The LELO/Satisfyer Ruling Is Very Funny

Been a while since I spoke my mind about the sex toy industry in the way that I used to. I’ve learned from the bridges I’ve burned. That’s growth, that is.

But the recent story about LELO and Satisfyer’s court case has just absolutely filled me with healing light, and I can’t stop thinking about it, because it’s the best and funniest example of how chaotic and stupid and messy and magical the sex toy industry can still be sometimes.

A very, quick, broad recap.

So, for years, YEARS, the German company EIS, which owns Satisfyer, has been hounding the company LELO (origins unknown*) over patent infringement.

Specifically, Satisfyer accused LELO of copying its air pulsing technology.

Last week, in what I hope to GOD ALMIGHTY is the end of this kind of thing, an Australian court not only dismissed the lawsuit, but also threw out Satisfyer’s patents in the process, because they infringed on Womanizer’s patents.

So in an effort to stifle industry competition, Satisfyer accidentally demonstrated that its own patents were invalid. And that is, in professional language, fucking hilarious.

Naturally, nobody outside the pleasure industry is going to take any notice of this news. Who cares. But some of us who were paying attention are secretly delighted. This was a better, and much funnier, outcome than most of us hoped for.

Let me explain.

The whole time I was at LELO, about five and a half years, we were locked in litigation with We-Vibe, a Lovehoney Group company, same as Womanizer. Various LELO products could not be sold in various markets, court cases dragged on for years, and the staff of the respective companies would be actively hostile to each other at trade shows. We tried to sabotage each other’s award nominations. That kind of thing. We all hated each other. Because… dildos.

And then throughout my time at Lovehoney, there was a renewed emphasis on intellectual property protection. Hundreds of thousands of Euros devoted to preventing patents being even slightly infringed, boring legal meetings, and backroom gossip about minor legal victories we had won or lost.

I hated all of it. All of it. I saw the increasingly litigious nature of the bigger sex toy brands as a complete waste of money, time, emotion, and resource, and an obstacle to innovation, and therefore growth.

Feels good to be right every now and then.

That emphasis on IP protection began around 2014, a time immediately after the astronomical 50 Shades Of Grey sales uplift, when there were suddenly major investors sniffing around our murky little industry. In an effort to make ourselves more presentable, and therefore more investable, we tried to act like big industries, pretending we knew about forecasting and investorship and mergers and IP protection.

Problem is, we didn’t know any of that stuff. We were dildo salesmen. And the pool of professionals from which we could hire to do this work was shallow, given the nature of the industry. That’s a euphemism; what I mean is occasionally we hired senior executives who weren’t very good, because we were inexperienced.

We were three chipmunks in a trench coat trying to pass for a businessman. In the arena of Intellectual Property protection in particular, the LELO/EIS case has proved that most of this investment in IP protection is a waste of a lot of money. In an effort to cosplay as serious businesses, the LELO/EIS case has exposed us as an unserious industry.

Here’s Why.

Go to any sex toy industry in Asia, China in particular, and it’s a bewildering cacophony of trademark and copyright disobedience.

One manufacturer produces one minor technical innovation, and the next year every product at the show has it. And then someone iterates on it, puts it in a prettier body, and the next year every product at the show looks like that one.

Even the branding is up for grabs. I distinctly remember being at the Shanghai Sexual Health tradeshow in 2015 and seeing a company selling products almost identical to LELO’s under the brand name ‘LECO’, with the ‘C’ slightly stylised to look like an L. The affrontery, the shamelessness. You almost have to respect it. LECO’s booth was massive, and it was in the same hall as LELO – they could fucking see each other.

Right then, in that moment, surrounded by dildo bikes, male masturbators that smelled of diesel, and suspiciously youthful-looking sex dolls, I knew that investing heavily in IP protection would ultimately be pointless.

China doesn’t care about IP the same way that Western CEOs do. Problem is, ALL the technological innovation in sex toys is coming out of China. All of it. I can’t think of an exception. It’s all there, and all the best sex toy designers and engineers I’ve ever worked with are Chinese. Chinese engineering departments produce frankly incredibly innovative and daring and weird designs, and then they have to just hand them off to Westerners so we can fuck the marketing up for them.

China is the heart, brain, and private parts of our industry, and there’s no incentive for them to abide by Western intellectual property standards. And even if they would, how could they, when the CEO in an office in Berlin has made the entire engineering department redundant, outsourced it to Shenzhen, and is still demanding 11 new flagship products this month? What do you expect is going to happen?

It's the businesses who aren’t getting themselves bogged down in pointless, expensive legal posturing that will ultimately grow, because for our industry, there will always be an IP protection problem. Western pleasure brands all rely on China for design innovation, but none of them can control the way IP is handled in China, and fighting it out in Western courts is such a pointless waste of time and money.

 If you’re a business owner, perhaps you think I sound naïve. Perhaps you think IP protection is always worthwhile. Ok, hard to argue with that. But we’re not talking about Samsung and Apple here, or LV chasing out fakes from the market. We’re talking about dildo brand shitfights. It’s embarrassing. The LELO/EIS thing was the product of our desire to be taken seriously, and all it did was demonstrate how silly we are.

Take your business seriously, of course, but not so seriously that you forget it’s an unserious business.

Anyway...

My loyalty is and always will be to the customer. This kind of industry shitfighting stifles innovation, and money that should go to the R&D and marketing departments goes instead to the lawyers, and it’s the customer who suffers.

*No one’s exactly sure where LELO is from. LELO’s like Tommy Wisseau; it has a vaguely unidentifiable European accent but is suspiciously evasive about its history. I don’t even know for sure where LELO is from and I was the brand manager.