"If you're writing about your hole in your body with strangers reading it, let me at least be honest. Otherwise, what's the point? I don't want to be the cool guy in a magazine. I'd rather be the one you connect with."
Topher Taylor said this about the writing they were doing in their mid-twenties - articles for a free magazine distributed in sex shops and sex venues, addressing the fears nobody else was naming. The things that were stopping people from having the experiences they wanted, unaddressed by anyone with a platform. Topher addressed them, directly and in their own words, and it worked.
That instinct - to be the person people connect with rather than the person who looks cool - has shaped everything they've done in the sixteen years since. They started in sex shops at 18, "because it sounded really exciting and interesting, and I was really curious about sex." They moved into head office roles, built social media for brands, ran PR and brand management for queer retailer Clonezone, acquired Uber Kinky when it went into administration because they didn't want to see it disappear, and somewhere along the way developed a model for working with adult performers on Twitter - paying them in product, tracking the resulting sales - that they now recognise as influencer marketing before the term existed.
The through-line across all of it is the customer who walked into the sex shop terrified. "I used to work in your typical sex shop with two doors you slip sideways into. It's very discreet. And I always enjoyed the customer who'd come in and be really terrified - not in a sadistic way. I liked cracking them. And that just developed into me being really interested in marketing and how we can reach people."
"Everyone's being silenced everywhere in our industry"
Topher said this before the interview had properly started - an unprompted observation about timing. It turned out to be the most important thread in the conversation.
The "big purge" they describe is specific and documented from where they're sitting: LGBT and sex-positive accounts that have been active for 12 or 13 years being pulled from social media platforms without warning, no appeal process, no explanation. The inconsistency is the part that stings. "Katy Perry can hold a womanizer in her music video. Lily Allen can develop her own line of sex toys and advertise that on Instagram. Cardi B can do collaborative posts with sex toys. But I can't. And who would benefit more from the invoice?"
The disparity isn't just unfair. It's commercially significant. The creators who have spent years building genuinely engaged communities around sexual wellness - the people whose audiences actually trust their recommendations and act on them - are the ones being penalised. The celebrities who pick up a product for one campaign and move on are not.
For brands whose creator strategies depend on those communities, this is an operational risk. Topher's call to action is practical: share posts, amplify when creators get shut down, put pressure on Meta through volume. "Putting pressure on Meta does work sometimes." It's not a complete solution, but doing nothing guarantees the problem gets worse.
The underlying concern is broader than platform policy. The word "obscene" is being thrown around in political contexts in ways that could affect how e-commerce platforms interpret their own terms and conditions. "If that word starts getting weaponised in terms and conditions for businesses, it's really going to throw things through because they can change the interpretation of what's obscene." That's a compliance risk most sexual wellness brands haven't started preparing for.
The Pride campaign, and what it proved
Topher's most instructive story about creator-led brand strategy is from a Pride London campaign with Nexus. The context: during Pride events, sex toy brands historically didn't move much product. Lube and poppers, yes. Sex toys, no. Topher's idea was to bring sex toy sponsors into the Clonezone presence at Pride - a queer audience, concentrated, open to conversation.
"It was amazing because we had all of these people buying sex toys during Pride. And that was the first time I really saw an idea of mine result in sales, which was really affirming when you really believe in it."
The lesson isn't just that the campaign worked. It's why. It worked because Topher understood the community from inside it - knew what the audience was receptive to, what framing would land, what made Pride a different context from a standard retail environment. That knowledge wasn't in a brief. It came from 18-year-old Topher walking into a sex shop and spending years paying attention.
This is the distinction they make about what "doing your homework" actually means. "AI still makes mistakes. It doesn't have the interpersonal knowledge that creators do." The advice for new brands is to spread far and wide - "a big OnlyFans creator, a tiny OnlyFans creator, an individual who sells videos of their feet on their own platform" - because the knowledge is distributed across people, not extractable from a database.
On brand integrity, and who gets "the gays"
Topher's position on brand partnerships is direct in a way that comes from having worked the B2B side of the industry. "I've got a lot of background intel on businesses and what goes on behind the scenes. And I wouldn't - I can survive without an invoice or two if it means I'm not feeling like I'm selling my soul. Especially when you're dealing with something so intimate."
What they won't work with: brands that have entered the category purely for the money, without understanding or respecting the community they're trying to reach. The version of this they encounter most often: "I'm going to make a load of money selling sex toys. Let me get a gay influencer on. He'll get us the gays. And I'm like - it's not quite how it works. The product has to be good."
The brands they hold up as the benchmark are Nexus and Hot Octopuss. The common thread is product quality and genuine insider involvement. "They changed my career and my life. They chose me because they knew I was really interested in the product and pleasure - not just because I was some young gay guy."
That's the standard. Not the values statement. Not the inclusive language on the website. The question of whether industry people with genuine community knowledge were actually involved in making the product.
On micro-influencers, and the most useful advice in six months
Topher describes a collective event they attended where creators ranging from a few hundred followers to hundreds of thousands were in the same room. The brand had done the work of bringing together different kinds of community knowledge rather than just selecting the biggest numbers.
"There's a lot of integrity and power in micro-influencers. Their audience is much more trusting of them - they're more likely to be engaging with their comments and their DMs. They look less like a hashtag ad. What they're saying is something they believe in."
The most valuable piece of advice Topher received in the last six months came from someone at that event: a woman who maps sex-positive events and industry calendars. Not a big follower count. Extraordinary institutional knowledge. "I've been in this industry since I was 18, which is 400 years ago now. And she blew me out of the water."
That's the argument for doing the homework properly - not the homework that returns the highest follower counts, but the homework that finds the people who actually know things.
Find Topher at @TopherTaylor on Instagram, or at tophertaylor.co.uk.
