"It's saturated as hell, so good luck." That's Alec Hardy's single piece of advice for any brand entering the sexual wellness category for the first time. He follows it with a genuine argument, but the bluntness is worth paying attention to. Eleven years in, having reviewed hundreds of products, built an audience around high-tech sex toys, and trained as a conscious kink educator and sexologist, he's not trying to make the category sound more welcoming than it is. He's trying to be useful.
Hardy came into sex toy content sideways - through cam work and live streaming, before gravitating toward reviews "naturally, like by accident." The pivot toward technology came from genuine curiosity rather than commercial calculation. He focuses on high-tech, interactive, and app-connected products; he tracks what's coming out of Chinese manufacturers and watches how brands evolve their approach to inclusion. He reviews a new product only when it genuinely brings something different to the conversation. "Since I've reviewed hundreds of toys already, if there's another standard vibrating deal, I don't really feel like there's any point in doing a 27th review of basically the same concept."
That filter - novelty over volume - shapes his view of what the category actually needs from brands right now.
The penis pump problem, and what it tells you about product copy
Hardy does panels at industry events in Hungary. Every time he brings toys and discusses penis pumps, the same thing happens. "Every single person thinks they are supposed to make your dick bigger."
His explanation of what penis pumps actually do - support blood flow for people with erectile dysfunction, as an ongoing therapeutic aid - is accurate and clear. The problem is that most brands aren't communicating it. "There are quite a few people who bought the pump and pumped their partner's penis. And of course, while it's in the pump, it gets swollen and bigger, but as soon as you remove the pump, it gets back to original size and they are like disappointed."
The audience expectation being set by product copy doesn't match the product. That's a customer experience problem, a returns problem, and a trust problem - all of which trace back to the same source: marketing language that prioritises aspiration over accuracy.
Hardy's version of authenticity isn't a values statement. It's an operational one. "There are a lot of brands that are advertising pretty basic toys as completely revolutionary. I'm not a fan of that." His position on what makes a brand worth working with strips back all the mission language and gets to the point: does the product do something new, and does the brand communicate what it does accurately? If yes, he's interested. If not, he isn't.
The Keon review, and the territory nobody is ready to talk about
Hardy's most successful piece of content, by every metric, was his review of the Kiiroo Keon - a masturbator with app connectivity and VR integration. It generated his highest view count, his highest conversion rate, and the most inbound questions he's ever received on a single product.
What made it interesting wasn't just the hardware. It was the questions the hardware raised. Hardy is direct about his own experience with it: "I had more real feeling sexual experiences using the Keon and watching videos with a VR headset than, for example, going to a massage parlour." He says this not as an endorsement of one over the other, but as a data point about where immersive sex tech is already sitting in people's lives — and how far ahead of the conversation the technology has got.
"The next level I can imagine is AI-driven content being generated in real time, responsive to my specific reactions, remembering everything I like. It's a really slippery slope that can lead to a lot of weird places if people are not using it correctly - if there's even such a thing."
For brands building in the sex tech space, that observation is an argument for investing in user education before the marketing spend, not after. The most technically sophisticated products in the category are also the ones most likely to produce unexpected outcomes for consumers who've had no preparation for what those products actually do. Hardy's point is that the conversation around immersive and AI-driven sex tech is happening at the product development level and nowhere near enough at the consumer education level.
On consent documentation - a practical note
Hardy's approach to consent in his own content production is worth noting for its specificity. For more intense scenes, he records a short video before the shoot - "this is what we're going to do, everybody's excited and enthusiastic about it" - and another one after. The post-shoot recording covers what was made, what worked, what to keep, and what was learned. "It's a good thing to have for every participant, because then you have video proof that after the shoot everybody was happy."
That's a protocol, not a principle. It addresses the gap between consent as a pre-shoot agreement and the more complex question of how people feel about what they made after the fact. He connects this to broader concerns about AI-generated content and deepfakes - a territory where the consent conversation is still almost entirely absent.
What brands keep getting wrong
Hardy's formulation of the buzzword problem is the clearest in the series. "I've seen quite a few brands like empowering and using all the right buzzwords, like how they are gonna revolutionise the sexual wellness industry, and this completely - and at the end it's just a dildo." His conclusion: "If there are very big words and just a dildo, I would not buy it. Stupid. Either go one way or the other - just not the mixed middle."
His actual advice for brands entering the category isn't to drop the ambition. It's to earn the language. "When there is actually something behind the buzzwords, then it's amazing." A clear product story - "this is a dildo, it's really awesome, go rock your socks off" - is more credible than revolutionary claims that can't be substantiated. The former sets expectations accurately. The latter sets expectations that the product can't meet.
The implication for brand positioning is direct: specificity outperforms aspiration if the aspiration isn't backed by anything real. That applies to product copy, to creator briefs, and to how brands describe themselves when they approach educators like Hardy for partnerships.
Find Alec Hardy on Instagram at @AlechardyXX.
