I make Sex Toys
Hi My name is Wayne I make sex toys. for a living. Yes.
How is that not a great way to start a conversation? Great for parties!!
Not only do I make sex toys, I make sex toys that give you electric shocks!!. I'm the creator of E-Stim Systems, an award winning UK company well known for being different when it comes to the world of adult play.
Join me as I explore the hidden world of making sex toys, the ups and downs of working in an very interesting industry, and the ins and outs of using our products.
I make Sex Toys
E-Stim Dilemas - won't you think of the CHILDREN!!!
What if advertising doesn't mean endorsing every aspect of a platform's content? Join me, Wayne from E-Stim Systems, as I confront the backlash surrounding our decision to advertise on certain platforms. We tackle the moral outrage and misconception that advertising adult products can generate.
We discuss the necessity of reaching potential customers where they are, while dismissing the unrealistic expectation that any platform is free from potentially offensive content. We must start with reasonable conversations rather than rants, as we navigate the labyrinth of ethical advertising.
Privacy and discretion are key when purchasing adult products, and I assure you that we prioritise these in our shipping and communication.
We've faced criticism about our presence in adult-only sections, but remain committed to respectful engagement with our community. Lastly we reflect on the joys and hurdles of podcasting, from audience interactions to technical mishaps, and invite you to share your thoughts as we continue this journey together.
Drop us a message, we cannot reply directly but it would be great to here from you
"I make sex toys" is a the personal podcast of Wayne Allen, the Director of E-Stim Systems. 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://www.e-stim.me/buy
So, hello everyone. This is Wayne here from eStim Systems, also known as the guy who does the podcast called I Make Sex Toys. Why do I do a podcast called I Make Sex Toys? It's really simple I make sex toys, so why not do a podcast about it? How's that? For an introduction, that's not too bad. Anyway, why am I here?
Speaker 1:I have a question for you, and the first question is are you morally outraged? Well, you should be, because I could be sitting here with no clothes on. Okay, yes, if you've got the video version of this podcast, you might notice that I have clothes on, at least in front of the camera, but how do you know what I might be wearing underneath? I might be wearing nothing. You should be morally outraged At least that's what I've been told because we have people complaining about what we do, and we don't just have people complaining about what we do. We have people complaining about where we do it, which gets even more intriguing. Where does this all come from? Well, this actually came from an email that I received this week from an interesting gentleman who was hiding behind a ProtonMail account yeah, that's where this is going to go and he was complaining quite voraciously about the fact we advertise on a website called FetLife.
Speaker 1:Now, what's FetLife? If you're an adult and you have any interest in the fetish environment, then you probably know what FetLife is. In fact, you're probably on FetLife because FetLife is one of the biggest fetish-based forums on the planet. It's big, it's like Facebook, but for adults who are into fetish, that's why it's called FetLife. And FetLife has a number of communities and a number of sections which allow you to talk about virtually anything. They try and keep things legal and generally they manage it. If you start to talk about stuff that is illegal, then you get kicked off very, very quickly. If you want to dress up in a green rubber mac, a pair of black rubber wellies, cover yourself in sugar and lick the end of a ruler, you can. And in fact, on FetLife, there's probably someone out there who also wants to watch you do it or help you do it. Who knows? It's what adults do, so I'm told.
Speaker 1:Anyway, this gentleman was very upset the fact that we were advertising on FetLife because FetLife allowed, shall we say, certain tags, certain conversations that he felt breached the rules, breached the law, breached basic morality, and when I first got this email I was a little bit concerned, as you would be. The email was quite long and went into quite a lot of detail. Unfortunately, like a lot of these emails, it went into far too much detail. But I decided that I was going to talk to FetLife and I pinged them an email and said hello, I've just received this, what can you tell me? And I got a reasonable reply quite quickly, with the eye rolls of yes, we've seen this before, we're aware of it. And here's a couple of responses which were quite reasonable. Fundamentally, it came down to the fact this individual didn't like certain subjects being discussed by adults, by consenting adults, in the privacy of their own home or even in the privacy of FetLife. Fetlife is designed to be adults only, so you can talk about quite a lot of things on there. But this individual was quite upset about the fact that there were certain tags being used, there were certain discussions being allowed, and he felt that because they allowed certain discussions by advertising on FetLife, we were condoning their stance and we were condoning these discussions, which is a little bit obtuse and twisted in my eyes If someone wants to dress up as a Nazi.
