Aug
10
How To Sell A Sex Chair
Nothing about this post is safe for work. And I am not responsible for what happens when you click on the links. Which you should. Just not when your kids, your boss, or possibly your spouse are around.
Having said that, we’ll move onto today’s lesson.
Today, I stumbled upon the Tantra Chair. It’s a chair that you have sex on. (Theoretically, one could also do yoga on it, if one were so inclined.) And I’m going to tell you how they purveyors of a $1200 sex toy masquerading as furniture took me from “Are you out of your fucking mind?” to “Do you take PayPal?” in less than half an hour.
1. The testimonials.
Elle Magazine likes it. Men’s Health likes it. Playboy likes it. (Well, Playboy would, wouldn’t they?) The testimonials from real, live people refer to things like “lovingly made” and “attention to detail” and “fine craftmanship”. This, darlings, is social proof, and you’re going to need it if you’re selling something that makes people say “what the fuck?” (Woowoo service providers and newly minted alternative life coaches, I’m talking to you.)
2. The pictures.
They have pictures of happy people and pictures of the chair looking at home in an upscale condominium living room. They have pictures of all the different finishes. And they have pictures of all of the different positions you can try. Like, photographs. With models. If you can show pictures of naked people having sex when you’re selling your product, it’s a good idea to do so. Good pictures are vital. Etsy people, take note.
3. Their About page.
If I’m going to drop more than a thousand bucks on a sex toy, I want to know these guys are the real deal. Go check out their About page. It’s the kind of thing you’d find at a zen retreat, not a sex emporium. It’s the kind of thing I’d show to my mom. (Hi Mom.) Your About page is not about what you sell. It’s about what you represent.
4. The options.
This is not a one-size-fits-all sex chair. It’s a piece of fine furniture, and they sell it as such. You can pick the color of the leather. (Is it leather? Not sure.) You can pick the color of the little studs that smash the leather into the wood. The colors have names that other, non-sex furniture comes in. I do not feel icky.
All that stuff is lovely, but all it does is show me that SOMEONE might like the chair, not that I would like the chair. Up until this point, I know longer find the idea completely ludicrous but it’s sure as shit not something I’m dropping nearly two grand on, when you consider that somebody’s going to have to get this monstrosity to my house. Which brings us to the clincher…
5. The videos.
Videos. Plural. Of a real, live, very attractive couple using the chair. I would love to describe the videos but frankly, words fail me. This is not for the faint of heart. But if you can, I really recommend you check them out. What these things show is that the lovely people at Tantra Chair know something very important. They know they’re not selling furniture. They’re not selling sex.
They’re selling you a better life.
They couldn’t have done that without the videos. Not as well as they did. They could have explained. They could’ve given dozens more testimonials. They could have talked and talked about the benefits of their product. But those would’ve just made them seem like something between Clayton Makepeace and Billy Mays.
Sometimes, you just gotta show people what your product can do for them.
“Today, I stumbled upon the Tantra Chair.” Uh huh, um….leaving that aside….you’re absolutely right! OMG! You didn’t even mention the “Fine Art” page which gives away a new chair once a year to someone who comes up with a new great marketing shot of the chair in, ahem, use.
And this is why they invented PayPal years ago…
But…they are selling sex…better sex in fact. The promise is that you will have better sex using their chair, than say, any other furniture item you could have sex on.
Good marketing, yes. So what you’re saying is, I need to tell people they will have better sex if they work with me.
Wait…no.
The problem with testimonials in my business (counseling) is that in order to give them you have to tell people that you’ve been to counseling. Until stigmas about mental illness are gone, people aren’t likely going to give that information up voluntarily (I know, I’ve asked them).
What then? Naomi? Folks? Any way I can apply this without people having to say “Yeah, I went to Jim and he helped me with X problem”, because otherwise it doesn’t apply to me.
Well crap…now I want one.
You know, I’ve often wondered how many people find your site searching for things like this (or hairy breasts, or getting some ass) and go “Oh! I like marketing!” and stick around
Cinnabar with pewter finish nail heads please.
This is a brilliant example of tasteful show and tell. The site is so unassuming and thorough. They’ve done a great job. Now, if I could just find $1200…
Thanks for sharing your find and your thoughts!
@ Julie — If I told you how I got there, you wouldn’t believe me. It involved being on the phone with Fabeku and Googling “Singing Bowls”. Which brought me to a PPC ad for a meditation chair. Which brought me to the Tantra Chair. (Which brought me to their Friends page, which is too much even for IttyBiz.)
@ Jim — First initial, last name? Real testimonials with fake names, with a spot that says names have been changed? If you could do that one in a light-hearted way (“Nobody wants their friends to know they’ve been in therapy, so we figured we’d make it easy for everyone and promised we’d let them change their names…”) you can get the testimonials out there without forcing everyone to air their dirty laundry.
OH MY GOD.
…
NOW I WANT ONE.
I want one! But my cat would probably totally ruin it with her claws, lol.
That aside, it’s also really great learning material. Thanks for sharing! Taking notess.
Um, $1200 would buy a lot of beer and Playboys with which one could have “sex” without buying furniture or indulging in those mandatory endless conversations with someone else.
Plus you would avoid any risk of injury due to attempting to assume new positions.
I totally want one.
this is crazy !!
I could so totally see one of those in my living room, for crying out loud! (My bedroom’s too small.) It doesn’t scream, “She has sex on me!” (unless, of course, my guests are IttyBiz fans – then the jig would be up.)
