This Hong Kong Startup Is Quietly Making North America’s New Favorite Butt Plug

Photo: Oksana Volina/Shutterstock

A fleshy, heavyweight sex doll with blonde hair is slumped on its back over an air mattress. Behind me there’s a large, all-black sex swing by the window. Metal shelving units are filled with double-ended dildos, vibrators, and butt plugs, and manikins are decked out in neon lingerie. One manikin, headless and shaped somewhat like a baby, dressed up in a miniature sex outfit, hangs over cardboard boxes.

I’m on the eighth floor of a Hong Kong office tower at A&H Design Group, a little-known Chinese maker and distributor of sex toys gaining traction in America.

“Some people wear butt plugs to work, or when they’re just out and about,” said Kat Weiss, one of the team’s graphic designers. Weiss was the only employee interviewed at the offices willing to give her name. While the team is open with me about their work, everyone I spoke to at the design group—except for Weiss—requested that their real names be withheld because they fear of being outed to their families for working in the sex toy industry.

But the small team of four millennials is jovial when I meet them, as they’re pushing ahead into what they call North America’s “anal market.” A&H’s new flagship product, an anal sex toy called the b-Vibe that launched last month, is made from silicone, comes in different sizes, and has rotating beads inside. It’s meant to be the sex toy market’s premier anal vibrator; the Apple of anal.

“We’re going for something educational, high-end, and techy,” Weiss said.

“We’re going for something educational, high-end, and techy.”

A&H is pinning its hopes on the b-Vibe as it moves away from relying on wholesale distributors—the team has just directly sold the first b-Vibe online without the help of distributors, to a customer in Canada. They expect that more online sales will soon follow.

Inside the conference room where I sit down with the team, each size of the b-Vibe—in a rainbow-like pink, purple, and blue—are lined up before me on the table with their Bluetooth remote controls. I’m taken by the packaging, which features a clean-cut gay couple in what looks like a wedding picture, along with other mixed-sex and same-sex couples enjoying intimate moments.

Image: b-Vibe

To help with its digital push, the team at A&H has just hired John* for online marketing. He thinks the market for A&H's products is there, and wants to sell directly to buyers online.

“What we find works really well is people search for ‘rimming plug’ online, or ‘what is rimming,’ and we show up—and they think, ‘Oh what is this product?’ So then they leave our website and type in ‘b-Vibe reviews,’” said John. “It’s a long kind of journey to the purchase.”

During the testing process, the company engaged the help of American sex expert Alicia Sinclair, who used the product and gave her feedback throughout. Sinclair, who is a member of the World Association of Sex Coaches, is today the public face of the company. Sinclair, along with another sex expert, Charlie Glickman, have put together a pamphlet on responsible anal sex that’s distributed with the b-Vibe.

“This product doesn’t exist anywhere else—there are no butt plugs with rotating beads,” said Sam*, the company’s design manager.

“What we find works really well is people search for ‘rimming plug’ online, or ‘what is rimming,’ and we show up.”

Meanwhile, other popular products coming out of the design group include the Drilldo, a large dildo attached to a drill.

“You can use any dildo and any drill you find in your home—we went with a DIY angle,” said Sam. The Drilldo comes with plastic goggles and a sexy female construction vest, both of which were designed in the company’s Guangzhou factory—just a few hours’ train ride from Hong Kong, up on the Chinese mainland. There, in south China, factory production tends to come at a low cost.

The sex toy packaging is designed by both Weiss and Thomas*, who said, “Like a website, it’s all about imagery.” Thomas is another graphic designer at the company, who was working at a web agency before joining A&H. “I’ve got to pay attention to color schemes, formats of icons—these are things I’d need to use while designing a website.”

Read more: I Went to a Chinese Robot Shop to Witness the Coming of the Sex Robots

A&H is also planning on releasing the Cow Girl, a relatively large sex toy that’s shaped in the fashion of a mechanical bull, with a dildo center and top. But it’s not all sex toys for the company—sometimes, if it means a profit on Amazon, they’re also selling blender kits, coffee makers, and even mattresses, which they purchase out-of-house.

In Hong Kong, where local Cantonese culture is markedly more conservative than in America, sex toys are selling well, regardless. A&H has a chain of seven stores called Pink Pussy Cat across the city, selling their sex toys.

“People are very coy when talking about sex toys because they think people judge them,” said John. “People want to experiment—you work long hours in Hong Kong and when you go home you want to have a bit of fun, and relax.”

John and Sam, meanwhile, also haven’t told their families that they work in the sex toy market. They don’t plan to.

“My parents came to the Guangzhou factory and I had them hide the stuff—my parents would not be very cool about it if they find out,” said Sam, who’s from Bangladesh, a country where speaking about sex is strictly taboo.

“The whole parents issue is because [Sam] and I are South Asian,” said John, whose family is Indian. “If I told my dad I were selling anal toys, he’d probably…” he trailed off.

While he said the transition from web design to sex toy and packaging design isn’t all too different in principle, Thomas now keeps his job a secret from his traditional Singaporean family. Weiss, while she’s told her family, sometimes withholds her job details from people she meets for the first time.

But for now, the hurdle to overcome for online sales certainly isn’t cultural—it’s getting people to buy a $150 anal insert that they haven’t touched, or let alone even seen, as they would as if they were making a purchase from a sex shop.

“Everyone might have an asshole, but to each their own,” said John. “That’s our biggest challenge.”

*Design group employee names have been changed.