Speaker 1:Now, before I say anything further, I find Nazism abhorrent. I have no connections to Nazism. I'm aware of what Nazism is because I did study the World War II. I went to school, we did history and all that. If somebody wants to dress up in a Nazi uniform in the privacy of their own home, quite frankly, as long as it's not against the law, why can't they? Yes, I agree it's probably inappropriate or barren, etc. Etc. But that's my opinion. What you do in the privacy of your own home is down to you. But this individual basically said because FetLife allows discussions about wearing Nazi uniforms, that made everyone who advertised with them a Nazi. No, I am not a Nazi. My company's not a Nazi. I don't have anyone that I know of in the business who supports Nazis.
Speaker 1:So, based on that logic, I wouldn't advertise anywhere. Let's face it some of the content on Facebook is pretty abhorrent. Some of the content that can be thrown up by doing a Google search can be pretty disgusting. So if you're not going to advertise on anywhere that has the potential to come up with something that somebody will consider to be immoral or inappropriate, then you'd never advertise. And I'm going to be honest I'm a tiny little company trying to survive in the world by advertising to people who may or may not be interested in my products. I could just sit there spamming the forums. I don't. I pay to advertise. So if you're going to have a go at a company for advertising with another company that you disagree with, might I suggest you start looking at the big companies? I mean companies that are destroying the rainforest, digging for oil, everything like that. I'm just a tiny little company. I'm trying to survive in the world, so attacking me for advertising in a group that has a large proportion of people who potentially might be interested in my products is not the way to go. I'm going to decide when I advertise and when I don't advertise. And just because you go into that rant mode and start complaining and suggesting all sorts of weird and wonderful things, I'm not going to stop advertising.
Speaker 1:The biggest mistake these people make they don't start with a reasonable conversation, they just start to rant, and probably some of this podcast sounds a bit like a rant. It's not a case of they come up and go. I'm really concerned about the way this has been handled, or I don't like the fact they do X, y and Z. That would be quite a reasonable way to approach it. But no, you get 400 pages of diatribe from a ProtonMail account and it's just impossible to have any discourse with them. So fundamentally I don't bother and strange enough, this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. When you're running a business making sex toys, there are a proportion of people out there who find your activities to be inappropriate, immoral. I could just go on with a whole list of insults. But fundamentally they don't like what you do and therefore they feel that it's necessary for them to tell you they don't like what you do in a very loud and inappropriate manner. And then they'll throw a few comments in there and you then just switch off because it's like yes, really, no, we don't.
Speaker 1:First one, your website is full of porn. No, it's not. Our website is designed to be not full of porn. It's a website for the pictures of eastern boxes and eastern electrodes. There are no people in it, so it's a bit difficult to turn around and go. It's full of porn unless you find a cable pornographic. Why do we not have lots of pictures of people here? Because we don't want to have a website that's full of porn. We don't want people just visiting the website to look for porn. That would just increase our traffic and wouldn't increase anything else apart from our overheads. The law is quite fluid at the moment. Things are changing. People are trying to crack down on what they see as porn and we don't want to be there, so we try and keep our website to be informative and interesting for adults and clear and, yeah, no porn. They still complain that we have porn. Possibly maybe they haven't actually seen the website. Maybe they should.
