The Couple Who Designs Sex Toys Together, Stays Together: Our Exclusive Interview with Brian & Suki Dunham Of OhMiBod

When Brian and Suki Dunham first met, little did either of them imagine that they would one day be on the cutting edge of the collision between sex toys and technology. Nevertheless, the founders of OhMiBod have taken their company from a niche market into the premiere sex toy innovators of the 21st century. In May, they launched an Indiegogo campaign for their latest innovation, the blueMotion, and racked up nearly twice the amount of money they were seeking. The product's integration with smartphone technology made it the newest frontier in keeping your partner pleased, even if you're not inhabiting the same space. 

Both Brian and Suki come from strong tech backgrounds, and thanks in particular to Suki's time spent with Apple, they have managed to continually manufacture products that not only stay a step ahead of the needs of a burgeoning market, but also come housed in sleek and elegant packaging that makes them stand out even further from the crowd. I recently got to chat with Brian and Suki about their tremendously successful crowdfunding experience, their humble beginnings, and where they think the future of sex toys might be heading.

Tucker Bankshot: What was the specific genesis for the OhMiBod App? Was there a time where you thought about it in very broad terms, or was it a specific idea from minute one, i.e. it couldn’t have existed without smartphone technology.

Brian Dunham: Well, one of our best selling products was the Club Vibe 2.OH, and that had a really cool remote control with a microphone built into it, so when you walked into a club, the music would stream right into your clit. So that was one of our best-selling products and the wearability of it was great, but what I got from our customers was that it would be great if we didn’t have the bulky remote. So what we tried to do was think of a way to have a remote control but to make it cooler or more discreet. So that’s kind of where the idea for turning the phone into a remote control started, and then we launched the app with blueMotion at CES in January and everybody obviously thought that it was super cool and loved the product, but what they also questioned us on, can I control this from a distance? So that’s how it led into not just an app, but an app that can be controlled over the internet. 

Suki Dunham: The other thing I wanted to add to that is that Brian is talking about the app in its current genesis, but we actually did a basic version of the app several years ago, I think it was four years ago we launched it at CES. What OhMiBod has been about for a long, long time is basically this place where tech and pleasure meet, so the whole idea behind, for instance, music-driven vibration and how we got our start was about giving people endless possibilities of vibrations, be it through music or whatever. So, when we introduced the app four years ago, it was an extension of that, and also the fact that obviously people were using their phones for just about everything, even back then, and so when we launched blueMotion and kind of revamped the app and added a bunch of functionality to it, it was obviously to take things to the next level and make it even more exciting and fun for the user. 

Tucker: Yeah, and I think that really comes through. The interface in particular is remarkably intuitive and easy to pick up, so I think that you can tell that it’s not something that was a seat-of-your-pants operation, it was clear that you knew what you were doing. 

Brian: Well, we work hard at user interface, whether it’s on the Vibe or even on the app, so we spent a lot of time on the UI for the app to make it not just fun and playful but also, as you said, easy to navigate and easy to control. The last thing you want to worry about when you’re having sex or controlling someone or masturbating you don’t want it to be a cumbersome process, so we tried really hard to do that, and we got a lot of good feedback from regular mainstream app folks, especially at the electronics show where they applauded us on the ease of navigation. So it’s always great to hear from folks, including yourself. We operate a little bit in a bubble here, so that’s always nice to hear.

Tucker: The response to your Indiegogo campaign was pretty overwhelming. What were your thoughts going into it and then coming out on the other side of it?

Brian: After we launched the initial app at CES that didn’t have the over the internet wi-fi capability which everyone was asking for, we thought, okay let’s do this is a way that’s fun and is more interactive than just working on it, like I said, in a bubble and then putting it out there. So, the idea of launching it on Indiegog was not just about the financial aspect, but it was also about getting some promotion and some publicity and pr about it, and it was also about getting feedback. We got a lot of private e-mails during that Indiegogo process that said, hey it would be cool if you did this or I’d love to do this with my girlfriend, so it was also a way of connecting with potential customers, and also to use those customers as a sort of Beta program. 

So we communicate with them directly, we get feedback from them directly, and then it makes the whole process better, because you can’t just launch something like this and expect it to work the same way for everybody. So the natural course is you launch it, you get feedback, you change it, you get more feedback, you tweak it again. We’re constantly in this process of tweaking it, whether it’s the connection or the layout or the UI or the functionality, with real customers. 

Suki: As far as the Indiegogo campaign goes, Brian really hit the nail on the head because the ability to get customer feedback while you’re in the development process of something is really a great thing to have because before you put something out there, you’ve already gotten some people that are interested in it to give you real, honest feedback. I think it also helped us to produce a better product right out of the gate. 

Tucker: That’s actually a great segue into my next question, which is to talk a bit about testing process for the Remote App. Was it rigorous, and did you seek a variety of opinions on the best options or did you trust your own instincts enough to create a universal product?

