Jacqui Cheng looks into the R&D driving it:
A company out of Houston, Texas named Aneros started out as a medical device company to aid with the comfort problems that come with an enlarged prostate in men. The inventor of Aneros’ first product, a now-78-year-old Japanese man named Mr. Jiro Takashima, was trying to find an alternative solution to surgery before he stumbled upon the adult side of the industry, discovering that his company’s customers were using his prostate device for much longer lengths of time than he intended, and in very different ways.
“That’s what sparked so many different versions of our products today, because users were using them for hours on end, so it’s what motivated us to redesign our products,” Aneros CEO CT Schenk told me. As such, “the things we’ve come out with in the last few years have this concept of a wearable product designed for long-term use.” And some of those designs have had to go against what Mr. Takashima wanted. “For example, he’d always been very adamant that the tab on the Helix Sin always needs to be hard and firm to work correctly,” Schenk said, “but through user testing, we found it’s more comfortable if we make it flexible.”
The company finds readymade focus groups in the products’ online forums:
“People from the forums spend more time using these things than all our employees combined,” Schenk said of Aneros’ forum of around 50,000 members. “The forum has become the foundation of everything we do. We have a few guys who have been around for 10+ years who have volunteered to moderate and keep conversations going about the products. When we do product testing, we ask the questions that these guys will ask, and if they see a problem, they almost deliver a solution themselves.”
Aneros’ almost entirely male community is so dedicated to the company’s main product—Aneros only recently launched its first female product—that they voluntarily become evangelists to try and draft more people into the Aneros cult. “A lot of our users claim our products give a life-changing experience because it changes the way they can have these kinds of sensations,” Schenk said. “In some cases, they’re pretty much the experts.”
The Dish 