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What Sex Toy Retailers Can Learn from the EdenFantasys Scandal

October 13th, 2013

Let me preface this article by explaining which scandal I am talking about because there are many. EdenFantasy has been doing wrong by employees, clients, manufacturers and reviewers for years. But several months ago, the owner “discovered” there was barely enough revenue left to keep the company afloat. He fire all the employees and shut down all the clubs and programs, including Sexis and EdenCafe, that had been going on. He, then, decided to cut how many points — points that contributors had earned — that contributors could put toward their orders. This resulted in a strange “point consideration proposal” by Fred who literally and liberally berated the community for abusing the system that he had championed for years.

I quote:

You will be asked to submit a reconsideration request. It is optional. If you chose not to participate, your points will remain as they are now.
We review the submission manually and decide whether your points will be restored or completely erased.

All your points (or converted Gift Cards) will be cancelled and removed if company finds that you accumulated 500 points or more by intentionally abusing the system.

EdenFantasys is not a store you an trust!

Around this time, many products were “discontinued.” Reviews and orders were being canceled left and right. Some, mind included, took months to get out. Anyone who wanted to buy something was hard-pressed to do so. Affiliates who had reached their payouts were not — and some still haven’t been, 5 months later — paid. During this whole thing, Fred refused, and then denied when I brought it up, to discuss or admit the state of the company. He banned many contributors and limited the accounts of others, myself included. However, many of the previous employees began to speak up about how this was just the cherry on top of the shit sundae.

Reviewers and shoppers who wised up by reading posts like mine left in droves, many opening up a blog for the very first time. Others took to Twitter and other review/affiliate programs in light of Fred/EdenFantasys’ policies. SheVibe opened their own forum.

There’s no doubt that it’s a ridiculous scandal and one that could have been completely avoided. It hurt the company and left the community scarred and fragmented, but that’s not all there is to it. Eden’s fallacies are absolutely a lesson that other companies can — and should — learn from. This is far from a cohesive list, so I encourage you to add your thoughts in the comments. I may even add them to this post. The scary part is how many of these facts are simply common sense.

Business Management

Don’t turn a blind eye to things like the bills. They don’t go away. Quite the opposite. They pile up, and you ruin your reputation with consumers, manufacturers and other companies with whom you have a relationship. When it gets to the point that the company needs to be shut down or sold immediately because you ignored or tried to deny away the problem for months or even years, there’s no one to blame but yourself.
Yes, you have to spend money to make money. No, you shouldn’t spend thousands or millions of dollars on projects that don’t bring in money and ultimately bleed the company dry. Yes, working with bloggers can yield positive results. No, it shouldn’t be your only end game.
Don’t blame the customers for your bad business practices. This falls under the “there’s no one to blame but you” category, but I’ll talk about it more anyway. Don’t blame customers for taking advantage of programs or sales that you created.
It’s such a sleazy thing to base your business on the idea that you will make deals with others. That you will slip them something a little extra under the table or that you’ll bow to their demands to appease them, especially if you’re hurting your customer in the process.
Don’t try to do it all. Even if you have the best of intentions, you can’t do it all. You just can’t. Determine what you can do and do it well rather than spreading yourself too thin. Otherwise, you wind up starting clubs and giveaways and blogger outreach. The best case scenario is that it works with a few hiccups or that it doesn’t, and you can gracefully back out. Sometimes people will understand. On the other hand, if you don’t realize that you’re setting yourself up for failure, you might make a bunch of promises that you can’t deliver on, which may result in some unhappy customers.
Treat your employees well because they are what make your company run. They may be the face that customers see. They have the power to testify against you in court and to tell your dirty little secrets.

Community

When you reward your contributors for listing pros and cons about things, they’ll do the same for your company. It’s not about bloggers, it’s about pissing off vocal people. And bloggers will talk — even Metis Black mentioned how quickly the network works a CatalystCon West — partly because we like to talk to begin with, but it’s more than that. I feel as though I owe readers the truth, whether it’s about a a toy or a company. I feel an obligation to tell buyers that a company isn’t reputable. As a blogger, I feel a sense of community with my fellow bloggers, and I want to help protect them from companies that will take advantage of them. So it’s my job to talk about it on this blog, on Twitter, on Tumblr, on Facebook or on your forum. Wherever I can talk about what you did wrong, I will. It’s not about you. It’s not petty vengeance. It’s about raising awareness of wrongdoing.
This leads me to my next point: don’t lie. The truth always comes out. Either you wind up telling bigger lies to cover up the succession of untruths, you get caught in the act or you wrong a person whom you trusted with your secret, and the truth comes out. The truth always comes out. Can you deal with that?
People don’t react to change well, especially not if it’s sudden. Yes, you may have to change the focus or programs that your company has. If you do it all at once, people will complain because they’ve become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. You can attempt to smooth things over by explaining why you have to change, and even though you don’t have to explain how your company works or what you’re doing, a little transparency goes a long way. When you start lying, even if it’s just by having shady practices, people stop trusting you.