Brian: It was a little bit of both as it is with most projects. We don’t have a huge wealth of Beta testers because when you’re developing things in this kind of stealth mode, you don’t want to talk to too many people about it, but we do trust our own instincts. We’ve been in the business for about seven years, making vibrators and selling products, and with Suki’s experience at Apple and my experience at Tyco Electronics, we do have between us a network of people outside of the industry that we can rely on from a technological perspective that really help us in product development. 

So it’s kind of a yes and no, we don’t go real public and put it out there for everybody. We do have folks that we bounce ideas off of, whether it’s playful or technology, we do have people in our pocket that we can rely on for that. And we trust them also to be candid with us and not just say, that was great.  

Suki: A lot of the people we know and get feedback from in the tech world, they’re not necessarily novices.

Brian: Yes, and for example when we were deciding on the audio chip, we decided to go with the straight audio because that way, not just our app can drive the vibration. So if you’re a female and you’re on a bus and you’re playing Candy Crush, for example, the sounds that get you to the next level, the music that starts playing and the bell and sound effects, that also drives vibration to the product. So whether it’s your Pandora playlist or an app that produces audio, any of those audio signals will drive the vibration. 

Tucker: You offer quite literally everything on your website. What is the process like for you when developing a new idea? Do you look at perhaps other products that don’t function as well as you would like or do you come from a place of meeting a need that no one else is meeting?

Brian: I think it’s a little bit of both. For example, the Triple Stim is driven from our own personal experience from our own, experimentation if you will. The Lovelife line, when we launched it last year, was a celebration of our relationship together. We’ve been together for…

Suki: Twenty six years. 

Brian: Right, so a little over a quarter of a century, so it was more or less a celebration of that and our fun journey together. I mean, even the product names are reflective of that journey. Things like Adventure and Cuddle and Smile and Dream and Discover, those are things that we think are cornerstones in any healthy relationship, so that’s how we came up with the names. But when we were looking into the product selection, to answer your question, we thought, let’s take some of the products that we’ve used in our own lives, and maybe make them a little better. But then also with Adventure, we thought, well let’s try something that really hasn’t been done before which is that idea of a triple stimulation vibe in a nice, compact format without making it look like an octopus.

Suki: Or making it look scary, which we’ve seen. So to go back to your point about, do we go from scratch or do we improve upon, if you look at Club Vibe, which was our best seller up until blueMotion came out, that product solved a bunch of customer complaints that they had had with remote control vibrators up until that time. So remote control vibrators in many cases up until that point, were battery driven, which means that they eat batteries. So we did ours as a USB rechargeable. 

The other thing was that most of the wearables were big eggs which, me personally, I find to be very uncomfortable. So we developed Club Vibe to be worn on the outside of the body, and to just be super slim line so it was very discreet. So with that particular product, and why it’s done so well, is because I think that we solved and resolved customer problems that they had with other products before that. 

Tucker: Again, that’s another great segue into my next question. The functionality of your products combined with the aesthetics is fantastic, so how did you come to meet and work with your designer Mathieu? 

Brian: We got his name from a crowdsource design site, and I think that’s how we originally met is through a mutual contact outside of the industry. We met with him and because of his experience as a world class designer, and the fact that he had done mostly cosmetics and furniture design, right? 

Suki: Yeah, he had done a little bit of everything, actually. Cosmetics and furniture to lighting and electronics, installation art, he had done everything and that’s why he was so appealing to us, because he hadn’t done anything even close to our world. So when you come to something with fresh eyes, you get some really interesting ideas.

Brian: Right, and he’s in his early 30s, he has a girlfriend, and they were very open to working with us on this particular project. So he was our right hand man, and brought us this really beautiful design which, with the Lovelife line, it won a red dot award for design which is highly unusual because usually they just pick one product out of a line, and we got it for the entire line. So when you combine that with Suki’s ability to design a package that’s in that sort of Apple way, with a very beautiful, sleek, fun, elegant, and classy without being over the top, those things combine to make a product really notable. 

Tucker: Yeah, and certainly helps you stand out from the pack but at the same time it’s admirable because I can see it appealing to people who wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as being in the market for something like that. When it meets those needs, it transcends what people think they want or need.

Brian: Right, and that’s how we got into this industry in the first place and I was shopping at, I think it was Good Vibrations, and this was ages ago, this was maybe a decade ago or more, and I bought Suki her first vibrator. But the process, even back then, this was before the people like OhMiBod and Jimmyjane and Lelo, most of the stuff was in that sort of clamshell package and it had some reference to a porn star or whatever. So the whole buying experience for me, and I was very young and inexperienced at least in this are, it was like it wasn’t marketing to me, it was marketing to someone else. 

