Growing With No Paid Ads, Dropped Payment Processors & an Amazon Double Standard with Searah Deysach

Hi, thank you for having me. My name is Searah, and I own a sex toy store in Chicago called Early to Bed, where we’re celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary this year. I come to it completely from outside the industry. I was in grad school studying art when I opened the store in 2001, so I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants for the past twenty-five years.

I came into the industry because the store that I wanted didn’t exist. The industry wasn’t backwards, exactly, but it was still stuck in the nineties, and it wasn’t thinking about queer consumers, women consumers, or consumers who are educated. So I came in to, and I would never have used this term in my life until this moment, disrupt it and do something different.

It definitely felt like being an outsider from the beginning. Trying to explain what we meant by feminist, woman-oriented, or education-focused was like speaking a different language to people who’d been in the industry for a long time. They just didn’t understand what that meant.
And being a woman in an industry that has historically been very male-run, I was treated like garbage by some of the people I was working with, like I was some idiot who didn’t know what they were doing. There were times I didn’t know what I was doing, for sure. But I knew my consumer, I knew my brand, and I knew what I was trying to do, and a lot of folks were very interested in talking me out of it or letting me know they thought it was stupid.

From the beginning, we were a store that was open and engaging, that was trying to demystify the experience and make shopping for sex toys warm, friendly and interactive. I think that’s what set us apart, and why, despite my lack of financing, industry knowledge and business experience, we’ve been able to survive. We hit a chord with a lot of consumers who were just starting to realize there could be a different way to shop for sex toys.

It’s hard online. First of all, we’re competing with Amazon, as well as places like Target and Walgreens. So we try to have as much information as possible about the products, and at least one picture that we took ourselves, so people can see it’s not just a computer-generated image. We try to put a little of our own spin on everything so folks know why we’re carrying it or what’s special about it, even though we’re using a lot of the text the manufacturers give us.
We also try to keep up with folks and be available to answer questions, and social media plays a part in that. People know they can reach us and ask about something they couldn’t ask anyone at a big box store. We do our best to make it a similar experience, but there’s nothing like walking into the store and feeling it in your hands before you make a decision.

There’s one year we didn’t win, but yes.

I wish I knew. A lot of it is that we have a great staff, which has been key as I’ve moved further away from helping customers, and they treat people in a way that gets word around that if you want a really great experience, this is where you go. It’s amazing how being nice and friendly and welcoming can still be radical in a lot of ways.

We do social media, we just can’t pay for it. We try to say yes to every donation and community event. I give talks at colleges, we work with community groups, and we try to be a community partner to a lot of people. I think that helps fill in some of the gaps when we’re barred from paid ads on Instagram, and even Google won’t let us advertise because I screwed something up ten years ago. I don’t know what I did, but they banned me.

It’s weird, though, because then I get ads for vibrators from other people and I wonder what they’re doing that we can’t. But when I think about cost-benefit ratios, I think just doing what we’re doing really well, and not focusing on the things that would be really hard and expensive for us, is the right call. It would be different if I were trying to grow into a multi-store takeover of the US.

But I’m really happy where we are, with one store that serves a lot of needs. I’m not a business person. I’m a passionate sex toy advocate who happens to own a business as my outlet for that.

Yes. I did hire a PR person for a while. Business has its ups and downs, and during a down period I thought, what have I not tried yet? It got us a lot of mentions, but it also got to the point where all I was being asked about was different sex positions. That’s not where I want my voice to be, and I don’t think it was driving traffic to our store. So we shifted to asking what else we could do, and how we could invest in our social media instead.

This was 2001, and I kind of thought, who knows what the internet is going to be? I was also so invested in the interaction of the storefront, and it was just me. I worked alone for two years without any help except friends and family. I was short-sighted. I wanted customers who could come in, touch and feel, and ask questions, and I didn’t realize we could grow our base, and that people who visited could then order later.

