A thirty-year-old trade show announced it was closing. Two competitors agreed to share technology. And a British pleasure brand started selling beauty products.
Not a bad snapshot of August in sexual wellness.
As usual, the three stories have very little to do with one another. But put them side by side and they do raise an interesting question about some of the routes this category has traditionally relied on.
What happens when the shortcut changes - or disappears altogether?
The show that named the industry is closing
The Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo has announced it is ending its involvement in the pleasure products industry after thirty years. The final edition ran in July.
If the name doesn't mean much to you, the founders will. ANME was established in 1996 by Susan Colvin of CalExotics, Elliot Schwartz of Nasstoys and Ron and Chad Braverman of Doc Johnson, with Pipedream and Topco among the founding group for much of its run. For decades, Burbank gave brands and buyers something incredibly valuable: access to one another.
In its farewell message, ANME described itself as a place where the industry came together to "build relationships, exchange ideas, celebrate successes and forge friendships".
That’s the human version. The commercial version is that a mid-sized brand could meet buyers, distributors and partners in two days who might otherwise take months to reach individually.
It wasn't the only route in. But it was the shortcut.
And ANME isn't the only change to the map. SZI Expo has moved to March 2027. Sex Expo returns to Los Angeles in January. E/X Ibiza runs for the first time this month, 22 to 25 September. Asia Adult Expo closed a successful edition in Hong Kong on 27 August. Satisfyer, meanwhile, suspended its participation in international B2B trade fairs back in March and moved to a distributor-led model built around market visits and workshops.
Individually, they're event stories. Together, they show a trade calendar becoming more spread out - geographically, strategically and in the way brands choose to meet buyers.
That doesn't mean trade shows are disappearing. Plenty are thriving. But if you have one travel budget and one stand budget, choosing where to spend them starts to matter a lot more.
And that raises a practical question: If fewer buyer relationships begin in the same room, what starts them instead?
There probably isn't one answer. It might be a distributor introduction, direct outreach, trade coverage, a market visit, LinkedIn, or a buyer discovering the brand somewhere entirely different. But whatever makes that first introduction has to work harder when nobody is standing next to it explaining the story.
That's where the humble deck, sell sheet, data pack and range plan become much more important. Not glamorous, admittedly. But a buyer opening a document on a Tuesday afternoon still needs an answer to the same question they'd ask face-to-face: What evidence do you have that people actually want this?
We've written before about DTC data being the material that answers that question. Sell-through by region, repeat purchase rates, review sentiment, returns, the segments buying that you didn't design for. Most brands in this category have all of it and use almost none of it.
For years, a strong trade calendar helped brands build those relationships in person. The opportunity now is to make sure the evidence can travel without you.
What happens when competitors start sharing the technology?
The second story landed at the start of September, but the agreement itself is worth including in the August picture.
Lovehoney Group and SVAKOM have entered a licensing agreement. SVAKOM will integrate Lovehoney's patented Pleasure Air Technology into a range of suction-based stimulators. In the other direction, Lovehoney gains access to SVAKOM's KooSync platform for its Arcwave brand.
Lovehoney Group CEO Johannes von Plettenberg framed it as a commitment to "protecting and sharing our intellectual property responsibly". SVAKOM CEO David Yu described interactive connection as the future of intimate wellness.
Both readings are fair. Ours is slightly different - and this is interpretation rather than something either company has said.
For years, product mechanisms have been one of the clearest ways brands differentiated themselves. Patents protected that advantage and helped keep competitors at a distance. Here, two significant operators have decided there is value in exchanging access. That doesn't make the underlying technology less valuable. Quite the opposite - licensing can extend the commercial value and reach of IP.
But it does raise an interesting question about where differentiation goes next when useful technology becomes available across more than one brand. And look at the other side of the exchange.
Lovehoney isn't simply receiving another product mechanism. It's gaining access to a connected-product platform. That opens a very different set of possibilities around interaction, product experience and potentially the relationship a brand can build around the product after the sale.
Perhaps the interesting story isn't that hardware suddenly doesn't matter. It clearly does. It's that hardware may no longer have to do all of the differentiating on its own. For brands, that opens up a bigger question. If another company can eventually build, licence or develop something similar to the feature you're known for, what else makes you difficult to replace?
The product experience? The ecosystem around it? The community? The relationship you've built with your customers?
Product innovation still matters enormously. But the value built around the product may be becoming just as important as the mechanism inside it.
Meanwhile, the category walked into a different aisle
The third story is smaller but we think it’s an interesting signal from August.
Je Joue is expanding its ILY range with a line-up that puts pleasure products, beauty essentials and lifestyle additions together, aimed explicitly at younger buyers. Elsewhere, SVAKOM's Klitty was picked up in anan, one of Japan's best-known mainstream women's lifestyle magazines, as part of a feature on self-pleasure products.
Neither is a headline event.
But both say something about where sexual wellness products increasingly see themselves belonging.
Now go back to that trade show for a second and read its name again.
The Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo.
Novelty.
That word tells you exactly what this industry believed it was selling in 1996, and it is not a criticism, because in 1996 it was broadly accurate. The distribution, the trade infrastructure, the buyer relationships and the shows were all built around a novelty business.
Thirty years later, brands are putting their products on a shelf next to serums and skincare and being written up by mainstream women's magazines.
ANME's closure isn't evidence that one caused the other. But the two stories make an interesting pair. One reminds us where much of this industry's commercial infrastructure came from. The other gives us a glimpse of where parts of the category now want to go.
And perhaps that's the more exciting point.
Sexual wellness doesn't have to leave specialist retail behind in order to enter new spaces. It can exist in both. The opportunity is a bigger map.
So what are we taking from August?
Three familiar routes looked slightly different by the end of the month. The trade show that brought buyers into one room is gone. Two competitors decided there was value in sharing access to technologies that might previously have stayed firmly behind their own walls. And products that once sat neatly inside "adult novelty" are increasingly appearing in beauty, wellness and mainstream lifestyle environments.
None of that means the old routes have stopped working, Trade shows still matter. Product innovation still matters. Specialist retail still matters.
They're just no longer the only routes available.
Buyer relationships can begin outside the traditional trade calendar. Technology can create value through collaboration as well as exclusivity. Sexual wellness products can find customers in places the category didn't historically occupy. That gives brands more choices. It also leaves us with one useful question:
If your usual route disappeared tomorrow, what would take its place?