Of course, at this point, I would be spending over a grand for a hell of a comfy reading chair as I am currently unattached and still have young children at home (so the likelihood of Mommy gettin’ her groove on in the living room – kickass “groove chair” notwithstanding – are pretty slim to none even IF Mommy had a “friend”.)
I agree with you Naomi, they’re selling far more than sex. All the factors listed above make this a ridiculous purchase for me at the moment, but I am STILL self-selecting as a member of their target market because of the possibilities, not the probabilities.
Thanks Naomi! I’m going to give that a shot and talk to my clients this week and use your suggestions. Once I get a few testimonials, I’ll pop them up on my site/blog and post the link here. :)
Suzanne, that’s a great point — “the possibilities, not the probabilities.”
Sonia – I would be loathe to admit how much money I’ve spent in the name of possibilities, not probabilities, but not all (or even most) of it turned out to be a waste. This is the mindset that made me buy “How to Sell the **** Out of Your E-Book” when it became available – regardless of the fact that I am not currently writing (or contemplating writing) an e-book. Was that purchase a waste? Hell no.
So, too, with this chair. I can TOTALLY see myself laid out on that thing with a favorite book, grinning like a bird-fed-cat at the knowledge that I’m not using it in quite the intended way…just yet, anyway. But, there’s always that possibility…
Or…if you REALLY want to see how my evil mind works…consider me buying one and putting it in my living room…and then my 22 yr-old son happens upon the Tantra Chair website sometime later…the shocked look on his face when he realizes that’s the chair I’ve got in my living room and that he just THOUGHT he knew who his mama is… Oh My Good Lord – that alone is almost worth $1200!!
There may one day be one of those lovely chairs in one of the bedrooms freed up by my children leaving home. We’ll call it Grandma’s “exercise” room…ROFL!
Laughing. Suzanne, you have one of the key traits of a good marketer–a really powerful imagination.
Nobody sells products or services. They don’t even sell solutions to problems. What people sell are fantasies. A sex chair is just a really fucking obvious one. For the rest of us selling non-sex items, we’re still selling fantasies. What fantasy are you selling?
I would have been so there if not for that music.
Those videos are a perfect illustration of the concept of good naked and bad naked.
Heh, sadly, one of my first thoughts was, “Wow, that looks awesome for reading!” Because apparently my better life would require the perfect reading furniture rather than fancier nookie. :)
That said, there’s another lesson in there: people will always find uses for your product that may never had occurred to you, so it pays to leave a little creative wiggle room in your marketing sometimes.
All I can say is that I hope these guys are still in business when *I* can afford a $1200 chair – they’ll be first on my list.
(Does their favicon make anyone else think of TechCrunch, though?)
OK, collect empty plastic milk cartons, stock up on cable ties, duct tape, a pile of old newspaper, a bucket and some wallpaper paste…..Then test the chair, do a video for youtube, sell bucketloads of cheap rip-off plans of the PMTC (Poor Man’s Tantra Chair). Two birds with one stone.
I saw the images and thought:
“Hmmm… they are all pretty much variations of the missionary position and doggie style. Plus it looks like I need to be the exact height to make the chair work. What if my legs are too short to reach the ground? What if they are too long and I have to bend awkwardly?”
Nothing in the marketing encouraged me to buy the chair. It seems to me like one of those fancy exercise machines where you spend lots of money thinking you’ll look like the models when using it then after three tries you realize that you aren’t the model and it’s not really that exciting anyway and the chair gets slid into a corner and becomes another place to drape dirty clothes…
I bought onen of those chairs, and used it once for the intended purpose. Really great, but a lot of work. In one position my head was down and I got really dizzy. She had a bit to many pounds so did not fit in other position. so we were limited. One has to be weight and height appropriate to fully realize the chairs full potential.
I bought onen of those chairs, and used it once for the intended purpose. Really great, but a lot of work. In one position my head was down and I got really dizzy. She had a bit to many pounds so did not fit in other position. so we were limited. One has to be weight and height appropriate to fully realize the chairs full potential. Mine is for sale for 500 dollars plus shipping. No stains.
If your tantra chair is still available I’m interested in purchasing it.
Thanks,
John
Cool, Naomi!
I have admired & coveted this chair for ages. Not long ago, I saw in a design blog (memory fails) that a hip young couple had copied the design, and made it in posh materials, at a much lower cost. Great design is worth including in your life.
Beyond the cost, my biggest barrier to acquiring or making one of these is the requisite serene space to put it in. We became empty nesters about a week ago, so time will tell!
look at the sex chair at sexchair.ca what do you think
That is selling a completely different thing–not a better life, but a kinkier one. It’s not beautiful, and it doesn’t look comfortable. I would limit this chair to my dungeon. Oh, yeah, I don’t have one.
actually amy I’m surprised at your closed mindedness Didn’t you notice that the chair has a cover that can be customized to match any existing decor hence not nessasary to have a dungeon and that the positions you can achieve with the 30 plus accesseries not only find your cuummfort zone but bring kamasutra to an entire new level. The sexchair.ca chair is one of a kind that fits the lightest of heart and the most exotic or shall I say kinkier life styled people.
please send information on how to buy your chair for sale for $500. will send money today!!!
I think you might be able to buy the chair directly from the web sight no need for third parties
Keep Writting goodinfo.
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