It took me a couple of years to start selling online. And then there have been so many issues with selling sex toys online over the years. Credit card processors have dropped us, websites won’t work with us, and we can’t use most point-of-sale systems. People ask why we aren’t on Square or whatever, but we can’t use any of these traditional options, so we’ve always had to navigate on the edges.
I’d also like to point out that our friends at Amazon and other places selling the same things we are don’t have these restrictions. They don’t get dropped by insurance companies and credit card processors the way we do. So, boo hoo me, we’ve managed to navigate it, but it’s an interesting stigmatized industry where the stigma doesn’t seem to apply to everybody who’s doing it.

I have a great social media person who is doing a really good job with our Instagram, all of it pretty much organic, because again, we can’t pay. I think word of mouth is huge for us. A lot of folks bring someone else into the store, and we see a lot of people bringing their friends in.

I’m also always amazed, twenty-five years in, that there are people, especially in the queer community, which is where I feel my home base is, who have never heard of us. So clearly we could do a lot better with that. Between social media, our reputation in the community, and things like Google reviews and Yelp, which still carry some weight for folks, I think that’s what it is. If I knew exactly how to leverage all of that to reach more people, I would do it. But it’s an art, not a science.

That’s an excellent question. I have no idea, and I’ve never really tried to run any tests on it. I acknowledge that AI is an inevitable tool that will become more and more a part of our culture, but I’ve been resistant to digging deep into it. I have concerns about the environment, and I have concerns about privacy. So I wouldn’t say we’re really harnessing AI in any way at this point.

We’ve started to see sex toy companies using AI for their product packaging, and there’s been resistance in this industry to that. Some people say they don’t even want to pick a product up if it has AI on it, because younger consumers, at least the lefty people who gravitate towards us, aren’t super into it. I’m really curious to see how this evolves. I think it’s inevitable, and there are times when I think there’s probably an AI tool out there that could help me clean up my inventory and dead stock in a few minutes, as opposed to the way I do it now.
But I need to take a beat and figure out what the implications are. There’s probably a lot of AI happening around me that I’m not noticing, with vendors and so on. I’m really into humans, so I think I’ll be one of those late adopters who gives in at some point but resists for a little while first. I am curious about what you said on how people would find us via AI. I’d never thought about that question before, so I’d be interested to do a little experimenting and see how that works.

There are a couple of evergreen top sellers. One is the Magic Wand, formerly the Hitachi, which is basically a high-quality back massager that has a huge foothold in this industry as a classic toy used by all kinds of people. It’s a really important part of our store, as it is for most people who have a sex toy store.

But what sells changes a lot, and social media is influencing it far more than it used to. It’s very specific toys, like the Rose and now the Lemon. People will come in and ask for things they wouldn’t have ten or fifteen years ago. Vibrators are our bread and butter. Lube is what our neighborhood comes for on a regular basis. And we do a lot with gender expression gear, working with transgender customers and their needs.
Vibrators are where my passion came from, where I think the industry has had a lot of innovation, and they’re a lot of people’s first sex toy, so that’s where we focus.

It’s always a hard question, because you want to say we’re for everybody, but we can’t be for everybody. Obviously adults, and that’s very important to note. We have a big consumer base in the queer and trans community, locally, but also folks who come from out of town because they hear that we’re queer and trans friendly. That’s where my community is, and it’s been a focus and an aim of the store from the beginning, to serve folks who have been historically left out of conversations about the expression of their own sexuality.

But also women in general. I really like to be a place for the person who is afraid to go into a sex toy store because they’ve never been into one before. We love the customers who walk in and say, “I want six of these and four of those,” but we really want the customer who’s never been in a store and wants to be walked through everything slowly and gently, and supported.
By age, college age through about the forties and fifties is the bulk of it, but I love our senior customers too. It’s a really big gamut. So I’d say queers, women, and people who are interested in exploring for the first time.

I know this sounds really boring, but I would love to stay the course and dig in a little more. We’ve been exploring more events and workshops, and ways to use our space as more of a community place, and I really like that idea. I want to dig deeper into what we do and what we’re able to offer people, and stay where we are, in our cute neighborhood. I don’t really want to expand the store.

I would love to expand our reach, both locally and across the globe, and just to be known. I would like to retire knowing that I’ve made this a really safe space for a lot of people to explore their gender and sexuality. That’s my goal for the next ten to fifteen years until retirement comes, and to work a little less while I’m doing it.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.