12:00AM GMT 18 Mar 2001
Comment
MIDDLE-class women and their sexual proclivities have kept Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Elle in business for years. But while women with large disposable incomes have been happy to read about sex, they have never spent much on it.
Now, Lilestone, a fledgling retailer chaired by Peder Ole Bertelsen, the septuagenarian oil millionaire who brought Ralph Lauren to Britain in 1973, is bringing designer sex into the homes of middle-class women by mail order, online shopping and a flagship store in west London due to open in September.
Think of The White Company or Boden but selling Italian branded lingerie, sex toys designed to look as good as anything Phillipe Stark would dream up, and cosmetics that would not look out of place in a Bulgari catalogue.
It is just a year since Charlotte Semler, a former board member of Lowe Howard Spink, the advertising agency, and Nina Hampson, a former analyst with Hay Management Consultants, founded the company and decided to take the sex industry into the luxury goods sector.
Although Lilestone is not a very sexy name, the company is keeping the identity of its new sex brand under wraps for a big September launch when it will be renamed after the brand.
"Sex should be fun, but what we are saying is sex can also be quality," says Semler. "There is an assumption that cheap and dirty is a turn on. Take most clothes and lingerie sold in sex shops. It does not compare to the quality of clothing in mid-market retailers. We are going to be different.
"The same with sex toys. The quality in sex shops does not compare with the quality of, say, most brown or white goods sold on the high street," she says.
Lilestone has launched a share offer to raise £1.5m as the company accelerates to its September launch. If it raises the money, Lilestone will be valued at £6m before a single basque or blindfold has been sold, based on a business plan predicting sales of £16m by 2003.
The mainstream sex business is dominated by Ann Summers, the retailer that bought Knickerbox last year. Jacqueline Gold, the chief executive, has built a business with sales of £53m and more than 40 stores.
With that part of the market sewn up, Lilestone is pitching itself at the top 20 per cent of women by disposable income, which amounts to about 2m consumers. The company's big hope is that it will have first-mover advantage in the upmarket sex business it intends to invent.
It has sent out a team of buyers to import lingerie brands which have yet to break into the British market from Italy, France and the US but, in a rather more ambitious move, it has also drafted in a team of designers found through the Royal Society of British Sculpture to rethink the vibrator, both in terms of what it looks like and the materials used to produce it.
"You know when you walk into an art gallery and you see a piece of sculpture you feel you just really have to touch?" asks Semler. "We've picked out people we felt had work with that sort of quality." The idea is to leave behind all those awful florescent phalluses and come up with something a little more aesthetically pleasing.
"It's not that most sex toys are designed by men," says Hampson, "it's that they just haven't been designed unlike every other household implement and product which has been redesigned 17 times by some of the best designers in the world. No one has really thought about it in that way, about using better, more hygienic materials which are better designed."
Meanwhile, Lilestone has signed up Intercos, the company which produces cosmetics for Versace and Calvin Klein, to manufacture its own range of cosmetics. It is also working with Peter Jarvis Cosmetics Developments, a company that counts Body Shop and Crabtree & Evelyn among its clients, to produce new massage oils, shower gels and lubricants.
"Take something really simple like a lubricant," says Hampson. "At one end of the market you've got KY Jelly which is a medicinal, industrial sort of product and at the other end there are products that our customers wouldn't use on their elbows, never mind anywhere else."
The company will be repackaging condoms, dragging the product's image out of the 1970s, and ditching all those embarrassing pictures and names that currently make having a pack in the house such a liability when the in-laws are staying.
"We are going to stand for a fashion brand that makes you feel sexy," says Hampson. "We have developed new products from scratch, new technologies and ingredients in our cosmetics that no one else is using. We have real unique selling points."
Hampson points to the 40 per cent growth rates Ann Summers is enjoying in turnover as a sign that the market has plenty of momentum. Lilestone has also scored something of a coup by hiring Georgina Blakemore, chief operating officer of The White Company to fill the same role at Lilestone.
Growth rates of 20 per cent a year for The White Company and other upmarket mail order businesses such as Boden and Racing Green gives Lilestone confidence that its business plan will work. Hampson believes its average transaction size will be at least £70. It will advertise its catalogue for sale every month in the glossies and expects a 3 per cent response rate. Of those who buy the catalogue Lilestone is expecting 8 per cent to make a purchase.
"We've done market research and it is very clear there is a gap in the market," says Semler. "When we say to affluent, fashion conscious women that we are launching a sex brand which is a luxury goods brand for women, they get it immediately," she says.
Semler and Hampson believe a new age of sexual enlightenment for women beckons, at least the shedding of some lingering taboos.
"There are two key areas that were never discussed and still aren't in a lot of cases even between female friends. One is female masturbation and the other is sex toys. In the past 12 to 18 months you have seen Cosmopolitan road testing sex toys and comparing them just as blenders used to be in Good Housekeeping."