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from This Hong Kong Startup Is Quietly Making North America’s New Favorite Butt Plug

Hong Kong's Property Ghost Hunters

A woman hanged herself in her beachside apartment with her own scarf in May. An elderly gentleman lost his balance while hanging laundry over the window, and plunged to his death in the city the month before. And out in the suburbs in February, a couple locked themselves in their apartment—with their dog—and burned bags of charcoal until they suffocated.

Turns out that here in Hong Kong, these at-home deaths—which happen all the time—can be another man’s boon. At spacious.hk, young entrepreneurs are keeping track of the tragic events that happen inside the city’s notoriously expensive apartments. Because when someone dies in one of the city’s properties, Chinese people don’t want to live in them anymore, out of a deep cultural fear of ghosts.

Luckily for spacious.hk, the city’s expatriates—not to mention Hong Kong’s new generation—aren’t usually bothered by living in haunted houses.

At the tech startup in Sheung Wan, which sits just on the edge of the city’s central financial district, spacious.hk founder Asif Ghafoor is making his business boom from the Chinese fear of living in these ghost apartments, called hung jaak in Cantonese.

The company reports that on average, the haunted house overlay is used some 5,000 times a month. Whether that leads to an actual transaction or not is hard to say, because from that point the transaction moves offline and between agents and renters. The haunted house service itself is free.

Read more: Haunted House Owners Were Once Legally Barred from Arguing Ghosts Aren't Real

“You can search for an apartment with specific incidents,” said Ghafoor, whose team keeps an updated database and map of where tragic deaths occur in Hong Kong properties—thereby lowering the rental prices. The user clicks a filter actually called “haunted.”

Take the J Residence, one of Hong Kong’s most luxurious residential buildings, as an example. After two sex workers were found gruesomely murdered in a one-bedroom apartment there in 2014, it came back on the market this year at half the price—dropping from a staggering $3,740 a month.

“It’s all a part of feng shui—there are no hard and fast rules, it’s about how you interpret the magic,” said Ghafoor, who explains that Hong Kong’s new—and dramatically expensive—developments take many aspects of feng shui into consideration to draw in wealthy Chinese renters. These aspects can include what direction the apartment faces, what the view is of, and the flow of the floor plan. Feng shui is everywhere in Hong Kong, and the government has spent millions on construction projects that are built in line with the ancient harmonizing philosophy.

*

When I first go to spacious.hk to find a haunted apartment, it doesn’t strike me as anything too different from other house-hunting websites. But when I click the filter, the map of Hong Kong becomes absolutely saturated with friendly-looking ghost icons—I’m shocked they’re everywhere.

For American James Fisher, spacious.hk’s director of analysis and analytics, collecting data on bizarre murders and suicides is all part of the day job. He leads a team of people who monitor in-apartment deaths from local media and police reports, and then map it out for spacious.hk users.

“Most of the stories are referred more as ‘data points,’ instead of detailed accounts of the individuals involved in the tragedies,” Fisher said. “I try not to dig down too much into those personal details.”

Screengrab: spacious.hk

He explains that spacious.hk has a simple back end form on the site for inputting building, date, and description of the event—and once that information is loaded, the event gets linked to the referenced building on the map overlay.

“The one thing that jumped out to me was cultural,” Fisher said. “I had to ask local colleagues what charcoal burning suicide was, because this isn’t something I ever heard of in the US.” In Hong Kong, a common form of suicide—like the couple with their dog—is to burn a charcoal grill inside an apartment and seal off the windows and doors with duct tape.

Charcoal burning became popular among high schoolers renting beach side apartments after failing their college entrance exams—they enter so-called suicide pacts with one another. The government considered building a controversial suicide theme park about a decade ago to capitalize from Hong Kong’s fear of ghosts, when death by charcoal burning hit its peak.

This fear of ghosts has even shaped one of Hong Kong’s trendiest neighborhoods, Po Hing Fong, where middle-aged and older Chinese renters mostly tend to avoid. In fact, it’s been affectionately dubbed “PoHo” by the large influx of expatriate residents there. Today, while the streets are dotted with craft beer bars and expensive vintage stores, PoHo was ground zero for the bubonic plague in Hong Kong and one of the city’s first slums after British colonization. And that makes PoHo bad feng shui.

“Most of the stories are referred more as ‘data points,’ instead of detailed accounts of the individuals involved in the tragedies”

Feng shui is taken seriously in Chinese culture—and this can cause a problem that moves past the supernatural. Real estate agents, especially the wily ones, are able to manipulate property prices by fabricating their own ghost rumors. If they want to attack another agent’s listing, there’s nothing stopping them from saying that someone tragically died in the apartment. “It’s quite easy to see this scenario that if someone wants to bring down a property price, they’ll just spread a ghost rumor,” said Ghafoor.

What governs the relationship between feng shui, tragic death, and apartments can be complicated, too. If someone jumps off the roof of a building, what does that mean for a property—do all the apartments then go for a lower price? There isn’t an easy answer, and spacious.hk only correlates data points for haunted houses with specific rentals.

Joseph Clark, a local property consultant with OKAY.com, said that the J Residence, again, is a good example of this murky magic territory. After the alleged murders in one apartment, many superstitious Chinese began moving out of the luxury building—obviously affecting its demand as a whole.

Meanwhile, the appetite for renting haunted houses is still strong enough that spacious.hk has plans to scale its service by expanding to Shanghai and Taipei. The company will follow the same process for collecting data on tragic deaths.

Clark said that today, he has many young locals and expatriates, alike, coming to him to find good haunted properties. “But if the parents are superstitious,” he said, “well guess what, the kids aren’t moving to that property they want, even if they love it.”

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from Hong Kong's Property Ghost Hunters