And that trust? Yea, it’s kind of important when you use marketing campaigns about how people can trust you.

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Categories: Articles

The Death of EdenFantasys

June 5th, 2013

If you’ve been around the Internet the last couple days, then you’ve probably come across this audio video, featuring the voice of Fred, the owner of EdenFantasys, and some staff members as he fires them all in bulk – and all without really saying so. In the event that the video gets deleted, Epiphora has a transcript up on her site. Multiple sources have verified the validity of the video; although Fred continues to deny that it’s real (also in E’s blog).

In fact, that post only outlines years of member abuses, shady behavior and a whole slew of things that have made people walk away from the company and community with a sour taste in their mouth. Not one, not two, but multiple of my friends have been banned from EdenFantasys over the years, and most of the time there was no legitimate reason other than “makes the site look bad.” In fact, review policy was changed a while back to state that we could only write positive reviews, more or less, to keep things looking all sunshine and kittens.

And, so the gist of the audio is that things had been going downhill for some time, but the company wasn’t even able to break even last month. So… Fred had to fire everyone via audio chat in a completely roundabout way. While he made it obvious that he had known what was coming, some people were completely blindsided, and he didn’t even take the time to fire some people. He simply changed email passwords to some people, essentially ending their jobs in the shittiest way possible. But, hey, it’s not the first time.

Things have been going downhill for some time according to Fred in that recording. In fact, Fred would have you still believe that everything is just hunky dory, and the only staff member who’s still around is spewing those lies to the community. But it’s more obvious than ever that things are bad. Stock has been dwindling for months. Good luck trying to find anything to spend those gift cards on because vendors don’t want to deal with the company. They’re calling the shots, but Fred’s minions would have you believe that inventory is shrinking to get rid of redundant products. As the truth comes out, it seems like this never was the case.

I’m eventually getting to my point, which is something along the lines of “I can’t believe he treated employees like this and is lying point blank to the community” and “I totally saw this coming.” By now, you’ve probably heard complaints from several people about various aspects of EF dealings, including unfair bannings, blocking off-site links, sending out used toys and employee abuse. So, I’m not entirely surprised that things have gone down in flames, but I don’t think anyone could have seen this coming the way that it did. Even staff members were left out in the cold, and now that we have proof that Fred is blatantly lying, it only brings into question everything he has ever said and, by association, anything the staff members have ever said because we don’t know how much involvement he had in it.

[edited to add]

I would count several people who have worked for the company among my friends, and I don’t mean to implicate them as dishonest, but I don’t know that what Fred told them was in truth.

[/edit]

Fortunately, I have no personal loss, but many people do, and many people are still drinking the god-damned Kool-Aid for some unknown reason. I’m being realistic. I cashed out my points and bought one of the few freakin’ things that still left in stock because I don’t even know if the website will be around tomorrow. Some people are in a so-called panic mode, and they’re not wrong to be.

Even before this, my role really dropped. I was unhappy with the company after they fucked with my friends and I became far less active. However, I still signed in and accepted reviews for one simple reason: I was gaming the system. It went something like this.

I’d write reviews and participate on site for points
I’d turn those into gift cards and buy other stuff
I’d get points for those purchases (the system no longer allows this)
I’d use my affiliate code to earn actual money

No, I didn’t feel bad about this. I always felt that the company had it coming from an ethical standpoint and their system continued to let me do it for years. You see, I agreed with all my friends who had left but I kept my mouth shut long enough to make this work for me because who doesn’t want some extra cash or free sex toys?

I think, perhaps, that the methodology to spend money to make money is one that Fred does not understand. Throughout those years, I became increasingly frustrated by this community movement. Sure, some awesome people joined even after the people I have grown used to left, but the blogger outreach and points programs led to a lot of shitty reviews and spam that made the site that much less useful. If you weren’t all overly supportive for the company or even for a freakin’ toy, you weren’t community-minded. Somewhere down the line, EF really became about quantity over quality, as if having people posting and talking about you was enough to drown out the negative and the cold, hard truth. Sadly, for a while, it was.

This should be a lesson to everyone. Treat your community, customers and employees like shit? It won’t work. Spread yourself too thin? And you’ll soon tear. Respond negatively to criticism or suggestions and the people who have a different vantage point will stop talking to you and start speaking up against you. Make enemies in the blogosphere, and people will tell others about what a little shit you’ve been.

Shortly before the announcement that all the staff had been fired, I received a PM as one a group of valuable members, asking me to stick around through some upcoming changes, I had no idea they’d be so extreme and, honestly, how can Fred expect the company to rebound in any way? As it stands, there’s nothing to stick around for. The community, the store are all in dire straights. The staff is gone. EdenFantasys is as good as dead, and if you think otherwise, you probably deserve to go down with the ship.