Speaker 1:I've already mentioned Facebook, but Facebook is another one of those organisations that have some strange and interesting ideas in relation to morality and what can and can't be advertised on Facebook. I would love to advertise my business on Facebook. If Facebook gave me the tools to advertise to adults in certain areas, I'd love to use it. Unfortunately, they won't, although they do keep poking me and saying you need to advertise on Facebook, and every time I try advertising on Facebook they go no Bard. Strange enough, the only thing I have managed to advertise on Facebook was the live stream, which just generated a whole load of people saying can I have a freebie? Without even really understanding what the product was. So complete waste of time. If you're in the adult industry, don't bother even trying to advertise on Facebook. It just doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Now the next story comes, when I made a genuine mistake and I managed to slightly misaddress a parcel. Now these things happen. Luckily they don't happen as much these days because we use electronic addressing. Nobody actually writes an address in. We use the address that the customer gives us. However, in this case we were handwriting addresses and I wrote an address that had the word cottage, which was the correct address, and I wrote cottages and I got a very irate email from a gentleman who was receiving the package who informed me that I had told his entire village that he was gay. What? Excuse me Really, personally, I'm really sorry to hear you feel that way, sir, but could you give me a little bit more information? The fact that I'd addressed this package to cottages as opposed to cottage meant that everyone knew that he was a cottager and he wasn't. He wasn't gay, because it was like, yes, I put an extra letter in accidentally and it changed your address to from cottage to cottages, but there's still a few letters needed to go to cottages or cottaging, and the only person who's going to see that is your postman, and he did manage to address it to you correctly. So really sorry, sir, but I think you're possibly going a little bit over the top, and that has happened in more than one occasion, not not the mistakes on the address, but people make some assumptions that people are constantly looking at what they're doing.
Speaker 1:A classic one that we get asked is do you ship in plain packaging? Yes, of course we do. Now we don't stick a label on the side saying sex toys are us be quite good advertising, but we send in generally plain packaging. If we're sending international, then yeah, we have to put a little bit more information on the package. Unfortunately, customs and excise require that. But even then we describe items as signal generators and cables. There are no sex toys described on the side of your box. So the fact that someone might see a package that's addressed to you, so what? It's a brown box. It could have a cat food in food in it, who knows. And this then leads to people complaining that if we send a box to that requires a signature because we send expensive packages across the world. Sometimes we have to send them and they end up at your local post office and they want you to sign for them. Quite reasonable, quite normal. But my local post office will know what I'm buying. I'm not sure how, unless they're going to sort of open the package in front of you and start pulling things out. And if they are, maybe you shouldn't be using that post office. But no, just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:Banks is another one. Now we use banks to take payments and credit cards and things like that, and we have had in the past people express concern that their bank is going to know what they're going to buy and therefore we should hide it, and it's like, well, that's quite difficult because the bank knows that you're purchasing from a company called e-stim systems, but the banks see thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of transactions a day. Nobody's ever going to look at those individual transactions unless you flag them up. See, that's where things get slightly interesting, because we've had a handful of people decide, for whatever reason, to issue a chargeback. Now a chargeback is basically you going to your credit card company and say I want my money back, and generally our answer to that is please talk to us first, because chargebacks get registered against us. It's a big rigmarole because we have to provide all the evidence and it's a lot easier just to talk to us and we can sort it out without doing a chargeback. We don't do fraudulent transactions. If you want to put a chargeback through, please talk to us beforehand. It's a lot quicker as well. But if you decide that you're going to do a chargeback for whatever reason, please be aware that we are required to provide the bank or the credit card company with a lot more detail than you currently have given them. And generally in chargeback situations we find people don't necessarily give the full story. So we have to give our side of the story and then the bank have full details of what you bought and what has gone on and what conversations we've had and all the correspondence. And generally the chargeback gets denied. So it's a lot easier just to ask us can I have a refund or can you change something or can you fix something? Without going for all that rigmarole? We can be discreet, but if you're going to go and complain to the bank, we have to give them that additional information. I'm sorry, that's the way it works.
Speaker 1:Then we come to events. Now we used to do events many in the UK. We still do events dotted around the world, but they tend to be business to business. We were doing events in the uk and we attended a pride. Now prides are basically great places to to be. It's a fun day out with people of all persuasions joining in the festivities and a couple of times we've done prize, where we've had a little roped off section where traders like ourselves can talk to people and explain what we do and potentially try and sell things to people. That's what you do when you're a business.
