for the lifetime as long as we can. If we can't repair it, we'll replace it. 20 years, we're still doing it. And in fact, we made it retrospective. We didn't start the lifetime guarantee at the point we started the company, but we made it retrospective. One, because we trust our product, we know our product, we expect our product to last, and it gives the customer better service. But again, we had more and more people coming to see us because we were different. That was the key here. We didn't just build boxes in China, ship them in, stick them on a shelf, look at my profit margin. We actually built the stuff in the UK, which was one of our big selling points. Why do we build stuff in the UK? It's expensive. Yep, it's expensive to build in the UK. However, we have a lot more control. We can ensure the quality because I can walk downstairs and I can look at something that's being made, coming off the CNC machine, and it's wrong. And I'll look at it and go, that's wrong. And the engineer will look at it and go, Yeah, that's wrong. That's the first one. Luckily, we haven't made thousands of them and they're all wrong. Let's fix it. Let's adjust whatever needs to be adjusted. But the fact is we have control. We can give you that quality, we can give you that level of quality at every level. We have three CNC machines, which started out as little manual things, then we bought another manual thing and a bigger manual one, then we bought our first secondhand CNC machine, which was great. I mean, it was hilarious. I'd actually ask the engineers, what would be the best thing for us to do in engineering in order to improve engineering? And the answer was buy a CNC machine. So we bought a secondhand CNC machine. It was probably 25 years old when we got it, but it did do the job and it worked. It broke down a couple of times, and that was entertaining because you'd phone people up and say, Can you come and fix my CNC lathe? And they'd say, uh, what is it? And we'd say it's an Anaheim controller, and they'd look at you and go, I haven't a clue what that is. Is it Fano? No, it's an Anaheim. Okay, no, we can't fix those. Thanks. Eventually we decided we were going to buy something a little bit more uh posh and more modern, and we ended up buying a new Hass machine. It was a revelation. We'd gone from a second hand machine that was held together with string and tape to a nice, shiny, big CNC lathe, and we loved it. And I love all my CNC machines. We bought the 10, then we bought a 15, which had larger capacity, so we could do larger electrodes. We still do the world's largest commercially produced electrode, decimator, four inch diameter, weighs 3.6 kilos, and it's a beast. We bought a CNC mill, which we were using to drill the boxes. We recently this year we bought a bigger mill, which allows us to do even more interesting things, which is where the rings came from. We'll talk about the rings in another podcast. The point is we were growing, we were investing in ourselves, we were investing in our machinery. Gradually we brought on more staff. We started with two, myself and my girlfriend, who then became my wife. If anyone ever phones at the office and talks to Kaz, that's my wife. As well as the lifetime guarantee, we also came up with the idea of a user support forum. Now, at the time we started, there was a major forum out there called SmartStim, run by a very nice guy called Clymer, who sadly has now passed away. And SmartStim was considered to be the jewel in the crown for the East Dim community. Everything related to Eastern was there. The biggest problem for us was it was very American-centric, although Climer was a British guy, but a lot of the content on there was American, and that just wasn't working for us. So we decided to create our own forum, mainly to support our products, but also we opened it up a little bit more to allow people to discuss other products. I've never had issues with people talking about other products. We'll always help people to purchase other products because at the end of the day, you've made the decision to buy something. It might not be my product, but you're now talking to me. You're now considering my products. So of course I'm going to tell you how my products will work with what you've already purchased. I'll never tell you that what you purchased is inferior or a bad decision because you've already made that decision. It's that's down to you. But I will help you to try and get the best out of using your products with my products. Why not? That's good business. And it works for us. So we created the user support forum. That's got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now from a forum perspective, it's probably one of the biggest in the world. The key here is it's user-generated and user-driven. We just sit there and answer the questions from time to time. We've now got users talking to each other, coming up with ideas, discussions as to the use things. The thing about using ESTIM products, it's not a press a green button and you get an instant orgasm. If I could produce that box, I would be a millionaire, but they just don't exist. ESTIM, you have to learn, you have to experiment, you have to play. That's the whole fundamental point of playing with the product. Everyone who works for ESTIM systems, who talks to people on the phone or visits people or meets them at shows, we all use the product ourselves. We are not just selling boxes off the shelf. You're talking to someone, I think we worked out we had something like 70 years worth of experience amongst us, all using ESTIM or ESTIM products. We don't know everything. We know quite a lot. And we love giving you advice and we love listening to how you're going to use our products because that's how we learn. It's does it work for you? Does it work for me? Let's come to some idea where it works for both of us. That's how we create products. And a lot of the things we do is down to our experiences and your experiences. Now, that sort of takes us right back to the original part of what I'm doing, which is doing a podcast on the fact that I build sex toys. And the simple answer is I do build sex toys. I build sex toys for eStim Systems because I'm the director of eStim Systems. But what I actually do is I build sex toys for you and your partner and anyone else you can think of who would love to try the technology. And now in 2024, we are stronger, better than we've ever been. It's fantastic. And it's all down to one thing, and that's you, the customers. It's all down to our customers who keep buying our products, keep giving us really valuable feedback, tell us when we've done things wrong. And we listen and we refine and we change things. And we're still here. 20 years later, we're still evolving and we're still growing. We still have new products coming out, we still have new products on the way, we still have new ideas. It's fantastic. I love what I do, and hopefully you do too. And finally, we've reached the end of the podcast. Thank you for listening. Don't forget you can click on the various links and subscribe. Hopefully, the next episode will be out soon. But whatever you do, be safe and have fun. Bye.