A new NSFW sex toy website, Bedroom Besties, reimagines what marketing in the adult world can look like and how three best friends with the time, the care and the freedom could collaborate to better the sex education of the LGBTQ community. In a shopping experience unlike any other, buyers can see the company owners “using the toys on themselves and each other,” according to Racket.
Bedroom Besties became public this January, but its three founders — who use the pseudonyms Ethel, Arch and Berry due to the pornographic nature of their work — dreamed up the “candid, queer, gender-inclusive, and filthy sex-toy shopping experience” in 2021.
All three worked at a ‘vanilla’ sex store when they came up with the idea to create a site for queer and trans customers in search of something kinkier. According to Racket, the group of besties self-identify as “sex-toy nerds and freaks” with interests in raunchy queer porn.
“We’ve always loved horny explicit photos, and it’s been really fun to create that content,” Ethel says.
Besides representation, play and filth, the group shared in their interview with Racket that one of their intentions for the site was to provide sex education for queer and trans people as to how the toys — which include Blush, Magic Wand, Satisfyer, Fun Factory, Womanizer, We-Vibe and more — are intended to be enjoyed. Like a product manual, but porn!
“Sex toys aren’t intuitive sometimes!” says Arch.
Different from other retailers, “We’re not just curating,” Ethel continues. “We’re going to show you how to use it.”
The Besties also take the time to edit every product description on their site to be gender-inclusive, though they add that the balance on the line of inclusive and clinical can be tricky.
“Explicit language is a lot of fun—and we want it!—but it also can be triggering,” notes Arch, “[because] not everyone’s gonna use the same language.”
Bedroom Besties is not a completely original idea, according to Berry, who cites Fort Troff, another site which shows how products should be used on bodies, as an inspiration.
“They’re great, but they’re really only marketing themselves to gay, cisgender men,” she says. “And I was like, I feel like there’s a huge opportunity here to show how sex toys actually work on all different kinds of bodies.”
For now, the Besties intend to stay online, and are working to get the word out about their platform locally, noting that the combination of sex toys and pornography makes the site difficult to market amidst the myriad of adult advertising regulations.
Read the original story on Racket here.
Check out the Bedroom Besties website here.