So when we decided to get into this business, we decided to take a very different angle. Our very first OhMiBod box was just a white box with a product shot on it, just like the Apple iPod. And that was different in the industry and I think that just by doing that opens up the market a little bit to people that might be shy about getting into these type of toys. So our mission became to make these products more approachable like a consumer electronic product as opposed to a “naughty” product. And if you open up a Brookstone catalog right now, the blueMotion is in there. So we’re starting to see cultural advances when it comes to these products, which is exciting to us to see the whole industry working toward making better products, whether it’s better materials, better packaging, better design, better electronics, etc.

Tucker: Yeah, you know it’s funny to hear you say that because at Exxxotica here in Chicago, and when looking at the sex toys, I thought to myself, nothing kills the mood faster than trying to figure out how the hell I’m going to get something open, let alone how am I going to use it (All laugh). So the packaging alone, it doesn’t seem like this huge thing. You expect that a company is thinking about the functionality and the electronics, it seems like the packaging is like an afterthought to so many companies, so it’s really nice to see that you have clearly put time and thought into that aspect. 

Brian: Thanks. Suki works particularly hard at that.

Tucker: Why the smiley faces on a number of your products? Is that something you requested or did Mathieu offer that up to you?

Suki: That really came out of our conversation with our designer Mathieu, and our conversations around what we wanted this new line that we were creating which was a celebration, and what kind of a feel it had. The purpose of Lovelife, besides celebrating our long, long relationship, obviously, was about this idea of approachability. For somebody who may not have ever purchased a vibrator, they would be able to get something that felt super comfortable to them, playful, cute, if you will, that also had the qualities to go along with all that other stuff; The packaging, the design, the quality of the materials, and the finish of the product.

Brian: I remember having a conversation on Skype with Mathieu and we had some different button iterations, and a lot of them were very serious. So we had this conversation around let’s not forget that this is a very fun thing that we’re doing. This is for couples or women who are playing with themselves or having intercourse with one another, and at the end of the day it needs to be a fun, playful thing and we don’t have to be so serious about it. And the buttons don’t have to be like regular consumer electronics buttons, that we can convey, like Suki said, through the buttons that the products are playful.

Tucker: Do you find that your products appeal more to people who are dissatisfied with other products on the market or to people who are first-time buyers of sex toys?

Brian: We don’t have a lot of hard evidence. I know, anecdotally, that our products appeal to a lot of first time buyers, but it depends upon the product too. I know that Club Vibe and blueMotion are not designed for that person that has never experienced vibration before, but rather a person that knows what a vibrator does and wants to take it to the next level, and they’re not afraid to go out in public, or to a club, or a dinner party and have someone remote controlling their vibe. It’s a totally different level from that person who’s thinking about maybe a soft g-spot toy or even a bullet that’s very discreet. We have products that, I think, appeal to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of experience levels.

And also, with Lovelife, we priced that line in a way where we saw a lot of products in that same quality level were priced well over a hundred dollars, and our main target with Lovelife was to make it really accessible for, say, young couples who don’t have $150 bucks to drop on a vibrator. So we’re trying to offer a very similar product in terms of usability, functionality, all that for a price that’s well below what a lot of folks in the industry are pricing their stuff at. 

Tucker: What do you think is the next frontier in the collision of sex toys and technology?

Brian: Well, we have some things that we’re working on, but we can’t tell you about them (All laugh). But just in general, culturally, I think we’re more open to this idea of tech and sex than we were even five years ago. The technology around the way we interact in our everyday lives and these products that track our every movement, it’s crazy. So that idea of integrating everything is something that people are much more receptive to than, like I said, five years ago. Even with blueMotion, this idea of controlling someone remotely is kind of far out there, it’s almost sci-fi kind of stuff.

We designed blueMotion for people to connect or to make their connections stronger, and there’s no reason why we can’t do that. Everyone’s mobile these days, people travel and if I’m in Chicago and I meet someone that’s in L.A., there’s no reason that I can’t keep that connection and keep it strong. Or if you’re in the military and you’re missing your wife, or even if you’re just in a different part of the city, the positive reaction that we’re seeing to that really bodes well for the development of new technologies.

Suki: You know, through my time at Apple, one of the things that I really saw is that a lot of big companies have these consumer groups and test groups and focus groups, and they design around that, and Steve always said that if you ask the customer what they wanted, they’re not going to be able to tell you, you have to just deliver it. They’re not going to know it until they have it. So you have to be the visionary there and see where things are headed.

Tucker: Is there anything else you’d like your fans and consumers to know?

Suki: I think that everything we do here, we put a lot of thought into. Everything from the name of something, spending time thinking of names, to our packaging to using the pattern of our Lovelife products on the box, literally every minute detail we’re spending time on and being mindful about. So we just want the consumers and fans to know that we put a ton of love into just about every single thing we do. 

Brian: It’s not always a pretty process, either, I think our next product is going to be called “Bicker” (All laugh). But I guess if you’re going to be in an industry with your wife, this is the one to be in.