Speaker 1:Now this particular pride, which was in cardiff, had a roped off section which said adults only, 18 plus, and great fine, we were in there, we were enjoying talking to people. Nice sunny day and a gentleman turned up with a book and the book was held in a particular way and I immediately thought, oh yes, the book was the bible. And this gentleman spent two hours standing in front of our stand lambasting us about our morals and our obligations to life, the universe and everything and how, the fact that ezekiel 17 dash, whatever, some a number of quotations for the bible were thrown at us. And then he got into the we are corrupting children, where I'm sorry, because we were in cardiff pride and pride was trying to build itself as a family event, which it was. We were corrupting the children, which was like, yeah, but we're in the 18 plus area. There are no children here. There's a gentleman over there not allowing anyone who appears to be less than 18 in, so I'm not quite sure how you're corrupting the children. He just went on and on and on Two hours later. Eventually the organisers had enough complaints from other people and possibly ourselves. The gentleman was asked to move on and he moved on.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that keeps being thrown at us and generally, if you look at any adult industry, there's some element of think of the children. I don't like to say this, but sometimes you think what are the parents doing? If you're going to let your child have unfettered access to the internet, they are possibly going to come across stuff that you find inappropriate. You can't blame every single other person on the planet for your inability to stop your child typing in sex or porn or whatever they might type into Google and finding it. Let's face it I was 12, 13 years old when I first discovered magazines with ladies in them, and it was a phase that you went through as a child. But these days it seems everyone else has to put up the barriers and protect the children and let the parents just sit back and go. It's everybody else's fault. I don't feel that way. I have grown up kids. I've had some experience of this sort of thing. So if you want to throw your twisted morality at us when we spent the last 20 years making sex toys for adults, please don't use the standard think of the children because, quite frankly, it doesn't work. We don't sell to children, we sell to adults.
Speaker 1:This is beginning to sound a bit like a rant and, quite frankly, I don't want it sounded like a rant. It was one of those. Something cropped up and I thought I'd do a little bit of a podcast on it, so I'm going to finish off with one last thing, which was the gentleman who felt that we were all religious nutcases. Why did he think that we were religious nutcases, and that was actually the term he used? The answer is because we told him we were closed for Christmas. Now, christmas is a holiday and we like to have holidays and our staff like to have time off, so we tend to close over the Christmas period. Because of this, he felt we were all religious nutcases. No, we're just normal people who like to have a Christmas holiday. That's the sort of thing that gets thrown at us from time to time. Anyway, this is the end of my little mini rant stroke pod.
Speaker 1:If you like it, please consider leaving a comment or a review, depending on whether you're watching on YouTube or listening to it on a podcast. If you don't like it, please consider leaving a review or a comment, because that's the way we get feedback and I find out whether I'm completely wasting my time or actually. This is turning out to be quite an interesting thing to do and lots of people like me doing it. Strangely enough, it does appear to be that because I'm getting more and more people commenting on the fact that they listen to my podcast, which is brilliant. I love it. Anyone who says hi, wayne, I heard you on your podcast. I'm like, yay, and I'm beginning to get more people pop up who'd like to come on the podcast. So that's going to be quite interesting, because I like talking to people and I like talking about what we do, but I'm also interested in what other people do. So watch this space. There are a few people who are going to crop up who are quite interesting.
Speaker 1:Anyway, if you like what I'm doing, as I say, please consider leaving a review, comment, like whatever's available to you. If you don't, please consider doing the same. But whatever you do, please enjoy yourself, be safe, have fun. Oh, and don't forget, think of the children. Anyway, bye, ps. This is the third time I've actually recorded this podcast. The first time I didn't have a camera that was working properly. The second time the sync on the camera and the audio were a little bit out. Hopefully the third time this is going to work. Anyway, thanks, bye.
